Thomas Bernhard | Woodcutters / 1987

falling trees

by Douglas Messerlli

 

Thomas Bernhard Holzfällen, translated from the German by David McLintock as Woodcutters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987)

 

American writers (and artists), particularly poets, often complain that their communities are viciously divided, and decry the fact that at the center of their art is great deal of vicious commentary, particularly between different literary sensibilities. My reaction to the various attacks from one front or another has always been a simple acceptance of the fact—although I have seldom willfully contributed to these assaults. Why shouldn’t a poet or fiction writer, if she or he is truly committed to art and his perception of what art consists of, feel a sense of affront by those who do not have that same commitment? If art matters, so does the territory; all writing (or art) is necessarily not equal, unless one doesn’t truly care about that art.

 

    In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is not just an US phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria. And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what the hosts, the detested Auersbergers, have described as “an artistic dinner.” For Bernhard’s Viennese counterparts, some of whom recognized themselves in his satiric attacks, the presentation of their failures, however, was not at all “fun,” one going so far to sue the author and preventing his book from sale.

     There is certainly no question that Bernhard, bearing a close relationship to the narrator, presents a devastating portrait of his fellow artists—writers, musicians, tapestry weavers, dancers, actors, and just plain hangers-on. The drubbing they receive and the recounting of the narrator’s intimate relationships with many of these figures is almost maniacal as he recounts over and over how he came to know each figure, what role they played in his life, and how they ultimately came to be the truly “hated” figures he regurgitates up before us. Bernhard’s book, in short, is precisely as its title suggests—at least in the German—a wood-cutting exercise, Holzfällen suggesting in the original not just the noun “woodcutters,” but the verbal construction of a critical denunciation.

     Bernhard’s narrator, having himself suffered an emotional breakdown and, consequently, spending a period in a mental hospital, has a great deal in common with the author, and the major event of the day of the “artistic dinner” is a graveside ceremony for the narrator’s friend, Joana, upon her having committed suicide at her childhood home in Kilb, is similar in some ways to Bernhard’s own reported suicide in Upper Austria only five years after publishing this fiction. The reader, accordingly, recognizes the narrator’s attacks as highly personal and, at times, nearly hysterical, as the character admits that for years he has gone out of his way to steer clear of his old friends from the 1950s and early 1960s upon his return to Vienna from years abroad. But even if the narrator did not admit to these personal vendettas—which, in fact, lay at the heart of this fiction—the reader would be forced to recognize the subjectivity of the narrator simply by the grammatical structures and intense repetition of his sentences. Each attack on his hosts and their guests, particularly the Austrian Virginia Woolf, Jeannie Billroth, and the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein (in my mind, two diametrically opposed figures), Anna Schreker, is repeated over and again in detail, with each foray the narrator adding a bit of new information, that we soon recognize the separated figure sitting, as he tells us dozens and dozens of times in the narrative, in a wing-tip chair, is clearly obsessed with these beings.

     As well he might be, given the fact that as a young man he was pulled into artistic and sexual relationships with nearly all the central players, including his hostess—a woman from a wealthy bourgeois family who uses her money to help buy her and her husband’s way into the cultural scene—he, a composer “in the Webern tradition”—along with the Austrian Virginia Woolf, the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein, and the talentless Joana who spent her life transforming her tapestry-maker husband into a world-renown artist who bolts to Mexico just as he reaches the pinnacle of his profession.

     While the narrator may seem utterly ruthless in his attacks, quite viciously recounting the demise of each of these figures, now unable to even tolerate them for their abandonment of whatever they might have had of any talent, he somewhat redeems himself by being as brutally honest about himself, admitting how they each helped mold him into the artist he is today while also attempting, in a Tennessee Williams-like metaphor, to emotionally and spiritually “devour” him, equating it to the way all of Austrian culture grinds down its most talented young artists. The Auersbergers have used him sexually to “help save their marriage,” Jeannie has taken him in as a kind of devotee of her artistic endeavors, Joana has created a relationship with him to help her develop her failed career as a dancer/actress. In order to survive, he proclaims, he has had to abandon them, while they have vilified him to all their acquaintances for that very abandonment, Joana perhaps even through her death expressing her sorrow in her loss of her once dear friend. So while the narrator may seem to be selfishly satisfied with his tale of his friend’s immense failings, he is equally brutal about his own hypocrisies, and praises the talents they once possessed—including Herr Auersberger’s musical abilities, his wife’s singing talents, and even Jeannie’s early devotion to literature before she sold out to the State officials who award stipends and literary prizes, one of which the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein has just been recipient.

