*****This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st ce*****This book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.*****
”Standing on the ruins of history, standing both in and on top of history’s depository, Jacques Austerlitz is joined by his name to these ruins: and again, at the end of the book, as at the beginning, he threatens to become simply part of the rubble of history, a thing, a depository of facts and dates, not a human being.”
His name is Jacques Austerlitz. He did not grow up with that name. He grew up in Wales as the son of a Calvinist preacher/retired missionary and his timid, colorless wife. They called him Dafydd Elias. It was a relief when he escaped this dreary half-life of oppressive thoughts and a plodding existence, waiting patiently for an afterlife. When finally he was allowed to go to school, it was as if he’d escaped from a prison sentence. It was at school that he learned of his unusual name. It is a name that denotes a merging of cultures, Czechoslovankian and French. Are there clues in that?
He discovers that he arrived in Britain during the summer of 1939 as an infant refugee on a kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. His life before he arrived in Britain is a blank canvas, as if, while he was carried across the ocean, his memories fled back to his homeland.
He goes to Oxford and discovers he is drawn to European architecture. He has a nervous breakdown. He knows he must return to Czechoslovakia and fill in the gaps of his missing life. He finds some clues that help unlock the hidden door in his own mind, allowing the language of his past life and the memories to start flooding into his brain. ”I have even thought that I could still apprehend the dying away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds which I think lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up and scratching or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent whenever one tries to listen to it.”
An unknown narrator tells us this story through a series of meetings he has with Austerlitz. They meet first in Antwerp and then in a cavalcade of European cities. It is as if they are drawn to each other and there is almost a supernatural need for this story to be told to the narrator so that he can share it with us. Each time they meet, Austerlitz picks up the thread of the story at the very moment he left it when they last parted. He weaves together sections of his life and introduces us to people he met along his journey to find himself.
There are so many wonderfully written passages to quote, but the ones that are lingering in my memories this morning are the ones that involve loss. ”I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colors had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.” There is certainly a nostalgia for the past being felt by Alphonso, but to even think about the loss of colors from the modern age that will never be seen again is a disconcerting thought. We’ll never see the world the same way as Alphonso did, and neither will our children see the same world we did. Maybe the color isn’t gone though, maybe it has just faded from his own eyes?
”It was as if time, which usually runs so irrevocably away, had stood still here, as if the years behind us were still to come.” I once stepped into an old man’s house, and it was as if his front door had been a portal to 1942. In the world that he could control, the interior of his house, he made time stand still. I felt this moment of discombobulation as if, when I stepped out of his door and back into the real world, my era would be waiting in the distant future.
”Unfortunately the tribe of the Aztecs had died out years ago, and that at best an ancient perroquet which still remembered a few words of their language might survive here and there.” It freaks me out to contemplate the idea that a race of people can die out and that their language only survives in the feeble lexicon of a handful of parrots.
”I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain.” I’ve never had a nervous breakdown, but it is always one of those lingering concerns that, eventually, one day, my brain will rebel against me and say, enough is enough...I’m pulling the plug. One doesn’t know who he will be on the other side, or if he will ever recover who he was, or maybe it's best he doesn’t. It is a scary thought to think of the shattered remains of my brain, like a building that has been hit by a bomb.
I have, of course, dabbled with the idea of reading W. G. Sebald. Nobel committee members have stated that he would have eventually won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had an untimely end, an inconvenient car crash, that left him dead at fifty-seven. I wonder if he had time to be incensed that the stories still left to be told in his head would forever be just a few jottings in a notebook and of course, there are all the stories that he hadn’t even discovered yet. Louis Erdrich is the one who gave me the two-handed push in the back to finally read him. She was on a trip through Ojibwe country, and at night, while stuck in some cheap motel being gently swayed by the passing semi trucks, she would read Austerlitz. I was riding along with her, reading the tale of her travel in her Books and Island book. She talked about the long, complex sentences in Austerlitz. There is one sentence that goes on for more than seven pages. That might even be more Faulkneresque than William Faulkner himself. She said she had to read sentences over and over again, but she didn’t see it as a burden.
I have a very good attention span and found it interesting (I actually chuckled a few times at finding myself caught out) to discover myself losing the thread of a sentence. I, too, had to go back and reread sentences, whole pages; sometimes I skipped back two or three pages to begin again. There is one point when I contemplated whether I was really smart enough to read this book, but I’m a stubborn man when it comes to books. As I read, there was a growing understanding that I simply must finish this book, not because it is challenging, but because this book is too important not to understand its story. I kept waiting for that familiar click in my head when my brain has made the adjustments to the writing style, but it never really happened. I’m not sure we are supposed to be comfortable with the complexity of the structure. I also felt the fluttering of butterflies in my stomach that told me that I had stumbled upon something special.
