It was hard to say exactly what had made Bezdomny write as he had--whether it was his great talent for graphic description or complete ignorance of the subject he was writing on, but his Jesus had come out, well, completely alive, a Jesus who had really existed, although admittedly a Jesus who had every possible fault."
(from The Master and Margarita)

Mihail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, the eldest son of a theology professor at the Kiev Theological Academy. After attending First Kiev High School (1900-09), Bulgakov studied medicine at the Kiev University (1909-16). From 1916 to 1918 he served as a doctor in front-line and district hospitals. These experiences he described in notes of a young doctor, 'Zapiski yunogo vracha' (1925-26).

In 1918-19 Bulgakov worked as a doctor in Kiev, and witnessed the German occupation and then the occupation by the Red Army. During these war years he used a morphine, but with the helped of his first wife he managed to win the addiction. In 1920 Bulgakov abandoned medicine in favor of a career as a writer. He organized in Vladikavkaz, Caucasus, a 'sub-department of the arts', wrote stories for newspapers

Bulgakov moved in 1921 to Moskow, where he worked for the literary department of the People's Commissariat of Education, and wrote as a journalist for various groups and papers. His largely autobiographical novel BELAYA GVARDIYA (1925, full text 1973, The White Guard) was an account of the turbulent years between 1914 and 1921 as reflected in the lives of a White family in the Ukraine. Two parts of the book was published in the journal Rossiya, which was closed before the third part could appear. Bulgakov abandoned his plans for a trilogy; the proofs of the new ending surfaced in 1987, but the final pages were missing.

From 1925 Bulgakov was associated with the Moscow Arts Theatre. He wrote and staged many plays, which enjoyed great popularity. Bulgakov's criticism of the Soviet system was not swallowed by the authorities. The Heart of the Dog (written in 1925), a satire on Soviet life in the guise of science fiction, was condemned unpublishable. In the story 'Pokhozhdenia Chichikova' the protaginist of Gogol's Dead Souls was dropped in the middle of the Soviet Russia's New Economic Policy period of 1921-27. 'Diaboliad' (1925) portrayed a poor clerk in a gigantic bureaucracy, where he loses his identity and life.

In 1928 Bulgakov had three plays running in three Moscow theatres, Zoya's Apartment, The Crimson Island, and The Days of the Turbins, dramatized from his novel The White Guard. It brought the author overnight success and became 'a new Seagull' for the new generation, although it also received hostile reviews for the sympathetic portrayal of White officers. Paradoxically, The White Guard was one of Stalin's favorite plays. It was banned in 1929, reinstated in 1932 but not published until 1955.

By 1930s Bulgakov's works were published rarely or not at all - Zoya's Apartment (1926), a play set in an atelier-bordello, was banned, as The Crimson Island (1928). Flight (1928), dealing with White fugitives leaving Russia, was banned before its premiere. In 1929 he wrote to Maxim Gorky: "All my plays have been banned; not a line of mine is being printed anywhere; I have no work ready, and not a kopeck of royalties is coming in from any source; not a single institution, not a single individual will reply to my applications..."

After writing a letter to Soviet government, requesting permission to emigrate, Bulgakov received a personal telephone call from Stalin and was employed as an assistant producer with the Moscow Arts Theatre. He adapted classics for the stage. During the late 1930s he was librettist and consultant at Bolshoi Theatre. However, Stalin's favour protected Bulgakov only from arrests and executions, but his writings remained unpublished. In Black Snow, a Theatrical Novel, Bulgakov described his love-hate relationship and took a revenge on Stanislavsky for the failure of his play A Cabal of Hypocrites, produced under the title Molière. In one scene Louis XIV, the Sun King, says: "Then hear this: my author is oppressed. He is frightened. I will show kindness to anyone who forewarns me of whatever danger imperils him... The ban is lifted. You may stage Tartuffe." The Last Days was performed first in 1943 under the title Pushkin. Bulgakov's stage version of Gogol's Dead Souls had a modest success.