     At the center of the “artistic dinner” is a third-rate actor playing Eckdal in the Burgtheater’s production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck., who, when he finally arrives well after midnight, shifts the narrative to a comic realization of just the boorish “artistic” conversations against which the narrator has been railing. Most of his commentaries are ridiculous statements of the difficulty of the actor’s life, criticizing nearly everyone—directors, writers, fellow actors and the theater itself, while exalting his own innumerable talents. When Jeannie Billbroth attempts to turn the conversation upon herself, however, at first vaguely, but, as the actor himself puts it, later “tastelessly” posing provocative questions, the actor turns from performing as a simple ham, endlessly recounting tales he has told dozens of times, to a kind of outraged philosopher, lambasting “the Austrian Virginia Woolf” for rude impertinence, lashing out against her obvious attempts to put down anything of value. In short, he voices just the criticisms that the narrator has privately held yet, hypocritically, failed to publicly express. For the aging actor, his desires are for a kind of return to nature—what anyone who has read Austrian fiction realizes is at the very center of that country’s romantic ties to a kind of peasant simplicity—a world of “the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter,” perhaps Bernhard’s ironic condemnation of the culture’s (as well as the narrator’s) own self-destructive desires.

     Indeed, Bernhard’s narrator, ultimately, does not come off much better than the devouring dead folk of his memories, as he waits until everyone has left, kissing the forehead of his hostess, and murmuring wishes that he might have heard her sing, while promising another visit—all of his actions and words representing more hypocritical mendacity. Or perhaps they do represent a kind of truth, as he goes racing down the stairs like he were still in his 20s, running away from his current home toward the city, determined to write down everything he has just suffered “at once…now—at once, at once, before it’s too late,” while at the same time admitting that as much as he hates these people and Vienna, he, just like the Burgtheater actor, loves them and the city:

 

                      This is my city and always will be my city, these are my people and

                      Always will be my people….,

 

an admission that almost instructively contradicts his deep hatred of all he has just recounted to us.

     In this sense, finally, Bernhard’s Woodcutters is not just a critical attack; while it is that, it is also an intense dialogue with the narrator’s self over his and his society’s failures, a public airing of his and his compatriot’s laundry, so to speak. And so the fiction is transformed into a kind of loving portrait of a failed world, the world which, in the end, all artists are forced to encounter, endure, and write about: never an easy task.

 

New York City, May 4, 2012

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (May 2012).

Anthony Powell | Venusberg / 2003

international relationships

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Powell Venusberg (London: Duckworth, 1932); reprinted by (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003)

 

The figure at the center of Anthony Powell’s satiric “dialogue fiction” is Lushington, far too serious and lugubrious for the events he encounters. Like Henry Green’s Party Going, this book begins in a pea-soup fog in London, involving, just as in Green’s work, an affair with a woman, the beautiful Lucy, who allows Lushington to observe her during her bath; yet, just as in Green’s fiction, little occurs since she is apparently in love with Lushington’s close friend, Da Costa, who represents England in an unnamed Baltic country.

     At least Lushington has consummated his relationship with Lucy; it is unclear that Lucy’s beloved Da Costa has ever had sex, since he seems utterly disinterested in women, attending to them—just as he attends to foreign service—distractedly and ineffectually. If Lushington seems confused and without direction, Da Costa is an absolute fool whose major attentions appear to be focused on his overly eager-to-serve and ridiculously loquacious valet, Pope, known to his former army comrades as “the Duke.”

     Nearly everyone in Powell’s delicious put-down of “international relationships” is an out-sized type, nearly all of them desperately seeking love, with few of them knowing how to achieve it. On the boat over to the mysterious Baltic country, Lushington, sent there by his newspaper, meets several of these figures, including the sad and disintegrating Russian Count Scherbatcheff and the far more outrageous and pretentious Count Bobel, both of whom will be ostracized from the society of this Baltic country, which is suffering the later stages of an attempt at Russian takeover. Throughout the entire work, there is an underlying fear of murders and bombing, which at first merely intrigues Lushington, but later thoroughly involves him and ends in his necessary escape from the scene of which he is supposed to be reporting.