As I sit here at my computer writing this review, contemplating my reading experience, I have the strong urge to reread it. This time I will be completely zoned in, impervious to distractions, and grasp the nuance of every sentence the moment I read it (I do beguile myself). I want to brush away the feeling that I failed the book in some way. With that feeling, I also feel euphoric, like I’ve ventured into something unknown and came away a better person. New vistas may have opened up in my mind. What else can I deduce from all this other than that the book is a masterpiece?
”Berlin sounded too disdainful in his ears. A new name was required, one worthy of a capital of world renown. A name like Germania, perhaps.”
In 1944, ”Berlin sounded too disdainful in his ears. A new name was required, one worthy of a capital of world renown. A name like Germania, perhaps.”
In 1944, Berlin is being bombed into oblivion. If there is going to be a Germania, it will be built on the smoldering ruins of the old. Richard Oppenheimer lives in a Jewish house with his Aryan wife. His marriage to her has been the only thing that has kept him alive. When a man in an SD (Sicherheitsdienst) uniform shows up at his door in the middle of the night, he believes his luck has run out. He feels a sense of relief that finally his wife Lisa will be rid of the burden of him. She will be safe and free of the constant worry of the sound of heavy boots on the stairs coming to take them away.
But as it turns out, the SS has a use for him.
Before the rise of the Nazis, he was a well-regarded police inspector, and now they have need of his special skills to help them find a depraved, serial killer who is viciously mutilating the genitalia of women and leaving them as offerings before monuments from World War One.
These aren’t prostitutes, exactly, who are being murdered, but they are women who are engaging in sexual activity with men who are highly placed in the Nazi regime. Needless to say, the powers that be would like the killer caught and the murders swept under the rubble. If the SS fail to find satisfactory answers, Oppenheimer will make a perfect scapegoat.
Serial killers are difficult to catch, even in modern times, and it is much harder trying to catch one against the backdrop of a world war with allied bombing raids frequently forcing Oppenheimer to seek shelter as he chases down every slender lead he is fortunate to know about.
I’ve read many books regarding the blitz of London, but I’ve spent very little time reading about the bombing of Berlin. The conditions in Berlin were, in many ways, worse than they were in London, with many people expecting to die at any moment and many, including Oppenheimer of course, secretly hoping for an Allied win. Oppenheimer keeps himself propped up through the chaos on a steady dose of Pervitin, an early form of crystal meth. It was liberally distributed to German soldiers to allow them to exist on very little sleep and be kept in a constant state of euphoria. Oppenheimer has a doctor friend who keeps him supplied. Doctor Hilde’s house is a warehouse for banned books. ”She opened the door to the black stove in the corner of the room, stood in front of it, and proclaimed, ‘For Stefan Zweig.’ Then she threw the luxury edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf onto the coals and lit it with a match.” Hilde is also Oppenheimer’s connection to the German resistance, and soon they want to know everything he is learning about the activities of the Golden Pheasants, the nickname for the senior party members, who skim off the cream of food and goods and live in the lap of luxury while the city around them starves. Oppenheimer has enough trouble staying alive without getting himself caught up in politics, but when they offer him an opportunity to flee the country with his wife, the temptation to cooperate is too good to pass up.
It’s not just that he wants to solve the crime to stay alive. He feels alive again, for the first time in years, and wants to catch the killer for his own satisfaction as well. It becomes almost as important to him as his own life.
The killer is becoming frustrated, too. He has sent letters to the police that have never been read. His missives are buried in a huge pile of letters sent by citizens denouncing their neighbors or family for violations against the Third Reich. These are people who fully understand that, by doing so, they are not just getting their neighbors and family members in trouble but are potentially condemning them to death. The Nazis rely on bullets more than incarceration for punishments. These tattle tales/liars/judgemental people consider themselves to be good people, but it is examples like these situations that make it very hard to like humanity.
Circling back to the burning copy of Mein Kampf, I find this passage to be very interesting as well: ”Oppenheimer doubted that Mrs. Korber had ever actually read Hitler’s book. Even among his most zealous followers, there were very few who voluntarily did that. Similar to a dusty family Bible, the work was more of a devotional object used to show your disposition than reading material that you perused to uplift yourself.” I’ve never really equated Mein Kampf with The Bible, but the blind faith of their followers is very similar indeed. If you want to have an intelligent conversation with someone about The Bible, don’t have it with a Christian; have it with an atheist. The atheist is much more likely to have read the book. I’m sure the same can be said about White Supremacists. I would postulate that few have read Hitler’s book, but probably all of them own a copy. Blind faith is easier to maintain than building a belief on a bedrock of truth.
