Once it was said to be the poor who were always with us, but nowadays it seems it is the war that we cannot be without. Anniversaries abound – VE-Day, the liberation of Dachau and of Auschwitz. The obituary pages are full of the longest-living among survivors of wartime events.
Most recently, 95-year-old Jozef Paczinski died; a Polish inmate of Auschwitz, his responsibility through much of his time in the camp was to cut the hair of camp commandant Rudolf Höss.
Movies and books about World War II appear apace, in what must be seen as a new wave of creative grappling with the subject. Canonical writers – Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski and Anne Frank – lurk in the wings demanding rereading.
In Germany, Look Who’s Back, the first novel by satirist Timur Vermes, has sold over 1.5 million copies. Its would-be comic feature is the resurrection of Hitler in a field in Berlin. What follows is hijinks – this is the only word for Vermes’ use of a Hitlerian monologue to critique cooking shows, the Internet and present-day German politics.
If Look Who’s Back offers an example of the new lowbrow view of wartime themes, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See is a recent contribution to a serious tradition of novelistic investigations of the war. Its back cover copy informs us that the novel was “10 years in the writing,” an argument, one might guess, for the fact that Doerr has done his research. But unlike other novelizations of historical events, Doerr does not include a list of “additional reading” to allow readers to follow his research.
All the Light We Cannot See opens by entering the historical fray in the summer of 1944. It is the beginning of the Allied bombing campaign over Brittany’s walled citadel of Saint-Malo, and the Germans are holed up as part of the last gasp of their occupation of western Europe.
The novel is pieced together like an ingeniously edited film, stepping forward and backward in time, though the bulk of its action takes place between 1940 and 1944. Its short chapters shift between a portrait of a blind Parisian girl’s arrival at Saint-Malo, and that of Werner Pfennig, a German child prodigy who ends up at an elite school where boys are taught the scientific, racial and violent creed of the new Germany.
A thoughtful review of Vermes’ Look Who’s Back relied on an influential piece of literary criticism penned in the 1920s by E.M. Forster: “The historian deals with actions, and with the characters of men only so far as he can deduce them from their actions.” The novelist, on the other hand, must “reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known…”
It is telling – each reader will have their own sense of this – that our reception of blind Marie-Laure, her fierce love for her father, her preternatural way of learning the layout of neighbourhoods, her experience of the destruction of Saint-Malo – does not make us wonder about Doerr’s ability to get things right historically. Like Roberto Benigni in the Jim Jarmusch film Down by Law, Marie-Laure is proof that we live in a sad and beautiful world.
But when it comes to Werner and his proto-Nazi school chums, the brutal male teachers and mincing female support staff of the Reich’s heyday, I hesitate. Here, Doerr must rise to Forster’s challenge “to tell us more about” the German Nazi outlook “than could be known.” The challenge is worthwhile, but it’s difficult to know if we’re being served anything like the real thing.
Unlike Vermes – who pitches a darkly humorous mass murderer – Doerr presents a likable and idiosyncratic young German at the centre of his tale. Werner Pfennig is no hero – his shame at not standing up for his weaker compatriots is clearly drawn. But the swiftness with which he is drawn into the elite institutions of Nazi culture irritates even his devoted sister. “You’ll become,” she tells him, thinking of the sycophantic boys in their circle, “just like Hans and Herribert.”
The initiation and instruction methods at Werner’s boarding school are brutal. The weak fall away. Science is taught with an eye on the country’s need for jet propulsion rockets. Teachers view the strong and smart as cogs in the national machinery demanded in “exceptional times.”
One of the strengths in Doerr’s approach is his willingness to write contrary to most Holocaust-related fiction, which offers detailed depictions of victims but little examination of actual Germans. Because of the hierarchy of guards, kapos and ghetto police in German camps and ghettos, the average inmate had little interaction with the German SS. Even privileged prisoners, like the non-Jewish Pole Tadeusz Borowski, encountered SS at Auschwitz as stoic, distant overseers of a host of prisoners forced into the system of killing Jews and political prisoners.
Doerr’s portraits of wartime German types are of interest. The lead teacher at Werner’s school is a voluptuous sadist, reminiscent, at least physically, of Hermann Goering. A technical sciences teacher called Hauptmann operates in relation to Werner as Dr. Frankenstein did to his monster, opting to turn his favoured student into a disciplined servant of the science of war
When Werner and a friend travel to Berlin for a school holiday, the friend’s mother affects an aristocratic Nazi politesse. In her apartment full of “sleek and shiny” modern accoutrements, she is quick to report that the building’s last Jewish tenant, Frau Schwartzenberger, “will be gone by year’s end.”
Here one encounters one of the oddities of Doerr’s portrayal of the “hidden life” of wartime Germany: we are halfway into a rather long novel before the first notable encounter with an actual Jew. Frau Schwartzenberger makes her appearance as a companion in an elevator ride. Afterward Werner marvels to himself, “A Jewess,” choosing a word that is prime bait for readers prone to wonder if this is how Germans spoke to themselves in 1941. (Is the anachronistic word “Jewess” meant as some approximation of a prissy German word, or is it simply an awkward choice, a infelicitous term as dead in the linguistic water as poetess?)
These are good readerly challenges. Doerr takes on Forster’s proposition and works with fierce and poetic detail to render the Bretons of Saint-Malo and the Germans of the ascendant Reich, even if there are points at which the narrative demands “additional reading.”
Norman Ravvin is a writer and teacher in Montreal.