     Also on the voyage over, the reporter meets two women, Baroness Puckler and Frau Mavrin, the latter a handsome and elegantly poised woman with whom he becomes sexually involved. It is his relationship with Frau Mavrin and his pretended friendship with Mavrin’s clueless, academic husband, Panteleimon, that lends Lushington any dimension, and stirs up, from time to time, Powell’s otherwise rather static plot.

    Indeed, it is as if all of these figures and others were attempting to play out their lives simply to be brought into the pages of Lushington’s newspaper. For behind the scenes nearly all their lives are empty and quite meaningless. When Lushington visits his friend Scherbatcheff we encounter a kind of hellish apartment wherein various members of his family go about their paltry lives trying to walk round and ignore each other’s presences. Despite the Count’s good-natured acceptance of his condition, the visit is one of the most painful scenes of Powell’s book, and through it we suddenly comprehend the character's depressive and, ultimately, consumptive state of mind and body. His death is cruelly announced in Powell’s work: “And then one day Count Scherbatcheff died.”

    Frau Mavrin’s home life is hardly better, as she, Lushington, and others, visiting one late night, must awaken her husband, who, forced to dress, appears only as his guests are about to leave, and is left little to do but help them take the unresponsive elevator down to the street. Later, Panteleimon pours out his fears of his wife’s affairs to Lushington, all his suspicions pointing to Da Costa, with whom he seems determined to fight a duel, while Lushington, the guilty one, feeds him platitudes.

    Bobel is clearly a fool who cannot even attain a central table at the local cabaret, Maxims. Cortney, an American, is as clumsy and empty-minded as they come, while the militaristic stooge, Waldemar, is more concerned with his uniform than any ideas he might express.

    While one might worry about the fate of this small Baltic country, there is so little at the center of this outlandish place, that, like Lushington, we are hard pressed to care about its affairs. While in reality, I care very much about and loved my visits in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the non-existent Powell Baltic spot seems to survive on a series of nightly parties in which very little happens and even less is intelligently discussed. But then, to be fair to Powell, neither have we heard any intelligent conversation in London presented in this book!

     It is only a tragedy than lends any significance to Lushington’s stay in “Venusberg,” a world where love seems to matter more than anything else. After attending the annual grand ball, Lushington, tired and disturbed by Frau Marvin’s foul moods (she is furious about his imminent departure), decides to walk home in the cold, while his friend Da Costa escorts her home.

     Assassins, supposedly attempting to kill Police Commissar Kuno attack a drosky, end the lives of both Da Costa and, as Lushington later discovers, Frau Mavrin, instead. But we also must question whether Panteleimon might have had a role in this. We can only wonder if, possibly, Panteleimon has been involved in this. Called up in the middle of the night by Pope, Lushington serves as a witness to his friends' respectability.

     As meaningless as has been his trip to this country, the reporter travels back to face what will clearly be an always slightly disinterested Lucy, surely settling into a home life as meaningless as all those lives he has just witnessed.

     As in all his Powell’s works, the slightly bitter satire is infused with a brilliance of language that redeems the characters’ lack of significance.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (September 2011).

Thomas Frick | The Iron Boys / 2011

voice and mind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas Frick The Iron Boys (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Burning Books, 2011)

 

Thomas Frick’s 2011 fiction, The Iron Boys, is full of rich characterizations and is densely plotted. By the book’s completion, the reader has a strong sense of the early 19th century northern English communities, in which many individuals were involved in the Luddite Movement, destroying machines and mills in strong reaction against the industrial machines newly installed. Not only were these individuals angered by the incessant noise of the new mills, run, in Frick’s fiction, by George Cogent Meadows Richard Pilfer Withy, but were disturbed by the economic shift from hand labor to machines, forcing some of them out of jobs and fair payment. The central characters of this book gather on street corners, in pubs, and in each other’s homes, or take long walks together, permitting the author to present us with dialogues between all sorts of beings, from radical agitators like Pank, hard-working women such as Rose Stonewarden and Sarah Maldon, and poor and wandering, poverty-stricken children such as Milky, to homosexual intellects like Eddard Weedy, lovers such as Silvy, and brutal drunkards, one of whom—in the most vicious act of the book—kills and eats a puppy. The world Frick paints is nearly Dickensian in its depiction of people of enormous appetites and hard living.