Oppenheimer is in the unenviable position of trying to keep too many people happy and succeeding with none of them. As he closes in on the killer, he realizes that the window for having any kind of future for himself is also closing. When he is no longer useful, what will be his fate?
This reminds me of the TV show Foyle’s War in the sense that it sometimes seemed ridiculous to be looking for the killer of a person(s) in the midst of a war that is grinding up human beings by the millions. Serial killers are terrifying, but hardly in the same league as the politicians who send men into the bloody battlefields to be slaughtered, but then there is no mystery to be solved there. We know the culprits. Trying to figure out the motives for the vicious murders of these women is even more interesting than catching the killer. The case is intriguing, but what is most fascinating for me is the time that Harald Gilbers spends showing the reader the daily lives of these people under siege.
I received a free ARC of Germania by Harald Gilbers from Macmillan in exchange for an honest review.
”Old man, you don’t need to understand American law, because we’re both outside it. Understand this: You will pay what I ask or the authorities will r”Old man, you don’t need to understand American law, because we’re both outside it. Understand this: You will pay what I ask or the authorities will receive the names and addresses of the Zahedi war criminals who are in America. You will be shipped back to Iran, Jew. Then you will be executed and your women will be stoned to death as whores.”
It wasn’t only the Shah of Iran who had to flee Iran in 1979. Jews living in Iran knew what would happen to them under the control of the fanatical, conservative, religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Many of these Iranian Jews came to America on temporary visas, and when those visas ran out, they stayed. To go back to Iran was going back to their own deaths.
The Shah had attempted to modernize Iran by nationalizing certain industries and restructuring the economic, political, and social traditions in an attempt to make Iran into a Middle Eastern superpower. One of the reforms that I’m sure was like sticking lighted bamboo slivers under the fingernails of the religious right was that the Shah wanted to grant women suffrage. It didn’t help that the Shah’s regime and his ideas were backed by the US and the UK. ”You see, most of the Arab states are educationally in the Dark Ages. If it isn’t in the Koran, it simply doesn’t exist. But you can’t build twentieth-century technology using the sayings of a seventh-century holy man.” Of course, this is seeing Iran through a mid-1980s lens.
The Arab Spring that began in 2010, though convoluted to determine exactly what exactly the revolutionaries wanted from country to country, showed me that the young people of the Middle East want more social freedom. Maybe they even want a separation of church and state.
We shall see, but for the moment, for the purposes of this review, otherwise known as a meandering thought process, we are back about 34 years ago with our intrepid protagonist known as Fiddler. He is a wealthy, charming, ruggedly (another term for a man showing the scars of life) handsome man, who has a rather unusually complicated relationship with his ex-wife Fiora.
”Fiora slid a nail into the crease between my lips and I opened my teeth to catch it. Like I say, we have a very complicated relationship with a pretty simple core.
‘Sex is a part of this,’ she said, tapping the package. ‘But it has a lot of other things you like, too. Power and competition, courage and cowardice. All the bloody absolutes that fascinate you.’
With that introduction I was not expecting a bird feeder. I gave her a look that had become familiar after years of marriage and separation.
‘Love,’ she whispered, bending over, ruffling my hair and nerve endings. ‘Have I ever misled you?’”
I call this relationship unusually complicated, but it might only be a precursor to the Facebook era of trying to define the exact nature of our relationships for the world. Their interactions are sultry, witty, marvelously intelligent, and passionate. Get that official piece of paper out of the way, and for some people the relationship continues to expand instead of constrict under the weight of mutual ownership.
When Shahpour Zahedi needs help he calls Fiddler. A PLO terrorist going by the name of Salameh has contacted Shahpour and wants $5000 a month or he turns the family, who are in the US illegally, over to the proper authorities. That is when the executions and the stoning of their women for being whores would commence. It seems that Salameh has gotten his hands on a list of Jews with vulnerable residency statuses and is using their monthly “contributions” to aid in the PLO fight against Israel.
Shahpour can not call the authorities for obvious reasons, but situations like this are tailor made for a guy like Fiddler. His investigation will take him from the halls of USC to the slimy corridors of corporate America. He will hear terms like yellowcake and Al-Makr thrown about. He will find a bomb in his Shelby Cobra. He will meet a vivacious Israeli agent, who is as dangerous as she is seductive. He will discover that there is a lot more to uncover than just a shakedown organization. This case has the potential to drop all the problems in the Middle East right in the lap of Southern California.
The writer A. E. Maxwell is actually the married couple Ann and Evan Maxwell. I can only hope that writing about Fiddler and Fiora put some added spark in their relationship as well. There are eight volumes in the series, of which this is the second. The next one is Gatsby’s Vineyard,which it sounds like I’m heading North to Napa for my next sultry caper with Fiddler and Fiora. I’m only a glass of wine away from being ready.
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