Amis’ Auschwitz breeds love amid ferocious evil
Matt Damsker
Amid reports of rising antiSemitism in Europe — most chillingly, perhaps, in Germany — the time is prime for Martin Amis’ bravely nuanced new novel to pour insightful light on the enduring darkness of the Holocaust. But The Zone of Interest is, inevitably, not only a project that risks condemnation but also a question — “Why?” — without an answer.
Amis is a major novelist who has taken on the Holocaust before, more than two decades ago, with Time’s Arrow, an experimental tour de force in which a Nazi sadist is revealed to us in reverse chronology. The Zone of Interest is a more traditional narrative, a blighted love story that begins as a comedy of boorish manners — the banality of evil, indeed — before descending into a sensorium of pathetic detail, with brilliantly sardonic dialogue.
It’s told from alternating points of view. There’s the swinish Nazi necrocrat Paul Doll, who struggles to route endless trainloads of “evacuees” to their death or enslavement at Auschwitz. He also must endure the contempt of his wife, Hannah, a towering frau whose lover, the communist Dieter Kruger, has disappeared into Nazi prisons.
Then there’s Szmul, who leads the camp’s Jewish crew of “Sonders” who stay alive by assisting in the gassing of the arriving Jews, gently misleading them all the way to the ovens. Szmul is the numbed blackness at the heart of the book.
The near-protagonist is Obersturmführer Angelus (Golo) Thomsen, a privileged nephew of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s chief of staff. Golo is a womanizing cynic who goes along to get along. At first he lusts after Hannah, but she stirs his conscience, and so their relationship rises to platonic heights. Their ironic union, amid the stink and savagery of Auschwitz, provides a burst of plotted momentum that only falters as the war unravels everything.
The final scene echoes that of the film Casablanca, but Golo and Hannah’s delicate farewell falls a bit flat as Amis strives for an elegiac, empathetic conclusion that can’t carry the weight of his horror.
Still, he conducts a powerful inquisition into the Nazi sensibility, suggesting how the endlessly compounded nouns of the German language can create such distance from reality that a bureaucracy of industrialized death can flourish.