     Yet for all its density of good, old-fashioned story-telling, the brilliance of The Iron Boys lies not in its secondary characters or plot, but in its focus on the voice of its narrator, Corbel Penner, an intelligent but uneducated local, who tangentially gets involved in a violent attack on Withy’s lace-making mill. And concentrating on Penner, Frick’s story, following the free-associations of the character’s thinking and his personal language, turns what may at first seem like straight-forward realism into a fairly radical and highly poetic text. While Frick gives us a good story that will end, we know from the beginning, in a highly dramatic attack and destruction of the mill, crippling our hero, what really matters in this book is the sound and movement of that figure’s voice and mind.

      How Frick—who was born and raised in Kentucky and Arkansas, before living in England, Michigan, New York City, Boston, Strasbourg, and, for the past several years, in Los Angeles—was so able to create a credible North England dialect for his character is unimaginable. But then perhaps this character’s voice, in its open eccentricity, is nothing like what it pretends to be. Who cares, when a fictional figure can speak so wondrously?

 

“Hangin over that year is the comet. Cant never forget that. It first appear in that cold spring. Biggest comet ever seen Weedy says. That should tell you something. Aint but a smudge in the sky at first. I make nothing of it but I don’t see so good. Theys some talk in the square. Misfigewsured lambs an blight in the comin crop. Bad twins. The fortunes a Napoleon. One crystal night seem all close at once. I can see a blood red tail brushed out like feather malt. Wide an tall an just that spiky. Weedy says it were a Frenchman spot it first. Out a their froggy pride they drum up all the virtues a their comet wine.... What we did have that autumn is the fattest sweetest penny lucre melon you ever taste.”

 

     If, at first, this language seems a bit too close to a work in dialect, the reader soon comprehends this as a masterly made-up language that reads throughout more like a poem. And along with the meandering mind of our hero which determines the various directions the tale takes, the fiction becomes something closer to being a long narrative poem. Even though the Burning Books format is small, and the work is only about 260 pages, it took me longer to read, at times, than the momentous novel I was encountering during the same period, Remembrance of Things Past by Proust.

     Consequently, Frick’s central figure, although he may be a kind of everyday man, is transformed into something very extraordinary, beginning the book by being able to comprehend the language of the birds, and ending up with a kind Homeric nobility in his late discovery that the boy from Child Town whom he has so long admired, is his own son, the mother of his former lover. And like Homer’s heroes, throughout Penner sings—such as the song sung about the mentally retarded local, New Billy:

 

                               O New Billy my charm a New Billy

                               When shall I see my New Billy again

                               When the fishes fly over the fountain

                               Then I shall see my New Billy again

                               When your fishes fly over the fountain

                               Then you shall see your New Billy again.

 

     Penner also has a sense of moral being that far outweighs most of the other figures in his world, growing disgusted with himself and others in the bar where, as drunk skins and eats a puppy, he and others sit passively watching. The result of that outrage ends in him murdering the drunk soon after, which, obviously, represents his personal fall from grace. If the book begin with his being one with nature, as opposed to the mechanical world created by Withy and other capitalists, his and the Luddites’ actions to do not result in any real change, as Withy simple builds a new and grander factory. Having lost the use of his legs, Penner himself is forced to rely on a kind a machine, a cart-like contraption fixed up for him so that he can travel about.

      If by fictions’s end, the birds no longer can be comprehended or, as Penner suggests, no longer even sing, however, the human voice of Frick’s picaresque has sung such a memorable song that you may be tempted to wander its pages all over again.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (January 2014).

Jenny Erpenbeck | The Old Child and Other Stories / 2005

hunger and thirst

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jenny Erpenbeck Geschichte vom alten Kind and Tand, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky as The Old Child and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 2005)

 

The story central to this new collection of tales by German author Jenny Erpenbeck, is, at heart, a kind of “Russian doll” tale, a story of selves within selves within selves. But “The Story of the Old Child” begins in a manner that seems far from the psychological manifestations inherent in that kind of structure. The sudden appearance on the street of the nameless “child” of this story reminds one, rather, of the Casper Hauser legend, where a young animal-like boy, with no language and no knowledge of his past, appeared wandering the streets of Nuremberg in 1828.