Bulgakov's most important work was The Master and Margarita, a fantasy about the Devil, disguised as a professor, who causes havoc in the city. The work was suppressed because Bulgakov refused to make the changes reguired by the authorities. Although Bulgakov worked still on the text on his death bed, the novel was completed. The first Soviet edition was published in 1966-67, a fuller text appeared in 1973 and the revised full text in 1989.

The Master and Margarita (1928-40). Published in installments in 1966 and 1967 in the journal Moskva. The large novel takes place on three levels, each of which provides a commentary on the others. Historical narrative is set in Jerusalem, where Pontius Pilate condemns to death a man, Jeshua, whom he knows to be innocent. Contemporary narrative is set in Moscow, in the 1930s, where the Master and Margarita live and where the Master has written a novel about Pilate. The third, fantastic level introduces the devil, who steps out of Goethe's Faust. He appears in Moscow with a retinue that includes an enormous black cat. The devil, Woland, is unconventionally seen as a relatively sympathetic figure, Righteous Man in Sodom. Moreover, the character of Jesus, called Yeshua, in not very Biblical. The philosophical and religious themes and examination of the freedom of art circulate around the intrusion of the devil into the life of modern Moscow and the crucifixion of Christ. Interacting and competing discourses from the realms of science, religion, literature, history, and politics, complicate further the narrative. Master burns his manuscript and retires to a madhouse. Margarita's love for the master drives her to a pact with Satan. However, "manuscripts don't burn" and Woland defends the existence of Jeshua.

Bulgakov composed two versions of the work. One was written at home and another, when he did not have the original available, was born while he was living with a mistress. Much of the the satire is aimed at greed, vanity, and pettiness, but is possible to read the book as a tribute to Stalin's policy to cut the bourgeois elements of Soviet society. After the publication Bulgakov was seen as a link between such writers as Vasilii Aksenov, Andrei Siniavskii, and the Strugatskii brothers, and the great past tradition of Gogol and Dostoevskii.

Bulgakov was married three times: with Tatiana Nikolaevna Lappa (1913), Liubov Evgenevna Belozerskaia (1924), and Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya (1932), who gave invaluable support to the author when he wrote The Master and Margarita and had his fits of paranoia. Bulgakov was writing Black Snow, his theatre novel, when he died in Moskow on March 10, 1940. It took until the 1980s before all Bulgakov's works could be printed in his own home country. For decades Bulgakov was considered an outsider and the most "un-Soviet" writer. Supernatural and occult attracted him, and he used sudden cuts into the fantastic and mockery. Although he was subjected to a number of restrictions as a writer, he survived attacks from the officials, when others were imprisoned and perished in the 'Gulag Archipelago'.

During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and—in 1917—the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school. The final Communist victory brought the confiscation of her father's pharmacy and periods of near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be.

When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history. Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs. Amidst the increasingly gray life, her greatest pleasures were Viennese operettas and Western films and plays. Long an admirer of cinema, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting. It was at this time that she was first published: a booklet on actress Pola Negri (1925) and a booklet titled “Hollywood: American Movie City” (1926), both reprinted in 1999 in Russian Writings on Hollywood.

In late 1925 she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.

On Ayn Rand’s second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille saw her standing at the gate of his studio, offered her a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings, and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During the next week at the studio, she met an actor, Frank O’Connor, whom she married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years later.

After struggling for several years at various nonwriting jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at the RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., she sold her first screenplay, “Red Pawn,” to Universal Pictures in 1932 and saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1934 but was rejected by numerous publishers, until The Macmillan Company in the United States and Cassells and Company in England published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels, it was based on her years under Soviet tyranny.

She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935 (taking a short break in 1937 to write the anti-collectivist novelette Anthem). In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as “he could be and ought to be.” The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers but finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. When published in 1943, it made history by becoming a best-seller through word of mouth two years later, and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism.

Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but wartime restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a screenwriter for Hal Wallis Productions, she began her major novel Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951 she moved back to New York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged.

Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. Although she considered herself primarily a fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles which make such individuals possible.

Thereafter, Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism, which she characterized as “a philosophy for living on earth." She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976, her essays providing much of the material for six books on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment.

Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totaling more than 25 million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.

