Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘Kreative Vernichtung. The postulate of all revolutions. Kreative Vernichtung.’

‘Quite. Now hear this. Burckl says the Jews are good workers , can you believe, so long as you treat them gently. And he says they’d do even better on a full stomach.’

‘Lunacy.’

‘I implored him to see sense. But the man’s deaf to reason.’

‘Tell me, what are the objective consequences?’

‘Entirely predictable. Classic erosion of the chain of command. Burckl doesn’t goad the foremen, the foremen don’t bully the guards, the guards don’t terrorise the Kapos, and the Kapos don’t thrash the Haftlinge. A kind of rot’s set in. We need someone who…’

Mobius took out his fountain pen. ‘Go on. More details, please. You’re doing the right thing, Herr Thomsen. Go on.’

Walking reasonably steadily but unbelievably slowly, his stride somewhere between a parade march and a goose step, and with neck tipped back as if monitoring a distant aeroplane, Paul Doll came down the aisle between the two halves of the standing audience and climbed the little staircase to the low stage. It was minus fourteen Celsius, and snow, tinged brown by the pyre and the smokestacks, was purposefully falling. I looked to my right at Boris, and then to my more distant left at Hannah. We were all bundled up to the thickness of mattresses, like experienced tramps in a wintry northern town.

Doll jolted to a halt in front of the banner-draped podium. Behind him, ranged out over the boards, fourteen wreaths leaned against fourteen ‘urns’ (tar-blackened flowerpots), which weakly flickered and fumed. The Commandant extended his tubed lips and paused. And for a moment it really did seem as if he had gathered us there, that murky noon, to listen to him whistle… But now he reached into the folds of his fleeced greatcoat and wrenched out a typescript of inauspicious bulk. The grey sky went from oyster to mackerel. Doll looked out and said loudly,

‘Jawohl… Well might the firmament darken. Jawohl. Well might the heavens sob their burden to the ground. On this, the Reich Day of Mourning!… November the ninth, my friends. November the ninth.’

Although everyone knew that Doll was not wholly sober, he seemed, for now, to have dosed himself with some care. Those judicious shots of liquor had rendered him calorific (and deepened his voice); and his teeth had already stopped chattering. He now produced from a nook beneath the sloped wooden surface a large glass of colourless liquid; it gave off a faint vapour as he raised it to his mouth.

‘Yech, November the ninth. A holy day of threefold import for this — for this irresistible movement of ours… On November 9, 1918, 1918, the Jewish war profiteers, in their crowning swindle, effectively auctioned off our beloved fatherland to their co-religionists in Wall Street, in the Bank of England, and in the Bourse… On November 9, 1938, 1938, after the cowardly murder of our ambassador to Paris by a man with the interesting name of uh, “Herschel Grynszpan”? — Reichskristallnacht! Reichskristallnacht, when the German folk, after so many years of unbearable provocation, spontaneously rose up in their simple quest for justice… But I want to talk to you about November 9, 1923. 1923 — as we duly honour this, the Reich Day of Mourning.’

Boris nudged me with his padded elbow. November 9, 1923, saw the ridiculous debacle of the Pub Putsch in Bavaria. On that date, about nineteen hundred assorted tub-thumpers and layabouts, cranks and freebooters, embittered militiamen, power-mad ploughboys, disillusioned seminary students, and ruined storekeepers (all shapes and sizes, and of all ages, all armed and all in ill-fitting brown uniforms, and each of them paid two billion marks, which, on that particular day, equalled three dollars and four or five cents) gathered in and around the Burgerbraukeller, near the Odeonplatz in Munich. At the appointed hour, led by a triumvirate of eccentric celebrities (the de facto military dictator of 1916–18, Erich von Ludendorff, the Biggles-style Luftwaffe ace, Hermann Goring, and, in the van, the boss of the NSDAP, the fiery corporal from Austria), they dribbled out of the basement and began their advance on the Feldherrhalle. This was to be the first leg of the revolutionary March on Berlin.

‘Off they stepped,’ said Doll, ‘grave yet gay, iron-willed but easy-hearted, laughing but full of moist emotion as they shivered to the joyous cries of the crowd. Before them shone the inspiring example of Mussolini — and his triumphant march on Rome! Still joking, still singing — ja, even whilst they jeered and spat at the raised carbines of the Republican State Police!… A gunshot, a volley, a fusillade! General Ludendorff shouldered his way on, trembling with righteous fury. Goring fell, grievously wounded in the leg. And the Deliverer, the future Reichskanzler himself? Ach, despite his two broken arms he braved the flying bullets to carry a helpless child to safety!… And when the acrid smell of cordite at last dispersed, fourteen men, fourteen brothers, fourteen warrior-poets lay sprawled in the dust!… Fourteen widows. Fourteen widows, and three score fatherless bairns. Jawohl, that is what we are here to honour today. German sacrifice. They laid down their lives that we should have hope — hope of rebirth and the promise of a brighter morn.’

The brown snow had long been thinning and now quite suddenly and silently ceased. Doll looked up and smiled with gratitude at the sky. And then in the space of a few heartbeats he seemed to falter, to tire, to tire and age; he slumped forward and took the whole lectern roughly in his arms.

‘… Now I unfurl… this sacred banner — our very own Blood Flag.’ He held it up for all to see. ‘Symbolically stained — with Rotwein… Trans uh, transubstantiation. Like the Eucharist, nicht?’

Again I turned to my left — coming into disastrous contact with Hannah’s eyes. She resteadied her gaze forward with a mittened hand clamped to her nose. And for the next passage of time I urgently and strenuously contended with the pressure in my chest, trying not to follow Doll’s voice as it slewed and skidded on, about medals, signet rings, coats of arms, brooches, torches, chants, vows, oaths, rites, clans, crypts, shrines…

At last I straightened my neck. Doll, whose face now looked like a huge and unwashed strawberry, was coming to the end.

‘Can a man cry?’ he asked. ‘Oh, ja, ja! Ach, ever and anon he must! Ever and anon he cannot but keen… You see me wipe away my tears. Tears of grief. Tears of pride. As I kiss this flag, badged with the blood of our hallowed heroes… Now. You will soon be joining me… in renditions of “Das Horst Wessel Lied” and “Ich Hatt’ Einen Kameraden”. But yet firstly, however… there will be a three-minute silence for… each of our lost martyrs. For each of the Old Fighters, the fallen . Ach, at the going down of the sun, and again in the dawn, we will remember them. To the last, to the last, they endure.

‘One… Claus Schmitz.’

And after ten or twelve seconds it began — the diagonal blizzard of strafing hail.

There was then an instantly and maximally drunken lunch in the Officers’ Club, and I moved through it, after the first half-hour (by which point Doll was laid out flat on a deep settee), as if in a mellifluous dream of peace and freedom, and there was music from the gramophone and some people danced, and although she and I kept our distance we were, I felt, intensely and continuously aware of one another, and it was hard not to submit to pressures of a different kind, different pressures on the chest, hard not to laugh and also hard not to crumple at the naively ardent lovesongs (from sentimental operettas), ‘Wer Wird denn Weinen, Wenn Man Auseinandergeht?’ and ‘Sag’ zum Abschied leise Servus’.