Placed in the shoes of a working man torn between what is right and wrong
The emotional impact of its narrative makes for a challenging, but superb read
THE DRAUGHTSMAN Robert Lautner Loot.co.za (R266) Borough Press
REVIEWER: JULIAN RICHFIELD
In a postscript to his second novel, The Draughtsman, Robert Lautner recalls reading an interview with one of the descendants of Topf & Sons, which was a prestigious engineering firm in Erfurt, Germany.
After unification, Dagmar Topf was interested in holding on to the factory and family villa which is now labelled as the workplace where “the engineers of the Final Solution” designed the ovens for the concentration camps of the SS.
Why would you want to retain that? Why wouldn’t you raze it to the ground? Dagmar’s attitude was that they were only doing their jobs. What choice did they have?
The Draughtsman is set in 1944 Germany and its central character is Ernst Beck. Unemployed since graduating as an engineer, he is relieved to finally get a job.
From his start at Topf & Sons, Ernst is assigned to its smallest team, the Special Ovens Department, reporting directly to Berlin. Ernst’s role is to annotate plans for new crematoria that designed to burn day and night. Their destination, for Topfs’ new client, the SS, is the concentration camps.
Slowly, the real nature of his work dawns on Ernst and he has a challenging decision to make.
He can chose to leave his job and return to the insecurity of being unemployed, or he can continue designing the crematoria and the accompanying moral ambiguity.
He is faced with the choice between taking the easy way out or doing what is right.
When his wife reveals a previously undisclosed truth about her past, the nature of his work at Topf & Sons becomes even more uncomfortable for him.
The Draughtsman is an extraordinary work of fiction.
It is not a Holocaust story, but using that time period as its setting, it deals with some of the contradictions of human nature and specifically how deeply complicit we can become in the face of fear.
The original Topf & Sons factory site in Erfurt, is today a Holocaust memorial and museum.
Lautner’s writing is such he is able to equally add a human side to the oppressors and those who suffered, and put the reader into the shoes of each.
Without resorting to cliché or caricature, he has superbly managed to portray an authenticity in his characters, their dialogue and the situations in which they find themselves.
The emotional impact of its narrative makes for a challenging, but superb read. The book is an exceptional work – one that is deserving of a wide readership, and is likely to be remembered long after its last page is turned.
The Draughtsman’s theme has much resonance in today’s world. For example, in South Africa, the question contemplated by many who lived through the apartheid era, is what could we have done, and did we do enough?
Robert Lautner is the pseudonym for the author of historical adventure fiction.
He lives on the Pembrokeshire coast with his wife and children.
He has a diverse working background, prior to becoming a writer, he owned a comic book shop, worked as a wine merchant, and was a photographic consultant.