Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

For the moods and textures of daily life in the Third Reich: Victor Klemperer’s magisterial I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End ; Friedrich Reck’s spitefully intelligent Diary of a Man in Despair ; Marie Vassiltchikov’s captivating and politically incisive Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945 ; and Helmuth James von Moltke’s Letters to Freya , a monument of moral solidity (and uxoriousness), all the more convincing for his self-confessed equivocation after the defeat of France in June 1940.

For IG Farben, the Buna-Werke, and Auschwitz III: Diarmuid Jeffreys’s finely executed Hell’s Cartel ; Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors ; Rudolf Vrba’s I Escaped from Auschwitz ; Laurence Rees’s Auschwitz ; Witold Pilecki’s The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery ; and the Primo Levi of If This Is a Man, Moments of Reprieve , and The Drowned and the Saved . For the ethos and structure of the SS, Heinz Höhne’s The Order of the Death’s Head (with its excellent appendices) and Adrian Weale’s The SS: A New History .

For background, and for random details and insights: Golo Mann’s The History of Germany Since 1789 ; Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century ; Peter Watson’s The German Genius and A Terrible Beauty ; Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews and A History of the Modern World ; Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall , and The Second World War ; Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War and The War of the World ; the three-volume Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts , edited by J. Noakes and G. Pridham; Bomber Command, Armageddon , and All Hell Let Loose , by Max Hastings; Heike B. Görtemaker’s Eva Braun ; Jochen von Lang’s The Secretary (on Bormann); Eric A. Johnson’s Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans ; Edward Crankshaw’s Gestapo and, more especially, his exquisite Bismarck ; and the death-cell memoir, Commandant of Auschwitz , by the fuddled mass murderer Rudolf Höss (from Primo Levi’s introduction: ‘despite his efforts at defending himself, the author comes across as what he is: a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel’).

For the tics and rhythms of German speech my principal guide was Alison Owings and her Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich . Time and again Owings probes, coaxes, humours, and inveigles her way into cosy intimacy with a wide range of housewives, heroines, diehards, dissenters, ex-prisoners, ex-guards. Her subjects are historically anonymous except for one; and the centrepiece of this amusing, frightening, and consistently illuminating book is a long interview, in Vermont, with Freya von Moltke, close to half a century after the execution of her husband. Owings writes:

I had assumed, while nervously boarding ever smaller planes to get to her home, that I would find a woman of bravery and dignity, and I did. I was not prepared to find a woman in love.

… ‘Women who lost husbands in the horrendous war and even here, in this country, experienced far worse than I. For them it was horrible, the men going off to war and then never coming back. Many lost husbands who hated [the regime] and they nonetheless were killed. That is bitter . But for me, everything was worthwhile. I thought, he has fulfilled his life. And he did. Definitely.

‘When you talk with me for a long while,’ she said, ‘you understand that one lives a whole lifetime from such an experience. When he was killed, I had two delightful children, two dear sons. I thought, so. That is enough for a whole life.’

For the survivors and their testimonies I want to single out from the huge and forbidding archive a volume that deserves permanent currency: Anton Gill’s The Journey Back from Hell . It is an extraordinarily inspiring treasury of voices, and one grounded and marshalled by the author with both flair and decorum. Indeed, these reminiscences, these dramatic monologues, reshape our tentative answer to the unavoidable question: What did you have to have to survive?

What you had to have is usually tabulated as follows: luck; the ability to adapt, immediately and radically; a talent for inconspicuousness; solidarity with another individual or with a group; the preservation of decency (‘the people who had no tenets to live by — of whatever nature — generally succumbed’ no matter how ruthlessly they struggled); the constantly nurtured conviction of innocence (an essential repeatedly emphasised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago ); immunity to despair; and, again, luck.

Having communed with the presences in Gill’s book, with their stoicism, eloquence, aphoristic wisdom, humour, poetry, and uniformly high level of perception, one can suggest an additional desideratum. In a conclusive rebuke to the Nazi idea, these ‘subhumans’, it turns out, were the cream of humankind. And a rich, delicate, and responsive sensibility — how surprising do we find this? — was not a hindrance but a strength. Together with a nearly unanimous rejection of revenge (and a wholly unanimous rejection of forgiveness), the testimonies assembled here have something else in common. There is a shared thread of guilt, the feeling that, while they themselves were saved, someone more deserving, someone ‘better’ was tragically drowned. And this must amount to a magnanimous illusion; with due respect to all, there could have been no one better.

He has so far gone unnamed in this book; but now I am obliged to type out the words ‘Adolf Hitler’. And he seems slightly more manageable, somehow, when escorted by quotation marks. Of mainstream historians, not one claims to understand him, and many make a point of saying that they don’t understand him; and some, like Alan Bullock, go further and admit to an ever-deepening perplexity (‘I can’t explain Hitler. I don’t believe anyone can… The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain’). We know a great deal about the how — about how he did what he did; but we seem to know almost nothing about the why.

Newly detrained at Auschwitz in February 1944, and newly stripped, showered, sheared, tattooed, and reclothed in random rags (and nursing a four-day thirst), Primo Levi and his fellow Italian prisoners were packed into a vacant shed and told to wait. This famous passage continues:

… I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘ Warum ?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘ Hier ist kein warum ’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.

There was no why in Auschwitz. Was there a why in the mind of the Reichskanzler -President-Generalissimo? And if there was, why can’t we find it?

One way out of the quandary involves an epistemological rejection: thou shalt not seek an answer. And this commandment can take different forms (leading us into a sphere known as the theology of the Holocaust). In Explaining Hitler — a work of almost uncanny percipience and stamina — Ron Rosenbaum is sympathetic to the spiritual queasiness of Emil Fackenheim (author of, for example, The Human Condition After Auschwitz ); however, he quietly derides the secular but self-righteous Claude Lanzmann (maker of Shoah ), who calls all attempts at explanation ‘obscene’. Rather, Rosenbaum inclines to the position of Louis Micheels (who wrote the painfully intimate memoir, Doctor 117641 ): ‘ Da soll ein warum sein : There must be a why.’ As Yehuda Bauer tells Rosenbaum, in Jerusalem, ‘I’d like to find it [the why], yes, but I haven’t’: ‘Hitler is explicable in principle, but that does not mean he has been explained.’