I read this some time ago — probably around 2009 when it and his other novel were re-issued for the 100th anniversary of his birth. (He died at 101.) His novels had been out of print and unavailable since 1962.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a German word which describes a certain type of literature which tries to tackle the difficult subject of past crimes or troubles. It literally means “Working through the past.” It’s something I don’t think Americans could ever understand because America forgets its past, or rewrites it.
This is one of those novels. W.G. Sebald’s works as well as Gunter Grass and others are in that category, but this book is remarkable because it traces the evolution of hate in someone who is ordinarily at peace. The Times review of the novel(s) by Francine Prose says it much better than I ever could, but in this era (with the rise of white supremacy yet again, and an American Nazism of its own — Kanye West just today said he was going to go “death con 3 on Jews,” and somehow claimed he couldn’t be anti-Semitic because he was a jew himself, earning himself a Twitter ban,) this book couldn’t be any more appropriate to promote in my tiny little corner of the internet.
From the review: “Rarely has a finer, more closely focused lens been used to study such a broad and brutal panorama, mimetically conveying a failure to come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name.” (My emphasis.)
And this:
Our hero is visiting a young woman with whom he works at a department store, and on whom he has a crush, when their pleasant evening is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of her brother and his friends. Almost instantly, without much being said, the narrator and the reader grasp that the intruders are Nazi thugs, just as it is obvious to the intruders that the narrator is a Jew. After a strained, abstract conversation about the burden of having a conscience and the relief of shedding that burden, the youngest of the goons is encouraged to describe a “secret assignment” in which he has participated. His story is long, gripping and almost unbearably horrific, though no one is hurt in the commission of this crime but a few of its inept perpetrators.
Listening, the narrator analyzes his own reactions with a characteristic detachment that is at once coolly clinical, incantatory and overwrought: “You’re a swine, I thought, not to get up and put an end to this disgusting and disgraceful performance. It did me good to call myself a swine, and at the same time I suffered under it. His story aroused all the fury and hatred hidden within me, I suffered under it and at the same time it did me good to suffer. I could have wept, and at the same time it did me good, like a father who is beating his child with tears in his eyes and experiences the twofold delight of being able to beat it and to suffer under it at the same time.” (My emphasis.)
I think the first highlighted section perfectly explains why white and Hispanic and even black Trump supporters are so happily embracing his racist platform, his toxic narcissism, his meanness, his ugliness. Not having to have a conscience means not having to worry so much, and, of course, there is a lot to worry about.
The second highlighted section I think shows how easily we are able to accept contradictions within our own minds, especially if there is some aspect of it that allows us relief from that same burdened conscience.
At this point, the American Nazi party is a fully formed cult. My one and only hope (and I share this with Michael Moore) is that there are more people disgusted with Trump and that group than people who join with them. And that is probably an enormous difference between what happened leading up to 1939 and what’s happening now. Joe Biden beat him once and he’ll beat him again. The other hope I have is that Trump is deteriorating rapidly. Some feel he is becoming aphasic. Others hope that he will be indicted soon. Hope. We live on it.