"It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck." (from All Quiet on the Western Front)

Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, into modest circumstances. His ancestors were French, the family name was 'Germanized' early in the nineteeth century. Peter Franz Remark, Remarque's father, was a poorly paid bookbinder. Although Franz Remark did not show much interest in intellectual activities, except his interest in the occult, the family had a piano, and at one point in his life Remarque planned a musical career. In 1904, at the age of six, Remarque entered the Domschule (cathedral school), and four years later he moved to the Johannisschle. Remarque was "always the best in class", as one of his closest school friends later recalled.

For a time Remarque studied at the University of Münster, but had to enlist in the German army at the age of 18. Remarque fought on the Western Front and was wounded several times. After his discharge Remarque had taken a teacher's course offered to veterans by the government. He taught for a year in a school, and tried also his hand as a stonecutter and a test-cardriver for a Berlin tire company.

Remarque began his writing career as a sporting journalist, eventually becoming the assistant editor of Sportbild. Among his friends was Leni Riefenstahl, who later made the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), and the two-part Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Remarque's wife, Jutta Zambona, "tall, slender as a fashion model, and strikingly dressed", as Riefenstahl described Jutta in her book of memoir later inspired heroines in his books. The marriage was stormy, and they both had extra-marital activities. His longest, intercontinental affair Remarque had with Marlene Dietrich; they met first time in Venice in the late 1930s.

Fame came with Remarque's first novel, All Quiet on the Westerns Front, which touched a nerve of the time, and sparkled off a storm of political controversy. The book, which first had been rejected by one publisher, sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. H.L. Mencken called it "unquestionably the best story of the World War." Its sequel, DER WEG ZURÜCK (The Way Back), appeared in 1931. It dealt with the collapse of the German Army after the war, and the fate of the surviving heroes, Ernst and his friends.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous novel dealing with World War I. The book starts in 1917 after a battle, in which half of Paul Bäumer's company has been killed. Bäumer is mostly the narrator and Remarque goes through his life in flashbacks. Paul and his classmates have been encouraged by their teacher, Kantorek, to enlist the German army. Bäumer's group includes some school fellows, and Katczinsky, an older man. The group goes through basic training and go to the front. Bäumer tries to understand what is going on. He realizes that back home "no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy." Paul visits home on leave, returns to the trenches, is wounded and sent to a military hospital. In the summer of 1918 German front is pushed back, and the soldiers are waiting for the end of the war. In October, when

there is nothing much to report on the western front, Paul is killed, a week or so before the armistice. - The story is narrated in first person in a cool style, a contrast to patriotic rhetoric. Remarque records the daily horrors in the trenches, where machine guns killed millions, in laconic understatement. - "At the next war let all the Kaisers, Presidents and Generals and diplomats go into a big field and fight it out first among themselves. That will satisfy us and keep us home." (Katzinsky) Lewis Milestone's film (1930), based on the novel, is a landmark of American cinema. One of the best scenes is when Paul (Lew Ayres) returns to his school and tells new students the truth. "When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all." The film was denounced by Goebbels as anti-German, but the Poles banned it for being pro-German. Particularly effective were the tracking shots of soldiers attacking enemy lines. In France it was prohibited until 1962. The close-up of Paul's hand reaching for the butterfly at the end, is actually the hand of the director Milestone. - A sequel, The Road Back, was made in 1937.

With All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque became a spokesman of "a generation that was destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells," as he said himself. The German defeat inspired two major war films of the year 1930 - G.W. Pabst's Westfront 1918, adapted from a novel by Ernest Johannsen and Lewis Milestone's film based on Remarque's novel. Milestone was unhappy with the original script - he saw it changed the point of the book, and he hired his friend Del Andrews and George Abbott, a stage director, the shape the final script. The producer Carl Laemmle Junior and Milestone both hated the original ending of the book, in which Paul Baumer dies heroically. Karl Freund, the cameraman, put forward the idea of the hand stretching out toward the butterfly.