This animalistic child is, like Casper Hauser, a kind of “blank slate,” a being so empty that adults hardly take note of her. But for the young boys and girls of the Home for Children in which she is placed, she is seen as a kind of monster that reminds one a bit of a Russian doll in appearance, “bigger than she should be,” appearing “like Gulliver among the Lilliputians,” with a “body that has swollen out of all proportion,” and a face equally swollen so that it has almost erased her eyes, nose, and mouth.

Given her near-complete emptiness of being and the monstrosity of her appearance, it is almost inevitable that she is tortured by her classmates. But the tale that Erpenbeck weaves is much more complex, as the children gradually perceive how to abuse her in much more devious ways. One of the first lessons she encounters in her schooling at the Home concerns Bertolt Brecht’s comedy, Puntila and His Man Matti, a story about a hard-drinking master who suffers from a split personality: friendly and humane when drunk, ruthless and self-centered when sober. With these two personalities he tortures various employees, his daughter, potential wives, and, particularly, his chauffeur-valet Matti. It is a story, in other words, about servitude. The fellow students of this monstrous child, accordingly, quickly perceive the potentiality, in both her seeming stupidity and in her desire to be loved, for her to serve them. She willingly does so in numerous ways, passing messages between them, covering up their derelict behavior, serving as a silent confessor for her roommates, even becoming a sexual surrogate lover for the young boys.

It is as a servant, in short, that this “Russian doll” attains any happiness, any sense of being, any possible personality that she attains. The moment she begins to discover the power and joy of her role, however, a second being within her begins to emerge. As the city in which the Home is located is fire-bombed, a battle brews equally within, as the “old child” begins to write letters, apparently to herself, which she hides in secret places around the Home. The messages scrawled upon these, read by no one after they are hidden, portray an inner world that may begin to explain the emptiness of the girl’s surface: NEVER GO OUT IN THE DARK AGAIN WITHOUT YOUR CAP, OR ELSE THE CROWS WILL PECK YOUR EYES OUT. BEST WISHES—YOUR MAMA; DON’T STICK YOUR HEAD SO FAR OUT THE WINDOW, OR ELSE IT MIGHT FALL OFF. BEST WISHES—YOUR MAMA.

These horrific aphoristic-like warnings—so full of hate and seemingly maternal love—gradually reveal a past of servitude on an even grander scale than the roles imposed upon her by her fellow students. Just as in Brecht’s play, the world conveyed through these hidden epistles is one of extremes: HUNGER AND THIRST. AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, reads one of the messages, YOU ARE DEAD. BEST WISHES—YOUR MAMA.

In the context of these tortured warnings, the dénouement of this beautifully crafted tale is inevitable. The girl falls into a deep sleep, refusing to eat, and is rushed to the Municipal Hospital, where she gradually wastes away, revealing a full-grown woman, whose elderly mother sits by her bedside, “shame…written all over her face.” Whether the shame is due to her own behavior to her daughter or because her daughter has been found to be a kind of fraud is not revealed. But, in a sense, it hardly matters: the shedding of so many layers of selves has also allowed the girl-woman to shed her past. “Oh, are you my mother? says the woman who used to be a girl, and very slowly she opens her eyes. I don’t remember you at all.” The servant-child has at last become master of her own life.

     Within the context of this title book of seventy-some pages, no other tale can compare. However, three stand out: “Sand,” a beautiful story of youth and age, and, again, of power and servitude; “Siberia,” another tale of servitude, this of a woman—who upon surviving and escaping from a Siberian work camp—returns home to find another woman living with her husband; and “Hale and Hallowed,” an ironic work about two woman, the birth of their sons, and their sons’ fates.

     In all, Erpenbeck’s writing represented in this book promises more work in the future worth our attention.

 

Los Angeles, January 1, 2006

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, II, No. 1 (Spring 2006).

Eric Lichtblau | The Nazi Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men / 2014

neighborly monsters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Lichtblau The Nazi Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

 

As I mention at the end of my essay on Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie, my father fought in World War II as a bomber, proudly feeling afterwards that he had battled to save the Jews—even if, if fact, by the time he bombed Frankfurt most of the German Jews had been sent away to camps or forced to attempt escape into other countries. My father remained committed to that belief throughout his life, never permitting my German-born, uneducated farmer grandfather, my mother’s father, to speak his anti-Semitic observations; every time we visited the basically kindly man, when he said something about “the Jews,” my parents booth quickly stood and hurried my brother, sister, and I off to the car for the return home. Since we visited my grandfather, Tobe Caspers, regularly at Easter, I believe these painful experiences made that holiday my least favorite of the year.

