Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘What did you say?’ she asked, looking elsewhere, and as if expecting no answer.

Overnight it had rained, warmed, and begun to thaw. Now a sour yellow sun was playing on the eaves and the slopes of the rooftops. All the pipes were busy, sluicing, racing; it made me think of multitudes of stampeding mice. Gerda said,

‘Did Papi mention the war?’

‘Barely.’ I sipped tea and wiped my mouth. ‘Did he mention it to you?’

‘Barely. I don’t think the war especially interests him. Because it’s not his sphere.’

‘That’s true, Tante. You’re right. Buna doesn’t especially interest him either. Because it’s not his sphere. Buna — synthetic materiel, Tantchen.’

Rivulets of melting snow sparkled like bead curtains against the misty windowpanes. Somewhere a ledge of frozen slush flopped emphatically to the earth.

‘Why’s Buna important?’

‘Because it’ll win us autarky.’

‘That doesn’t sound very good.’

‘It’s not like anarchy, Tantchen. Autarky. We’ll be self-sufficient. And when the first five thousand tons of rubber roll out of the Werke, and when we’re converting coal to oil at a rate of seven hundred thousand tons a month, this war will take on a very different complexion, I can assure you of that.’

‘… Thank you, dearest. That’s given me heart. Thank you for saying that, Neffe.’

‘Is — is Uncle Martin especially interested in the Jews?’

‘Well he can’t very well not be, can he. And of course he’s very pro.’

‘Pro?’

‘Pro Endlosung of course. Wait,’ she said. ‘He did mention the war. He did mention the war.’ She frowned and said, ‘Apparently they now know why we underestimated the Red Army. They got to the bottom of it. Russia had a war of its own recently, didn’t it?’

‘You’re right as always, my love. The Winter War with Finland. Thirty-nine to forty.’

‘And they botched it, isn’t that right? Well they did that on purpose, Papi said. To lure us in. And another thing!’

‘What, Tante?’

‘Stalin was supposed to have killed half his officers. No?’

‘True again. The purges. Thirty-seven to thirty-eight. More than half. Probably seven-tenths.’

‘Well he didn’t really. That was just another Jewish lie. And we fell for it like the simple souls we are. They’re not dead. They’re alive.’

Just beyond the glass doors a ruptured drainpipe swung into view, drunkenly and loutishly spewing water, and then swung away again. Plump tears had gathered in Gerda’s eyes. The mice were racing and squeaking, tumbling over one another, going faster and faster.

‘They’re not dead, Neffe. The Judaeo-Bolsheviks. Neither disease nor filth will ever eradicate this scum. Why, dearest? Tell me. I’m not asking you why the Jews hate us. I’m asking you why they hate us so much. Why?’

‘I can’t think, Tantchen.’

‘… They’re not dead,’ she said hauntedly. ‘They’re all alive .’

On New Year’s Day, in my first-class carriage, ‘The Theory of the Cosmic Ice’ (a bulky dissertation by several hands) lay unattended on my lap. I looked out. First, the much-enlarged, seemingly interminable outskirts of Munich groaned by: untouched meadowland and woodland had now been replaced by foundries and factories, by pyramids of grit and gravel. We heard the city sirens, and the train crept into a tunnel and cowered there for over an hour. Then we picked up speed, and in harsh sunshine Germany was soon going past me like a torrent of earth tones, siennas, ambers, ochres…

The pitch of Uncle Martin’s laughter told me that Kruger was no longer breathing. And I naturally recalled that conversation with Konrad Peters.

Spirited away for special treatment. For very special treatment .

Killed .

Oh. At least .

I needed to know the size of that at least .

It was difficult to be brave in the Third Germany. You had to be ready to die — and to die after preludial torture which, moreover, you had to withstand, naming no names. And that wasn’t all. In the occupied countries the lowest criminal could resist and then die like a martyr. Here, even the martyr died like the lowest criminal, in the kind of ignominy that a German would find peculiarly terrible to contemplate. And you left behind you nothing but a wake of fear.

In the occupied countries such a man would be an inspiration — but not in the Third Germany. Kruger’s mother and father, if he still had a mother and father, would not be talking of him, except between themselves and in whispers. His wife, if he had a wife, would remove his photograph from the mantelpiece. His children, if he had children, would be told to avert their faces from his memory.

So Dieter Kruger’s death served no one. No one except me.

It was back in November — November 9, the Reich Day of Mourning. I awoke, I came to, in the Officers’ Club. Hello, I thought, you must have nodded off, old boy. Must have taken 40 winks, no? The luncheon had long since come to an end, and that repast, embarked upon with a patriotic fervour much inflamed by my commemorative address, had clearly degenerated; around me, the dregs and leavings of a gangsters’ banquet — sicked-on serviettes, toppled bottles, dog-ends upright in the trifle; and, outside, the smudged dusk of Silesia. Dusk in November, dawn in February: that is the colour of the KL.

As I lay there, trying to free my tongue from the roof of my mouth, these questions came to me…

If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig — why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that?

The Reich Day of Mourning — back in November , last year, before Zhukov, before Alisz, before the new Hannah.

… There is a placard on the office wall that says, My loyalty is my honour and my honour is my loyalty. Strive. Obey. JUST BELIEVE! And I find it highly suggestive that our word for ideal obedience — Kadavergehorsam — has a corpse in it (which is doubly curious, because cadavers are the most refractory things on earth). The duteousness of the corpse. The conformity of the corpse. Here at the KL, in the cremas, in the pits: they’re dead. But then so are we, we who obey…

The questions I asked myself on the Reich Day of Mourning: they must never recur .

I must shut down a certain zone in my mind.

I must accept that we have mobilised the weapons, the wonder weapons, of darkness.

And I must take to my heart the potencies of death.

In any case, as we’ve always made clear, the Christian system of right and wrong, of good and bad, is 1 we categorically reject. Such values — relics of medieval barbarism — no longer apply. There are only positive outcomes and negative outcomes.

‘Now listen carefully. This is a matter of the gravest moment. I hope you understand that. Fraternising with a Haftling’s serious enough. But Rassenschande … Insult to the blood! A corporal might get away with a reprimand and a fine. But I’m the Kommandant. You realise, don’t you, that it’d be the end of my career?’