In the 1930s Remarque's books were banned in Germany by the government. All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back were among the works consigned to be publicly burnt in 1933 by the Nazis. Stores were ordered to stop selling his books. The film's premiere was disrupted by Nazi gangs; Remarque was accused of pacifism. It was not until the 1950s the film was shown again in West Germany. In 1938 Remarque lost his citizenship. He had moved to Switzerland in 1932 and in 1939 he emigrated to the United States, where in 1947 he became a citizen. In New York he spent much time at the Stork Club and at 21. In Hollywood he made friends with stars, including the actress Paulette Goddard (1911-1990), whom he married in 1958. Remarque had been married twice before, and to the same woman, Jutta Ilse Ingeborg Ellen Zambona, in 1925 and again in 1938. After the war Remarque settled eventually back in Switzerland, where he made his residence at Porto Ronco on the Seiss shore of Lake Maggiore. His play, DIE LETZTE STATION, about the fall of the Third Reich, was produced in Berlin in 1956. Remarque died at the Sant Agnese clinic at Locarno, on September 25, 1970. He had suffered for months from aneurysm.

"If things went according to the death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish, self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it." (from The Black Obelisk, 1956)

Remarque's later works, depicting the political upheavals of Europe from the 1920s to the cold war, did not achieve the critical acclaim of his first novel. However, his skill to create interesting characters, fascinating plots, and balancing between realistic and sentimental scenes made him a highly popular writer. DREI KAMERADEN (1937) received good reviews and was made into a film in 1938, directed by Frank Borzage. The screenplay was written by Edward A. Paramore and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was determined to do a good job. Fitzgerald kept completely sober, for a while. However, his contract with M-G-M was not renewed. The final scene in which the two friends of the story are joined by their ghostly comrade, has still a strong emotional charge. Several of Remarque's later novels dealt with people struggling under Nazi rule. Arch of Triumph (1946) told a story about a German refugee physician and an actress. The work was adapted into screen in 1947, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Remarque himself played the schoolmaster Pohlmann in A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), based on his novel ZEIT ZU LEBEN UND ZEIT ZU STERBEN (1954). In the story a German soldier, Ernst Graeber, on furlough from the Russian front, falls in love with his childhood friend, Elisabeth. But he must return to the trenches. The German edition was censored for its "unnational" passages. Douglas Sirk's film version, beautifully photographed in CinemaScope, ends dramatically in Graeber's death.

Spark of Life (1952) was a fictional documentary about life in Nazi concentration camps. The Black Obelisk (1956) was a tragi-comedy, in which Remarque explored the chaotic Germany of in the 1920s. Remarque's screenplay The Last 10 Days for G.W. Pabst's film from 1956, was based Judge Michael A. Musmanno's book 10 Days to Die, a study of the death of Hitler in a Berlin bunker. DIE NACHT VON LISSABON (1962, The Night in Lisbon), in which two refugees from Nazism flee in Portugal, and SCHATTEN IN PARADIES, depicting refugees in the United Sates, were published posthumously in English in 1971.

 

Primo Levi, 1919-1987

Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, who first gained fame with his autobiographical story SE QUESTO È UN UOMO (1947, If This is a Man) of survival in Nazi concentration camps. For the last forty years of his life Levi devoted himself to attempting to deal with the fact that he was not killed in Auschwitz. "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died," he said. Levi also published poetry, science fiction, essays, and short stories. In 1987, at the age of 67, he killed himself. Italo Calvino called Levi "one of the most important and gifted writers of our time."

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
(from 'Shemá' in Collected Poems)

Primo Levi was born in Turin into a Jewish middle-class family, the son of Cesare Levi, an engineer, and Ester "Rina" Luzzati; she had been his secretary. His grandmother Bimba was a baroness. She and her entire family had been made barons by Napoleon, because they had supported him economically. As a youth Levi knew very little about Jewishness, but Mussolini's anti-Semitic policy soon taught Levi that it was not ''a cheerful little anomaly'' in a Catholic country. An underdeveloped, quiet boy, Levi was derided at school for his size. Through cycling and mountain climbing he acquired friends, but according to a biography he did not have any sexual experience before meeting his wife, Lucia, in 1946. Just before the Fascist racial law of 1938 forbade Jews access to academic status, Levi started his chemistry studies at the University of Turin. He graduated first in his class in 1941, the year after Italy had entered World War II as an ally of Germany. During the war Levi wrote for the resistance magazine Giustizia e Libertà.

