Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘They claim there’s a rationale for the children, don’t they, sir?’

‘Yes. Those babes in arms will grow up and want revenge on the Nazis in about 1963. I suppose the rationale for the women under forty-five is that they might be pregnant. And the rationale for the older women is while we’re at it .’

He rocked to a halt and for a moment seemed out of breath. I looked away. Then he flung his head back and marched on.

‘People, people like you and me, Thomsen, we wonder at the industrial nature of it, the modernity of it. And understandably so. It’s very striking. But the gas chambers and the crematories are just epiphenomena. The idea was to speed things up, and economise of course, and to spare the nerves of the killers. The killers… those slender reeds. But bullets and pyres would’ve done it in the end. They had the will.’

The pathways of the Tiergarten were dotted with other amblers and wanderers, in groups of two or three, bent in donnish converse; this was the capital’s equivalent of Hyde Park in London, with its Speakers’ Corner (though everyone here spoke not in shouts but in whispers). Peters said,

‘It’s known that the Einsatzgruppen have already killed well over a million with bullets. They would’ve got there — with bullets. Imagine. Millions of women and children. With bullets. They had the will.’

I asked him, ‘What d’you think… happened to us? Or to them?’

He said, ‘It is still happening. Something quite eerie and alien. I wouldn’t call it supernatural, but only because I don’t believe in the supernatural. It feels supernatural. They had the will? Where did they get it from? Their aggression has sulphur in it. A real whiff of hellfire. Or maybe, or maybe it’s quite human and plain and simple.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but how could it be?’

‘Maybe all this is just what follows when you keep putting it about that cruelty is a virtue. To be rewarded like any other virtue — with preferment and power. I don’t know. The appetite for death… In every direction. Forced abortions, sterilisations. Euthanasia — tens of thousands. The appetite for death is truly Aztec. Saturnian.’

‘So modernity and…’

‘Modern, even futuristic. Like the Buna-Werke was supposed to be — the biggest and most advanced plant in Europe. That, mixed with something incredibly ancient. Going back to when we were all mandrills and baboons.’

‘Decided on, you said, at the zenith of their power. And now?’

‘It will be prosecuted and perhaps completed in the colic of defeat. They know they’ve lost.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Berlin. The mood’s completely changed, it’s all flipped. Defeat is so palpable.’

‘Mm. Guess what everyone’s calling him now. After Africa. After Tunisgrad. Grofaz.’

‘Grofaz.’

‘A sort of acronym. Greatest field marshal of all time. It’s just childish German sarcasm — not bad expressively, though. Grofaz … It’s all changed. No more straight-arm salutes. It’s Guten Tag and Gruss Gott. Making scores of millions of Germans yell out your name thirty times a day, by law. The name of that osterreichisch guttersnipe … Well, the spell is broken. Our ten-year Walpurgisnacht is coming to an end.’

The branches of the trees were growing downy with green, and would soon be giving the place its usual deep shadows. I asked him how long it would take.

‘He won’t stop. Not till Berlin looks like Stalingrad. I suppose the resistance might manage to kill him.’

‘You mean the Vons — the colonels.’

‘Yes, the Junker colonels. But they keep arguing among themselves about the make-up of the government-in-waiting. A laughable waste of time and energy. As if the Allies’ll put another crew of Germans in charge. Prussians at that. Meanwhile, our petty-bourgeois Antichrist is keeping a lid on things — by means ’, said Peters, in English, ‘ of the nation’s nineteen guillotines .’

I said, ‘Then why all the sour satisfaction? I can’t get over how pleased everyone looks.’

‘They feel Schadenfreude even for themselves.’ He halted again, and said with a sympathetic look, ‘Everyone’s pleased, Thomsen. Everyone except you.’

And I told him why. I didn’t attempt to vivify it; I didn’t say that every other time I closed my eyes I saw a flesh-coated skeleton pegged out on the whipping horse.

‘So Grofaz and Rupprecht Strunck, between them, have exposed me as a Schreibtischtater.’ A writing-table perpetrator — a desk murderer . ‘And for nothing.’

Peters scowled and raised a horizontal finger at me. ‘No, it’s not for nothing, Thomsen. The stakes are still enormous. Buna and synthetic fuel wouldn’t win the war but they’d prolong it. And with every day that goes by…’

‘That’s what I keep telling myself, sir. Still.’

‘Events will put a brake on your Herr Strunck, believe me. Very soon they’ll only be killing the women and the children. Because they’ll need the men for labour. So cheer up, eh? Look on the bright side. Shall I tell you the question that’s hanging in the air?’

‘If you would.’

‘Who are they killing the Jews for? Cui bono ? Who will wallow in the fruits of a judenfrei Europe? Who will bask in its sun? Not the Reich. There won’t be a Reich…’

Just for a moment I thought of Hannah — and the unities, and what war does to them. Peters smiled and said,

‘You know the people Grofaz hates most — now? Because they failed him? Germans. You watch. After he’s chased out of Russia, all his efforts will be in the west. He wants the Russians to get here first. So hunker down.’

I shook his hand and I said I was grateful for his time and trouble.

He shrugged. ‘Kruger? Well, now we’re almost there.’

‘I’m pretty sure I’ll learn more. My uncle, he can’t resist a good story. In which case I’ll certainly…’

‘Yes, do. I keep thinking — Leipzig, January ’34. That’s where and when the Dutch pyromaniac parted company with his head.’ He gave a snort. ‘Our Viennese visionary had his heart set on the rope. More demeaning that way. He was appalled to learn that there hasn’t been a judicial hanging in Germany since the eighteenth century.’ Peters gestured: in the distance, the creamy dome of the gutted and abandoned Reichstag. ‘Leipzig, January ’34. Do you think Dieter Kruger might’ve had something to do with the Fire?’

Wibke Mundt was a compulsive smoker — in an hour she could brim a whole ashtray with butts of brown. She was also a compulsive cougher and retcher. A full month had passed, and I now sat in her office at the Chancellery (on a bomb-damaged but efficiently repaired Wilhelmstrasse)… I was numbly watching the movements of another, more junior secretary, a soft-faced blonde called Heidi Richter. With abstract admiration I noted the way she leaned sideways, bent forward, crouched down, straightened up… During these months in town I had played the part of the privileged ascetic, strolling the working-class suburbs of Friedrichshain and Wedding in the afternoons, dining early and sparely at the hotel (fowl, pasta, and other unrationed items, occasionally including oysters and lobster) before going back up to my room (where, at some personal risk, I read the likes of Thomas Mann). There were three or four Berlin girls with whom I had what we called ‘understandings’; yet I let them be. Boris would have ridiculed my earnestness, but I felt that I had gained some emotional or even moral capital, and that I didn’t want to deplete it, I didn’t want to start living off it. And I was the man who, not so long ago, had known coition with the murderess Ilse Grese…