The Zone of Interest (43 page)
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Authors: Martin Amis
My own inner narrative is one of chronic stasis, followed by a kind of reprieve. Here is an illustration. I first read Martin Gilbert’s classic
The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy
in 1987, and I read it with incredulity; in 2011 I read it again, and my incredulity was intact and entire – it was wholly undiminished. Between those dates I had worked my way through scores of books on the subject; and while I might have gained in knowledge, I had gained nothing at all in penetration. The facts, set down in a historiography of tens of thousand of volumes, are not in the slightest doubt; but they remain in some sense unbelievable, or beyond belief, and cannot quite be assimilated. Very cautiously I submit that part of the exceptionalism of the Third Reich lies in its unyieldingness, the electric severity with which it repels our contact and our grip.
Soon after this negative eureka (I have not found it, I cannot understand it), my eye was caught by a new edition of Primo Levi’s
The Truce
(his comedic and affirmatory companion volume to the darkness of
If This Is a Man
). And here I came across an addendum I hadn’t seen before – ‘The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions’, which covers eighteen pages of small print.
‘How can the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?’ asks question number seven. In reply Levi lists the most commonly cited root causes, which, nevertheless, he finds ‘not commensurate with, not proportional to, the facts that need explaining’. He goes on:
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. Let me explain: ‘understanding’ a proposal or human behaviour means to ‘contain’ it, contain its author, put oneself in his place, identify with him. Now, no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human . . . [T]here is no rationality in the Nazi hatred; it is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man . . .
Historians will consider this more an evasion than an argument. To non-discursive writers, though (and we remember that Levi was also a novelist and a poet), such a feint or flourish may be taken as a spur. Here, Levi is very far from hoisting up the no-entry sign demanded by the sphinxists, the anti-explainers. On the contrary, he is lifting the pressure off the why, and so pointing to a way in.
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My special thanks go to Richard J. Evans for checking my typescript, for drawing my attention to some historical implausibilities, and for tidying up several grave errors in the novel’s garnish of German; and thanks also to my friend of almost half a century, Clive James, for his suggestions and his thoughts. As I said to Professor Evans at the outset, my only conscious liberty with the factual record was in bringing forward the defection to the USSR of Friedrich Paulus (the losing commander at Stalingrad) by about seventeen months. Otherwise, I adhere to that which happened, in all its horror, its desolation, and its bloody-minded opacity.
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Epub ISBN: 9781448192366
Version 1.0
Published by Jonathan Cape 2014
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Copyright © Martin Amis 2014
Martin Amis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Jonathan Cape
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ISBN 9780224099745
Table of Contents
Chapter I: The Zone of Interest