Quarrel & Quandary (16 page)

The conflict between the freedom to invent and an honest confrontation with the constraints of the historical record remains muddled—and, often enough, muddied. If the subject were, say, the Homeric wars, the muddle might be benign, even frolicsome, a simulacrum of trickster literature. But the subject is the Holocaust, and the issue is probable fraud, hoax, or delusion. What is permissible to the playfully ingenious author of
Robinson Crusoe
—fiction masking as chronicle—is not permitted to those who touch on the destruction of six million souls, and on the extirpation of their millennial civilization in Europe.

Yet the question of the uses of the imagination does not and
cannot stop even here. Beyond the acrobatics of impersonation, or the nervy fakery of usurpation, lies a sacred zone consecrated to the power of art: or call it, more modestly, literature’s elastic license. I have in mind two novels,
Sophie’s Choice
, by William Styron, and
The Reader
, by Bernhard Schlink—one first brought out in 1979, the other published in 1998; one long acclaimed, the work of a contemporary American literary master, the other by a highly praised German writer. Both novels clearly intend to attach their stories to the actuality of the death camps.

Sophie’s Choice
followed by a dozen years Styron’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
Confessions of Nat Turner
, and, like the latter, became a celebrated best-seller. Opening as a richly literary
Bildungsroman
, it recounts the often beguiling fortunes of Stingo, an untried young Southern writer whose attraction to New York lands him in Brooklyn, “the Kingdom of the Jews.” In Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman’s rooming house, Stingo meets Nathan Landau and his lover, a beautiful Polish woman named Sophie. Nathan is Jewish and mad—a paranoid schizophrenic, erratic when lucid, brutal and suicidal otherwise. Sophie is tormented by a horrific past, which she discloses to Stingo, piecemeal, as the two halves of the novel, Brooklyn and Auschwitz, begin to converge. And it is on account of Sophie’s Auschwitz tribulations that
Sophie’s Choice
has had an enduring reputation as a “Holocaust novel.”

There is some justification for this, at least for the well-researched historical sections dealing with the Final Solution in Poland. Primo Levi, in
The Drowned and the Saved
, affirms that ninety to ninety-five percent of the victims of Auschwitz were Jews, and Styron’s factual passages do not depart from this observation. His information concerning Polish Christians in Auschwitz is far thinner; it is, in fact, nearly absent. He gives us Sophie herself, but fails to surround her with the kind of documentation
that he supplies for the deportation of Jews—exact dates of arrival in Auschwitz, for instance, as when he recounts the gassing of a contingent of Greek Jews, or when he enumerates figures for the Jewish population of Warsaw before 1939, or when he notes that the “resettlement” from the Warsaw Ghetto took place in July and August of 1942. Wherever the fingerprint of Styron’s Holocaust research appears—and it appears frequently and accurately—it points to Jews.

When he turns to Polish Christians, he apprises us of the Nazis’
Lebensborn
project, which sent “Aryan”-looking Polish children to be reared as Germans in Germany; of the Polish resistance movements, many of them zealously anti-Semitic—though the two resistance workers featured in the novel are passionately concerned for Jews; of a boxcar filled with the corpses of Polish children rejected for
Lebensborn;
and of the rescinded plan to tattoo Polish Christian prisoners. Sophie’s father and husband are depicted as serious Jew-haters. For the 75,000 Polish Christians murdered in Auschwitz, Styron’s novel provides no data, no detail; or, rather, Sophie alone is the detail. But 75,000 Polish Christians
were
murdered in Auschwitz, and that is fact enough. If Styron’s Auschwitz research leads voluminously to Jews, it is because the murdered Jews voluminously outnumbered the murdered Polish Christians; yet—incontrovertibly—the factory of inhumanity that was Auschwitz produced complete equality of unsurpassed human suffering. Here there can be no hierarchy, nor may suffering be measured in numbers, or by majorities, or by percentages.