 

     Despite father’s and mother’s strong-minded commitments—of which I am proud and which, I am sure helped to make me such a fervent spokesman against anti-Semitic sentiments and behavior—my father was basically a naïve man, a true innocent in many respects, even though as an educator he was seen as a community leader. Like so many others of the period, he believed in what the government and newspapers espousing government viewpoints said without question.

     When I was in Junior High School, for example, he strongly encouraged me write an essay on that year’s declared topic, “Space, Man’s New Frontier,” and helped me, if I remember correctly, on the research, making certain that I properly  expressed praise for the “great” space architect, Dr. Werner von Braun, who, having worked on the German rockets V-2 in World War II, had helped the U.S. create the Saturn-V. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency had, after all, been instrumental in bringing van Braun and several other German scientists, through Operation Paperclip, to the US after the War, and continued to award and praise these individuals for decades after for their service to the Cold War battles with Russia.

     My father never suspected, I am certain, the truth: that Braun had had knowledge of and was likely personally involved in activities in Mittelbau-Dora, the German base and concentration camp where Polish, Russian, and some French slave laborers were forced to create the rockets, while being fed little and killed on a regular basis, only to be replaced with others. Many were hung in the tunnels of the rocket camp itself, particularly if they were seen as slacking off or challenging their torturous tasks.

     I won that Junior High School speech contest, and am now quite embarrassed by my own innocent praise of the former Nazi’s contributions. As writer Eric Lichtblau makes clear in his new study, The Nazis Next Door, more than 10,000 Nazi’s—many of them brutal murderers during the War—were permitted and in many cases even encouraged by the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies to seek asylum after the War in the US. By the time enough people began to realize these facts, von Braun had died; while underlings in the Huntsville, Alabama space program such as Arthur Rudolph, who was admittedly (and implacably) involved in the hellish concentration camp activities, and the so-called “father of space medicine,” and Dr. Hubertus Strughold, who had medically experimented on prisoners at Dachau, were finally brought to trial. Rudolph remained unrepentant, even trying to slip back into the US through Canada, and Strughold died before he could be deported.

      There have now been several books of this sad series of episodes in American history, including Richard Rashke’s 2013 book Useful Enemies and Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip. But what Pulitzer-Prize winning author Lichtblau reveals is just how determined the spying agencies (with figures like Dulles, Bush, and, obviously J. Edgar Hoover) and, under President Reagan, even the office the President itself, through opinions voiced by Pat Buchanan and others like him, were to help and avoid any prosecution of the Nazi monsters in our midst.

    By this time, whistler-blowers such as the outspoken left-wing journalist, Chuck Allen, Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, and Howard Blum, whose work Wanted!: The Search for Nazis in America was perhaps the most nuanced study of former Nazis in the USA of its day, had gained enough attention to even occasion a PBS television segment, hosted by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, on the former CIA spy and then Passaic County chief purchasing officer, Tom Soobzokov. Soobzokov, one of the most contentious of the ex-Nazis continued throughout his life to insist upon his innocence, often suing and threatening those who dared to suggest that he was a second lieutenant in the Waffen SS, often described as “the second Eichmann,” who helped in the execution of several hundred Russians during the War. With help from his former CIA connections and his own supportive immigrant community, Soobzokov was found not-guilty by a technicality: he had made known his past to the CIA and other organizations and they had still hired him and helped to gain citizenship. Later, Allen was arrested for and briefly imprisoned for even writing about Soobzokov, while the Nazi he had exposed remained free.

      Soobzokov continued to live in William Carlos Williams’ hometown of Patterson, New Jersey until a radical Nazi hunter (perhaps related to the Jewish Defense League) exploded a bomb on his front porch. That event, in itself, caused further calls to halt what by that time had finally become an organized government response, headed by Eli Rosenbaum and Tony DeVito, of the Justice Department in hunting down the remaining Nazis. 

