European classic of the paranoia of war

FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Death of the AdversaryBy Hans Keilson, translated by Ivo Jarosy Vintage, 208pp. £12.99

A BUNDLE OF PAPERS previously entrusted to a Dutch lawyer for safe keeping are passed on to a friend for his opinion. The recipient notices that the contents are written in German. The lawyer asks that the second man read and return them to him. We are told nothing about the author of the notes other than that he was a victim of persecution.

The reissue of The Death of the Adversary, by Hans Keilson, which was written in 1959 and published in an English translation three years later, is an important act of literary retrieval. This is a major European classic offering intense insight into the paranoia of war and political intrigue. Comparable to the work of Hans Fallada and Wolfgang Koeppen, it is a subtle, timeless novel for the present yet is rooted in the rise of National Socialism and, with it, the emergence of Hitler.

The story is well documented, but Keilson’s novel is remarkable for its oblique tone and cool psychological approach. The central narrator, the voice of the notes, is regretful and slightly bewildered as he looks back to the fears that unsettled his childhood and the guilt that dogged his adult life. At no time does Keilson refer directly to Hitler; instead the dictator is referred to as B, an individual with whom the narrator becomes obsessed. He watches him through a haze of fascinated revulsion.

As a guest at a hotel the narrator overhears a rally taking place in the adjacent hall. He sits and listens to the speech blaring over a loudspeaker and tries to make sense of the conflicting emotions racing through his mind.

“There was something in that voice which had nothing to do with the man himself. Behind the coldly passionate screaming, behind the vulgarity that betrayed its origin in a sophisticated and pitiless mind, something else could be heard . . . a great success, or a great danger, a great catastrophe?’’

For the narrator the voice “seemed to contain a message, addressed to me personally . . . A small, plain-looking man, in the grip of something stronger than himself, was speaking as though he were strangling himself . . . To me he sounded like a drowning man screaming for help”.

Keilson, who was born in Germany in 1909, is now 101; he still lives in the Netherlands, where he fled in 1936. He had completed his medical studies in Berlin just as the race laws against Jews were being implemented. He had also published his first novel, sharing a publisher with Alfred Döblin. At one time, forbidden to work or write, he was a gym teacher. When he moved to the Netherlands he joined the Dutch Resistance. Both of his parents died in Auschwitz.

The boyhood sequences in the novel are very unusual. He recalls his younger self and a passing interest in stamps. He successfully traded stamps he had forged to a friend. The other boy’s father was a serious collector, and the episode ends in disgrace for the narrator. But the idea of playing with reality had grown in his mind through his father’s practice of altering and retouching photographs.

Illusion and fact run through the book. The narrator frequently attempts to distinguish between what he is seeing and the imagined.The background is based on unstated but obvious historical detail. Keilson directs the story to the ways in which the human mind wavers and drifts; he captures ongoing sensations and preoccupations. The narrator recalls the chaos and the clarity. In ways the narrator brings to mind Kafka’s central characters, except that Keilson’s narrator is free to the extent that he can move around and is never called on to explain himself. It is because of this false liberty that he retreats into self-criticism. When his playground friends reject him his mother intervenes. Elsewhere he describes two friendships that collapse because he is ineffectual. It is implied but never stated that because he is Jewish he is no longer regarded as German. He grows up and gets a job at a department store. There he notices a girl and comes to her assistance when two female customers are fighting over fabric.

It is one of several exceptional set pieces in a skilfully choreographed work that consistently surprises. Its strength resides in the self-absorbed narrator’s precise recollections, while the descriptive quality of the elegant prose, well rendered by a talented translator, consolidates the edgy grace.

Keilson makes effective use of the narrator’s initial inability to recall the girl’s name. After a few casual encounters she invites him to the house she shares with her brother. The potentially romantic interlude is disrupted when the brother returns accompanied by his buddies. Here Keilson places the narrator in the position of outsider, but not merely as a girl’s suitor; the youths are involved in political activities. It becomes clear, though unspecified, that they are young Nazis, and sense that the narrator is Jewish. Eventually one of the gang describes in detail his part in a raid on a Jewish cemetery.

For the narrator his failure to denounce the vandalism is worse than the crime itself. Calm and deliberate, Keilson leads us through a hall of mirrors refracting the way the mind works. The dread of what is to happen lingers over the opening sequences. The narrator’s parents know they must all leave. The old father carefully packs a rucksack for the difficult journey ahead, which for him and his wife ends in death. For his son, the narrator, he selects a suitcase. The face of the dictator is everywhere, and Keilson, an eminent psychiatrist, makes wonderful use of the enduring irony that the man who destroyed so many lives, generations of lives, died by his own hand, causing the narrator to reflect: “He had taken a piece of my life with him into his death.”

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times