Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘Esther. This insane nightmare will end,’ I concluded, ‘and Germany will lose. Be alive to see it with your own eyes.’

Then I dozed, having had a long and repetitive but not especially brutal night underneath the Political Department. For the first six hours I was joined by Fritz Mobius who, despite a lot of incredibly vociferous shouting (and it wasn’t simulated, it wasn’t an act, the millennial German anger), used no force. As the shift changed at midnight, Paul Doll looked in. To me he seemed transparently haunted and furtive; but he managed to slap my face a few times, as if in spontaneous patriotic disgust, and he punched me in the stomach (quite feebly hitting the bony ridge just above the solar plexus). From then until dawn it was Michael Off, who did a bit more of exactly the same; it appeared that someone had told them I was not to be marked.

This was curious: in his appearance Doll made me think of a coal miner coming off shift. His tunic and jodhpurs minutely glinted with specks of light, and on his back there was a shard the size of a coin. It was mirror glass.

Mobius, Doll, Off — they all yelled, they all hollered fit to kill. And I vaguely and confusedly wondered if the story of National Socialism could have unfolded in any other language…

When I woke up Esther was standing in front of the window, with her forearms flat on the sill. It was an exceptionally clear day, and I realised she was gazing at the mountains of the Sudetenland. She had been born and raised, I knew, in the High Tatras (whose peaks were perennially capped with gleaming ice). Seen in profile, her face wore a frown and a half-smile; and she was so lost in memory that she didn’t hear the door as it creaked open behind her.

Hedwig Butefisch came into the Block. She paused, then bent her knees, almost to a crouch; she moved quietly forward, and delivered a pinch to the back of Esther’s thigh — not viciously, not at all, but playfully, just hard enough to give her a fright.

‘You were dreaming!’

‘… But you woke me up!’

And for half a minute they wrestled, tickling each other and yelping with laughter.

‘ Aufseherin! ’ shouted Ilse Grese from the doorstep.

At once the two girls recollected themselves and straightened up, very sober, and Hedwig marched her prisoner out into the air.

‘Try and drink some of this, my dearest, my darling. I’ll hold it. There.’

‘… Thank you, Neffe. Thank you. Neffe, you’re thinner. Though I’m one to talk.’

‘Ah but I’m like the troubadour, Tantchen. Famished for love.’

‘Pass me that. What did you say?… Oh, Neffe — Boris! I wept for you, Golo, when I heard.’

‘Don’t, Tante. You’ll start me off.’

‘ Wept for you. More than a brother, you always said.’

‘Don’t, Tante.’

‘At least they made a nice big fuss about him. Well, he was so photogenic… Is Heinie all right?’

‘Heinie’s fine. They’re all fine.’

‘Mm. Except Volker.’

‘Well, yes.’ Volker was her ninth child (if you included Ehrengard), and a boy. ‘Volker’s a little out of sorts.’

‘Because this is such an unhealthy place!’

The place was Bolzano, in alpine Italy (and the time was the spring of 1946). My remaining Bormanns had met an unlikely fate: they were in a German concentration camp (it was called Bozen from 1944 to ’45). But there was no more slave labour, no more flaying and cudgelling, no more starvation, and no more murder. Full of DPs, POWs, and other internees awaiting scrutiny, it was Italian now, with unabundant yet appetising food, reasonable sanitation, and many cheerful nuns and priests among the helpers. Gerda lay in its field hospital; Kronzi, Helmut, Heinie, Eike, Irmgard, Eva, Hartmut, and Volker were in a kind of military marquee nearby. I said,

‘Were the Americans beastly to you, Tante?’

‘Yes. Yes, Golo, they were. Beastly. The doctor, the doctor — not me, Neffe, but the doctor — told them I had to have an operation in Munich. Every week there’s a train. And this American said, That train’s not for Nazis. It’s for their victims !’

‘That was cruel, dear.’

‘And they think I know where he is!’

‘Do they? Mm. Well if he made it out he could be anywhere. South America, I’ll bet. Paraguay. Landlocked Paraguay, that’d be the one. He’ll send word.’

‘And Golo. Were they beastly to you?’

‘The Americans? No, they gave me a job… Oh. You mean the Germans. No, not very. They were dying to be beastly to me, Tante. But the power of the Reichsleiter held good to the end. Like your lovely parcels.’

‘Perhaps it isn’t the end.’

‘True, dear. But it’s the end of all his power.’

‘… The Chief, Neffe. Killed as he led his troops in the defence of Berlin. And now it’s all gone. The end of National Socialism. That’s what’s so impossible to bear. The end of National Socialism! Don’t you see? That’s what my body’s reacting to.’

The next night she said with a vexed look,

‘Golo, are you still rich?’

‘No, darling. That’s all disappeared. All but about three per cent.’ Which was actually far from nothing. ‘They took it.’

‘Ah well, you see — once the Jews get a whiff of something like… Why the smile?’

‘It wasn’t the Jews, my dearest. It was the Aryans.’

She said comfortably, ‘But you’ve still got your paintings and objets d’art .’

‘No. I’ve got one Klee and one tiny but very nice Kandinsky. I suspect all the rest found their way to Goring.’

‘Ooh, that fat brute. With his three chauffeurs and his pet leopard and his bison ranch. Mascara. Changing his clothes every ten minutes. Golo! Why aren’t you more indignant?’

I shrugged lightly and said, ‘Me, I’m not complaining.’ Of course I wasn’t complaining, about that or about anything else: I didn’t have the right. ‘Oh, I’ve been very lucky, very privileged, as always. And even in prison I had lots of time to think, Tantchen, and there were books.’

She worked her shoulders up the bed. ‘We never doubted your innocence, Neffe! We knew you were completely innocent.’

‘Thank you, Tante.’

‘I’m certain your conscience is completely clear.’

In fact I did feel the need to talk about my conscience with a woman, but not with Gerda Bormann… The thing is, Tantchen, that in my zeal to retard the German power I inflicted further suffering on men who were already suffering, suffering beyond imagination. And dying, my love. In the period 1941–4, thirty-five thousand died at the Buna-Werke. I said,

‘Of course I was innocent. It was the testimony of just one man.’

‘One man!’

‘Testimony extorted by torture.’ And I reflexively added, ‘That’s medieval jurisprudence.’

She slumped back, and went on in a vague voice, ‘But medieval things… are meant to be good, aren’t they? Drowning… throttled queers… in peat bogs. That kind of thing. And duels, Neffe, duels.’

This wasn’t wild talk, about duels (or about peat bogs). The Reichsfuhrer-SS did briefly reintroduce duelling as a way of settling matters of honour. But Germans had already got used to living without honour — and without justice, freedom, truth, and reason. Duelling was re-illegalised after the first Nazi bigwig (an outraged husband in this instance) was briskly shot dead (by his cuckolder)… Now Tante suddenly opened her eyes to their full extent and cried,

‘The axe, Golo! The axe!’ Her head sank downwards into the pillow. A minute passed. ‘All that’s meant to be good. Isn’t it?’