     While the organization was able to force the deportation of people such as Rudolph, they also met with continued resistance by other governmental agencies which refused to release records and actually worked with the accused in staging cover-ups. The Justice Department, however, did themselves the most harm by falsely accusing John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio auto worker of being the brutal Treblink guard, Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk, it was later discovered was, in fact, a much lesser guard at another camp, Sobibor, and died in a nursing home still protesting his innocence.

      Several Alabama scientists, still outraged over the trials of Rudolph and Stughold, banded together in anger over the Justice Department division; immigrant communities stood in firm opposition to the agency’s attacks on elderly men whom they perceived as important community members; many of those who testified against the ex-Nazis were growing so old that they memories were waning; and CIA, FBI, and other offices remained strapped in the Cold War ethics, convinced that in order to defeat the Russians, it was important to make pacts, as Dulles had argued, even with the devil. None of these individuals, agencies, and communities seemed to be able reflect upon the issue of their own morality in supporting Nazis such as Soobzokov, Rudolph, Klaus Barbie, Otto von Bolschwing (a close ally of Eichmann) or Nazi General Karl Wolff (a close associate of Himmler), while permitting to achieve success and, quite often, financial security in the U.S., after having helped to murder millions of Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians, gays, and other peoples in Europe. 

      As Litchblau ponders, early in his book how could it happen that as the Nazis fled, their victims were often “left to languish,” that although thousands of the worst criminals in history were able to obtain American citizenship, as many homeless and tortured Jews were barred from our borders? The elephant in the room, quite obviously, is the fact that many of our leaders were perfectly willing to sleep with the enemy, and were likely as equally anti-Semitic as the Germans the Allies had just defeated. It is so terribly painful as an American to recall, as Lichtblau does early in this book, that Bess Truman, wife of President Truman, “did not welcome Jews in her home, and that the President himself privately referred to Jews and “Kikes” and “Jew Boys,” that the lionized General George S. Patton, as he and his men were discovering in the Nazi death camps, held “Jews in utter contempt.” Writing Truman, “Old Blood and Guts,” laid bare his rabid anti-Semitism, complaining of how the “the Jews in one DP camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” “would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy ‘locusts.’”

 

                  We entered the synagogue (on Yom Kippur) which was packed with

                  the greatest sticking mass of humanity I have ever seen.”

 

      As late as 1987, Pat Buchanan, Ed Meese and other government officials were attempting to countermand another American Nazi, Karl Linnas’ deportation to Russia by sneaking him—without even discussing it with the Justice Department prosecutor Neal Sher—to Panama, where Sher might imagine Linnas “relaxing under the palm trees on the beaches…living out his days as some sort of bon vivant in exile.” The end-run deportation was thwarted by Shear and Holtzman who, visiting the Panamanian embassy, quickly detailed the ex-Nazi’s criminal background.

     Rounding up the Nazis was clearly a near impossible task in a country where they had been so readily welcomed.

     My father, had ever read of these facts, could never have believed them. What had his actions of War-time service meant if they had had so little effect? Fortunately, brave journalists such as Litchblau, Richard Rashke, Annie Jacobsen, Howard Blum, and Chuck Allen before him continue to speak the truth so that we might finally comprehend our complicity.

      Just a few weeks before I wrote this review (May 31, 2015), Lichtblau reported in The New York Times that “The American government paid $20.2 million in Social Security benefits to more than 130 United States residents linked to Nazi atrocities over the course of more than a half-century, with some of the payments made as recently as this year….” Finally, it appears, such payments have stopped and most of the Nazis have passed away. Perhaps it should not surprise us, in hindsight, that numerous American leaders had learned little in their countrymen’s struggle to wipe out such racist hate, but certainly it continues to sicken and shock most of us.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2015

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2015).