Still, what does it signify—does it signify at all—that the author of
Sophie’s Choice
chooses as his protagonist an inmate of Auschwitz who is a Polish Catholic? Here is a fictional decision that by no means contradicts a historical reality. It is the truth—but is it the whole truth, the representative truth? And
again, under the rules of fiction, why must a writer’s character be representative of a statistical norm? Under the rules of fiction, if Bovary is not typical of most French women, and if Karenina is not typical of most Russian women, why should William Styron’s Sophie be representative of the preponderant female population of Auschwitz? What does the autonomy of the imagination owe to a demographic datum? Or ask instead, what does individual suffering owe to the norm? Will the identity of the norm dare to compromise or diminish or denigrate one woman’s anguish?

Come now to Bernhard Schlink’s
The Reader
, a novel by a practicing judge, a professor of law at the University of Berlin. Its narrator is a law student who is presented as a self-conscious member of the “second generation”—the children of those who were responsible for the Nazi regime. The narrative begins postwar, when an intellectual teenage boy, the future law student, strikes up an unexpected friendship with a streetcar conductor, a woman markedly older than himself. The disparate friends rapidly become lovers, and their affair takes on an unusual routine of added romantic pleasure: in scenes tender and picturesque, as in a Dutch interior, the boy reads aloud to the woman. Only many years later—the occasion is a war crimes trial—is the woman revealed as an illiterate. And as something else besides: she is a former S.S. guard in a camp dedicated to the murder of Jews. An unsuspecting youth in the arms of an unconfessed female Nazi: over this retrospective image falls, unavoidably, the shadow of what some call Nazi porn.

Contemplating the predicament of young Germans after their nation’s defeat, the narrator asks, “What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews?… Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt?” “Our parents,” he explains,

In short, an educated generation. To the narrator’s observations let us add Goebbels, a novelist and playwright, Speer, an accomplished architect, and perhaps also Goering, an art collector—or looter—with a taste for masterpieces. None of this can surprise. Germany before the Second World War was known to have the most educated population in Europe, with the highest standard of literacy. Yet the plot of Schlink’s narrative turns not on the literacy that was overwhelmingly typical of Germany, but rather on an anomalous case of illiteracy, which the novel itself recognizes as freakish.

And this freakishness is Schlink’s premise and his novel’s engine: an unlettered woman who, because she could not read a paper offering her a job in a factory, passed up the chance and was sent instead to serve in a brutal camp. After the war, when she is brought to trial, the narrator acknowledges that she is guilty of despicable crimes—but he also believes that her illiteracy can, to a degree, mitigate her guilt. Had she been able to read, she would have been a factory worker, not an agent of murder. Her crimes are illiteracy’s accident. Illiteracy is her exculpation.

Again the fictive imagination presses its question: is the novelist obligated to represent typicality? If virtually universal literacy was the German reality, how can a novel, under the rules of fiction, be faulted for choosing what is atypical? The novelist is neither sociologist, nor journalist, nor demographer, nor reality-imitator; and never mind that the grotesquely atypical
turns out to be, in this work by a member of the shamed and remorseful second generation, a means of exculpation. Characters come as they will, in whatever form, one by one; and the rights of imagination are not the rights of history. A work of fiction, by definition, cannot betray history. Nor must a novel be expected to perform like a camera.

If there is any answer at all to this argument (and the argument has force), it must lie in the novelist’s intention. Intention is almost always a private, or perhaps a secret, affair, and we may never have access to it. Besides, the writer’s motivation does not always reveal itself even to the writer. It would seem, though, that when a novel comes to us with the claim that it is directed consciously toward history, that the divide between history and the imagination is being purposefully bridged, that
the bridging is the very point
, and that the design of the novel is to put human flesh on historical notation, then the argument for fictional autonomy collapses, and the rights of history can begin to urge their own force. The investigation of motive is history’s task, and here a suspicion emerges: that Sophie in Styron’s novel was not conceived as a free fictional happenstance, but as an inscribed symbolic figure, perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure—Anne Frank, let us say; and that the unlettered woman in Schlink’s novel is the product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for
Kultur
.

