Darknessundertheshadowofwar
Zephyr Books, £11.99 Reviewed by Stoddard Martin
Rudolf Nassauer came to London from Frankfurt in 1939, aged 14. His father was a wine-merchant, a trade he inherited. He became a novelist and married a novelist, Bernice Rubens. Both published debut works in 1960. Nassauer’s took 10 years to write and was rejected more than once. Regarded as the most remarkable of his seven books, it is now available in a new edition from Zephyr Books, with an introduction by Michael Moorcock.
Few of us any longer know what the world felt like in the 1950s, let alone 1940-45. The Zeitgeist into which The Hooligan emerged had barely experienced the Winds of Change and was not yet affected by All You Need Is Love or its riposte, Sympathy for the Devil. The Second World War was a palpable memory, the Cold War present reality, nuclear holocaust a great fear. It was the era of Soviet gulags. Fascists still ruled Portugal and Spain.
In Nassauer’s milieu, refugees like Elias Canetti impressed literati like Iris Murdoch with treatises on crowd psychology, and “New Age consciousness” was afoot. By the end of a new decade, hooligans proper would bring terror to (and from) Northern Ireland, but it is not them Nassauer had in mind in his title, but rather victimisers from a town called Himmlersberg who run a death-camp named Goeringen. His theme is the Dostoyevskian Weltanschauung which impelsthem,half-sleepwalking“beyond good and evil”, into amoral goop.
The book is ugly, and titanic. The victimisers are like Alberich and Mime in Wagner’s Ring, but without their justification. Nothing has been stolen from them; they are not even of society’s losers — only its second-raters, its malleable mass. Yet, in odd ways, they are also US nuclear test carried out at Nevada in the 1950s individual thinkers, each conjuring his own form of antinomian ethics. Transvaluation is at the core of the deadly game that attracts them. Their playing of it induces their victims — the most conscious of them — into entering a version of it, too. Wrath against a God who has failed is ubiquitous, as it is against conventions that lie.
Yet if “God is dead”, then (to complete Nietzsche’s phrase) “for millennia to come people will spy his shadow in their caves”.
Survivors long for saviours. A starving, grief-addled woman sees a former camp-officer as Christ — or is he the Antichrist? Whichever, he dispatches her to her death. An old Jew whom he once forced to grovel with pigs testifies at his trial that he has shown intrinsic goodness in releasing her from misery.
The world is beyond reason. What hope? “Man will rebuild the ravaged cities, but there will be no more churches, no altars… only the children… I love children.” Thus, the way back to morality of a kind — or is it to the paedophilia of a Savile era?
No exit from existential confusion is sure, except the ultimate. Stoddard Martin is a writer and publisher