Aksel Sandemose | The Werewolf / 1966, reprinted 2002

the melancholics and the missing bucket

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aksel Sandemose Varulven (Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co., 1958), translated from the Norwegian by Gustaf Lannestock as The Werewolf (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966; reprinted 2002)

 

I first purchased a cloth copy of Sandemose's The Werewolf during my sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin, one year after the publication of the translation into English. The book sat unread on my shelves as a desired but foreboding object (the book is 375 pages long in a 6 x 9 format) for 35 years until this year, when Wisconsin reissued it in a paperback edition. In many respects, it was fortunate that I did not attempt to read it at the age of 19. I would not have understood it, and probably would have grown impatient with its rambling, dissociative structure. Even today, as an admitted admirer of fictional genres that lie outside of the more normative psychological novel, I was annoyed, at times, by its seeming lack of narrative continuity—at least until I recognized it as a kind of encyclopedic work that was attempting to reveal Norwegian culture from the 1930s until the date of its publication, 1958. And even then there were numerous times when Sandemose's long journeys into metaphoric ideation—the figure of the werewolf as a being who must have control over others is, quite obviously, at the center of this fiction—bothered and, at times, even confused me.

 

     The story, such as it is, is a fairly simple love story between Erling Vik and Felicia Ormsund, who meet and then—for a number of reasons, including World War II and their participation in the underground—go their various ways before meeting up again. Meanwhile, Felicia encounters and marries Jan Venhaug, but with Jan's tacit approval returns to a sexual relationship with Erling. The three, accordingly, live in an unconventional triangular relationship, all having, as Erling describes it, faced down and won out over the werewolf, permitting each other to live as free and distinct individuals.

      This simple love story, however, is merely one ingredient in a stew of dozens of characters that include Erling's former lovers and wife, his illegitimate daughter, Julie (who has been invited to live at Venhaug), brothers, strangers, and war-time heroes and traitors. Not only does Sandemose attempt to capture the whole of Norwegian culture during these years, but he explores, through his major figures, particularly Erling and Jan, some basic dichotomies in the Norwegian psyche.

      From my outsider's point of view, I have come to see two elements of the Norwegian sensibility, elements that are seemingly opposed, but which are perhaps only two sides to a single entity. Because of the differences in Norway's rulers before its independence, Sweden and Denmark, Norwegians are often represented in literature in two different ways, both presented in Sandemose's work: the melancholiac and the devilish imp, Brand and Per Gynt. One might attribute these differences to the dour Swedish questioning of the meaning of life, which Americans know best through filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, and the Danish comedic vision, recognized by Americans in Hans Christian Andersen, the Norwegian-born Dane Ludvig Holberg, or Norway's own storytellers Asbjørnson and Moe. In Sandemose's work the darker, werewolf-vision of Norwegian society might be said to be best expressed in the problem plays of Ibsen as opposed to Holberg or Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. Sandemose's novel nods to both Holberg and Hamsun several times, Erling quoting from Holberg and described as living a life as a young man in Oslo that recalls Hamsun's novel Hunger. In another instance, Erling has an affair with his landlady, Master-Mason Pedersen's wife, Hamsun's birth name. Many of Erling's legendary experiences, particularly his sexual adventures with a young girl trapped in a huge pot and his story about a bucket he has purchased that suddenly vanishes into thin air, remind one of early Hamsun, Per Gynt, and other magical Norwegian tales.

     Jan, on the other hand, a man of ideas and great practicality, is much closer to a character out of Ibsen's social dramas, Sigurd Hoel's great war-time novel Meeting at the Milestone, or the intense social encounters of the novels of Jens Bjørneboe. In short, Jan provides Felicia with a house, food, and gentle love, as opposed to the often uncontrollable urges for sex and alcohol that face Erling. Yet, quite obviously, Erling is the more exciting, and in that sense, more beloved by the whole family and most envied by those outside of Venhaug.

     It is clear that Felicia, the strong heroine of this book, must have both in order to survive and, as the work suggests at its end, such bi-lateral love is necessary in order to become part of the Norwegian myth represented in its enduring histories and sagas. But it is that very pull between these two—the inability of the average man or woman to live up to either of these ideals—that often tears the society apart, allowing the werewolf entry into the heart, and ultimately it is that failure that revenges itself on the woman both men love.

     What Sandemose most clearly reveals in this remarkable encyclopedia of mid-20th century Norwegian affairs is that World War II served almost as a crucible for Norwegian culture, asking its citizens to accept these extremes of identity or stand meekly in the middle awaiting the bite of the beast. The obvious answer is, like Erling's brother Gustav, too many hunkered down in terror, nearly allowing the nation to be swallowed up in hate.

     At fiction's end, Erling finally joins Jan and his daughter Julie—the new mistress of Venhaug—in making history, in determining their own fates.

 

Los Angeles, November 18, 2002

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2008).