Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

In the quixotic spirit of that summer, I procured a car, a filthy old Tornax (whose blackened and oft-needed crank kept making me think of a broken swastika), and boldly drove south-east. My purpose? My purpose was to get closer to the end of hope — to exhaust it, and so try to be rid of it. I was quieter, older, greyer (hair and eyes losing colour); but my somatic health was good, I quite liked translating for the Americans (and I had become genuinely passionate about a pro bono job I was doing on the side), I had men friends and even lady friends, I was plausibly to be seen in the office, in the PX store, in the restaurant, at the cabaret, at the cinema. Yet I could not construct a plausible inner life.

My OMGUS colleagues liked to say that ‘Ich Wusste Nichts Uber Es’ was the new national anthem (I Didn’t Know Anything About It); and yet all Germans, around then, as they slowly regained consciousness after the Vernichtungskrieg and the Endlosung, were meant to be reformed characters. And I too was a reformed character. But I could not construct a self-sufficient inner life; and this was perhaps the great national failure (which, at least, I did not seek to relieve by ‘joining’ anything). If I looked inside myself, all I saw was the watery milk of solitude. In the Kat Zet, like every perpetrator, I felt doubled (this is me but it is also not me; there is a further me); after the war, I felt halved. And when I entertained memories of Hannah (a frequent occurrence), I didn’t have the sense of a narrative gallingly unfinished. I had the sense of a narrative almost entirely unbegun.

Earlier I said that you couldn’t live through the Third Germany without discovering who you were, more or less (always a revelation, and often untoward); and without discovering who others were, too. But now it seemed that I had barely made the acquaintance of Hannah Doll. I remembered and still tasted the complex pleasure I derived from her, from the shape of her stance, the way she held a glass, the way she talked, the way she crossed a room — the warm comedy and pathos it filled me with. And where exactly were these interactions unfolding? And what was that syrupy stench (which walls and ceilings were powerless to exclude)? And was that man her husband?… The Hannah I knew existed in a sump of misery, and in a place that even its custodians called anus mundi . So how could I defend myself from thoughts of a Hannah reborn and reawakened? Who would she be — who would she be in peace and freedom, trusting, trusted? Who?

Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red Orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were.

Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.

And so it came about that I resumed my search for a maiden name.

Hannah met Paul Doll in Rosenheim, and they spent time together in Rosenheim, and it seemed reasonably likely that they were married in Rosenheim. So I went to Rosenheim. With much snorting, knocking, and pinking, and then stalling, and then bounding, the terrible Tornax completed the sixty kilometres from Munich.

Rosenheim comprised eighteen boroughs, each with its own Standesamt: births, weddings, deaths. My project, therefore, would effortlessly consume an entire week’s leave. Well, ‘furloughs’, by now, were being audaciously referred to as ‘vacations’. Besides the abruptly available goods and services, there was something unrecognisable in the air. Whatever it was, it was not the return of normality. There had been no normality to return to, not after 1914, not in Germany. You had to be at least fifty-five to have an adult recollection of normality. But there was something in the air, and it was new.

I arrived on the Sunday, and established myself at a guest house on the fringe of the Riedergarten. First thing the next morning, in solemn consciousness of futility, I cranked the Tornax and started on the concentric circles of my rounds.

At five in the afternoon of the following Saturday, sure enough, I was drinking a glass of tea at a stall in the main square, my throat inflamed and my eyes weakly watering at the far corners. After the expenditure of much drudgery, cunning, obsequiousness, and money (those valiant new Deutschmarks), I had managed to peruse a total of three ledgers; and without the slightest edification. The trip, the enterprise, in other words, had been a ridiculous failure.

*

And so I stood there, dully looking out at the peace and freedom of the town. That was undeniable: there was peace and freedom (the capital was under blockade, and there was little peace, and no freedom, in the Russian mandate to the north-east, with rumours of hectare-wide mass graves). And what else? Many years later, I would read the first dispatch from an American journalist posted in Berlin, which consisted of four words: Nothing sane to report . The year was 1918.

In January 1933, when the NSDAP picked up the keys to the Chancellery, a narrow majority of Germans felt, not just horror, but the dreamlike fuddlement of the unreal; when you went outside, you were reminded of the familiar, though only as a photograph or a newsreel reminded you of the familiar; the world felt abstract, ersatz, pretend. And that was what I was a witness to, maybe, that day in Rosenheim. The beginning of the German compromise with sanity. Social realism was the genre. Not fairy tales, not Gothic novelettes, not sagas of swords and sorcery, not penny dreadfuls. And not romance, either (an outcome I was beginning to accept). Realism, and nothing else.

From this certain questions would inevitably and persistently follow.

From above? said Konrad Peters in the Tiergarten — fastidious Peters, who died in Dachau covered in nightsoil and lice. From above, Bismarckian Realpolitik degraded to the nth degree. Combined with hallucinatory anti-Semitism and a world-historical flair for hatred. Ah, but from below — that’s the real mystery. It’s a common slander of the Jews, but it’s no slander of a huge fraction of the Germans. They went like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And then they donned the rubber aprons and set to work.

Yes, I was thinking, how did ‘a sleepy country of poets and dreamers’, and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to having their souls raped — and raped by a eunuch (Grofaz: the virgin Priapus, the teetotal Dionysus, the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex)? Where did it come from, the need for such a methodical, such a pedantic, and such a literal exploration of the bestial? I of course didn’t know, and neither did Konrad Peters, and neither did anyone in my sight, families, limping veterans, courting couples, groups of very young and very drunken GIs (all that strong, cheap, and delicious Lowenbrau), tin-rattlers collecting for causes, black-clad widows, a moving, threading line of boy scouts, and sellers of vegetables, sellers of fruit…

Then I saw them. I saw them over a great and populous distance — and they were receding from me, walking away from me to the far edge of the square. It was the configuration — that was all. A mother and her two daughters, the three of them in straw hats, swinging straw bags, and dressed in crenellated white.