Everything the camera has guilelessly shown—the burning of Jewish houses of worship, the burning of Jewish books, the humiliation of Jewish fathers, the terrorization of Jewish children, the ditches heaped with Jewish dead—touches on the fate of Jews in twentieth-century Europe. The pictures are fixed. In the less stable realm of words, the ghastly syllables of
“Auschwitz” have resolutely come to denote the intent—and the means—to wipe out every last living Jew, from newborn infants to the moribund elderly in nursing homes. It is sometimes forgotten that the Nuremberg Laws and the Final Solution—the fundamental initiating elements of the Holocaust—were directed at Jews and only at Jews. In a speech in January 1939, Hitler looked forward to “the annihilation [
Vernichtung
] of the Jewish race in Europe”; nothing could be more explicit, and this explicitness succeeded in destroying one-third of the world’s total Jewish population.

But the Holocaust is defined by more than the destruction of lives. German national zeal under Nazism exacted an abundance of victims, the Poles painfully and prominently among them. Let us make no mistake about this, and let us not minimize any people’s suffering. Eleven million human beings met their deaths during the Nazi period; yet not all eleven million were subject to the Final Solution. The murderous furies of anti-Semitism and the wounds of conquest and war, however lethal, cannot be equated. The invasion and occupation of Poland were deeply cruel; but the Holocaust is not about the invasion and occupation of one nation by another. There is a difference between the brutal seizure of a country (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, etc.) and the achieved extirpation of an entire civilization. In the aftermath of the German occupation, Polish land, language, and Church were still extant. What defines the Holocaust is not the murders alone, but their irreversible corollary: the complete erasure of Jewish academies, libraries, social and religious bodies—the whole vast and ancient organism, spiritual and intellectual, of European Jewish civilization.

Auschwitz is that civilization’s graveyard (a graveyard lacking the humanity even of graves); and herein lies the inmost meaning of the ideology of the death camp. Auschwitz represents the
end not simply of Jewish society and culture, but of the European Jewish soul. Then how is it possible for a writer to set forth as a purposeful embodiment of Auschwitz anything other than the incised, the historically undisputed, principle and incarnation of the Final Solution? The German occupation of Poland enslaved, abused, murdered; it was a foul evil; it merits its own distinct history and commemoration. But it was not the Final Solution. The attempt to link the two—the annihilation of all traces of Jewish civilization with Poland’s fate under Nazi rule—is to dilute and to obscure, and ultimately to expunge, the real nature of the Holocaust.

Sophie, then, is not so much an individual as she is a counter-individual. She is not so much a character in a novel as she is a softly polemical device to distract us from the epitome. The faith and culture of Catholic Poles were not the faith and culture targeted by the explicit dogmas of the German scheme of
Vernichtung
. Styron’s Sophie deflects from the total rupture of Jewish cultural presence in a Poland that continues with its religion and institutions intact.

And when a writer describes in his novel the generation complicit in Jewish genocide as rife with members of the judiciary, physicians, lawyers, teachers, government officials, army officers, and so on, what are we to think when he fabricates a tale of German brutality premised on the pitiful absence of the alphabet? Who would not pity the helplessness of an illiterate, even when she belongs to the criminal S.S.? And have we ever before, in or out of fiction, been asked to pity a direct accomplice to Nazi murder? Here again is a softly rhetorical work that deflects from the epitome. It was not the illiterates of Germany who ordered the burning of books.

In the name of the autonomous rights of fiction, in the name of the sublime rights of the imagination, anomaly sweeps away
memory; anomaly displaces history. In the beginning was not the word, but the camera—and at that time, in that place, the camera did not mislead. It saw what was there to see. The word came later, and in some instances it came not to illumine but to corrupt.