The Zone of Interest (42 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND AFTERWORD: ‘THAT WHICH HAPPENED’

I am of course greatly indebted to the
loci classici
of the field – the works of Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, Norman Cohn, Alan Bullock, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hannah Arendt, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert, Ian Kershaw, Joachim C. Fest, Saul Friedländer, Richard J. Evans, Richard Overy, Gitta Sereny, Christopher R. Browning, Michael Burleigh, Mark Mazower, and Timothy Snyder, among many others. These writers have established the macrocosm. I now intend to discharge some obligations on the level of the
meso
and the
micro
.

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.’

Still, we shouldn’t forget that the mystery, the why, is divisible: first, the Austrian
artist manqué
turned tub-thumper, second, the German – and Austrian – instruments he carried with him. Sebastian Haffner was a popular historian who studied both ends of the phenomenon, from below in
Defying Hitler
(a memoir of life in Berlin 1914–33, written in 1939, just after he got out) and from above in
The Meaning of Hitler
, an intense exegesis that appeared in 1978, when Haffner was seventy-one (in 1914 he was seven). The first book went unpublished in his lifetime, and there is no attempt at uniting the two perspectives. But we can attempt it; and the connections are unignorable.

In moods and mentalities, it seems,
Volk
and Führer partook of the same troubled Danubian brew. On the one hand, the people, with their peculiar ‘despair of politics’ (as Trevor-Roper has put it), their eager fatalism, their wallowing in petulance and perversity, what Haffner calls their ‘resentful dimness’ and their ‘heated readiness to hate’, their refusal of moderation and, in adversity, of all consolation, their ethos of zero-sum (of all or nothing, of
Sein oder Nichtsein
), and their embrace of the irrational and hysterical. And on the other hand the leader, who indulged these tendencies on the stage of global politics. His inner arcanum, Haffner believes, floridly manifested itself during the critical hinge of the war: namely the two-week period between November 27 and December 11, 1941.

When the
Blitzkrieg
in the east began to collapse, Hitler notoriously remarked (November 27):

On this point, too, I am icily cold. If one day the German nation is no longer sufficiently strong or sufficiently ready for sacrifice to stake its blood for its existence, then let it perish and be annihilated by some other stronger power . . . I shall shed no tears for the German nation.

By December 6, as the War Diary of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff records, Hitler had acknowledged that ‘no victory could any longer be won’. And on December 11, four days after Pearl Harbor, he boldly, gratuitously, and suicidally declared war on the USA. Where, here, is the Führer’s why? According to Haffner, he was ‘now coveting defeat’; and he wanted that defeat to be ‘as complete and disastrous as possible’. Thereafter his aggression veered in on a new target: Germans.

This reading offers a framework for December ’41–April ’45, and helps make some sense of the Ardennes offensive in late ’44 (which effectively opened the eastern door to the Russians) and the two disobeyed ‘Führer Orders’ the following March (for mass civilian evacuation from the west, and the ‘Nero Order’ for scorched earth). We now ask, How far back did it go – the subconscious drive towards self-destruction, and later its treasonable corollary, the conscious drive towards ‘national death’? And the answer seems to be that it went back all the way.

Hitler’s core notion, ‘living space’, announced with settled pomp in
Mein Kampf
(1925), was from the start a ridiculous anachronism (the reasoning is ‘pre-industrial’); and its
sine qua non
, the quick win over Russia, was ruled out in advance by demographics and geography. When the dissident diarist Friedrich Reck, who came from an old military family, learned of the attack on Russia (June ’41) he reacted with ‘wild jubilation’: ‘Satan’s own have overreached themselves, and now they are in the net, and they will never free themselves again’. Thus in Haffner’s words, the ‘programmatician’, as Hitler liked to call himself, ‘programmed his failure’.

Both Haffner’s books give you the rare excitement of impending (if perhaps fugitive) clarity; and read in tandem they do seem to inch us a little closer to coherence. But we are continuing to beg an enormous question: the question of sanity. After all, Hitler’s other core notion, the one about the Jewish world conspiracy, comes straight out of a primer on mental diseases – it is the schizophrenic’s first and most miserable cliché. In the street, then, gutter Judaeophobia (or at best the unnatural ‘indifference’ adduced by Ian Kershaw), a fulminant nationalism, and herd docility punctuated by ‘mass intoxications’; in the Chancellery, the slow
felo de se
of a mind now putrescing with power. And madness, if we impute it (and how can we exclude it?), is bound to frustrate our investigation – because of course we will get no coherence, and no legible why, from the mad.

What is the unique difficulty in coming to terms with ‘that which happened’ (in Paul Celan’s coldly muted phrase)? Any attempt at an answer will necessarily be personal, and for this reason: ‘the Nazi genocide’, as Michael André Bernstein has written, ‘is somehow central to our self-understanding’. Not everyone will feel that way about the events in eastern Europe 1941–5 (and I am reminded of W. G. Sebald’s dry aside to the effect that no serious person ever thinks about anything else). But I accede to Bernstein’s formulation; it is surely one of the defining elements of the singularity.