After the collapse of Mussolini's regime, he tried to contact a partisan group in the north of Italy. Levi was captured in December 1943. "I was twenty-four," Levi wrote in If This Is a Man, "with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency ... to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships." He was first interned in a transit camp in Fòssoli, and then, two months later, deported to the camp of Moniwitz-Auschwitz. The number 174517 was tattooed on his left forearm.

From the railroad convoy of 650 people, fifteen men and nine women survived. Levi worked at one of three I.G. Farben laboratories and was spared the gas chambers. The company made synthetic rubber for the Nazi war machine. As a chemist he knew he could safely eat cotton wool and drink paraffin. A non-Jewish guest worker secretly gave him extra helpings of soup. To his friend Jean Samuel he taught Italian by quoting Dante; eating and translating Dante were both keys to survival. Dante remained a constant point of reference throughout Levi's writing. From the Ulysses episode of Inferno he chose a passage, which dealt with the crucial question "What is a man?" Levi's superior in the laboratory, Dr. Ferdinand Mayer, gave him a pair of leather shoes.

Liberated by the Soviets in January 1945, Levi returned to Turin in October. He took up his work as a chemist, living in a stately old building that his family had occupied for three generations. In 1961 Levi became the general manager of a factory producing paints. He retired in 1977 to become a full-time writer. With Hety Schmitt-Maas, whose husband had been a chemist for I.G. Farben, Levi corresponded almost 20 years. She also helped Levi to track down Dr. Meyer and sent him German books and newspaper clippings on Nazism.

His prison recollections Levi wrote in the form of a memoir, Se questo è un uomo, which documented how the camp deprived prisoners of their identity and finally annihilated them. When the major publisher Einaudi rejected the work, it was published by a small house. Ten years later it was reprinted in an enlarged edition. In Italy the book sold over half a million copies, was translated into eight languages and adapted for the theater and radio. Part of the book's impact was based on Levi's sober and precise style. In spite of the brutality to which he was subjected Levi described the terrible events objectively like an observing scientist, but also noted with compassion the heroism in the suffering.

Its sequel, LA TREGUA (1963), portrayed Levi's wanderings in war-torn eastern Europe in Poland, Belorussia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania. During the journey Levi meets a gallery of colorful, rootless companions in misfortune, among them Mordo Nahum, a Greek, from whom Levi learns that in war you must first think of shoes, then the food. Without shoes you can't go after food. Levi returns home on the last pages of his account, but he has a continual nightmare in which his present life turns out to be a mere illusion and he wakes up with Auschwitz's morning call: "Wstawac". But Levi also uses his experiences as a basis for philosophical meditations, which connects the book to Jorge Semprún's L'écriture ou la vie (1994, Literature or Life), dealing with the return to life after the camp.

"It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is."

LA CHIAVE A STELLA (1978, The Monkey's Wrench) presented vivid stories told by Libertini Faussone, a construction worker and self-educated philosopher. The writer-chemist listens to him, and records his experiences in different parts of the world. "All kids dream of going into the jungle or the desert of Malaya, and I also had those dreams, only I like to have my dreams come true; otherwise they're like some disease you carry around with you all your life, or like the scar of an operation that, whenever the weather turns damp, it starts aching again." Among Levi's other works is IL SISTEMA PERIODICO (The Periodic Table, 1975), which uses the Russian chemist Mendeleyev's periodical table of elements as the basis of autobiographical meditations. Its 21 pieces are each named after a chemical element. "Every element brings a kind of 'click' for me," Levi wrote. "It triggers a memory." 'Argon' is a homage to the author's Jewish ancestors. 'Vanadium' represents Levi's uncanny encounter with a former official in Auschwitz, Dr. Müller, who was the chief of the laboratory, and 'Zinc', a boring metal, explorers the fascist myth of racial purity. SE NON ORA, QUANDO? (1989, If Not Now, When?) combined the emergence of Jewish consciousness and documentation of action taken on the Russian front by partisan Jewish groups against retreating Nazi forces. A group of Jewish partisans moves toward Palestine, blows up trains, and rescues victims of concentration camps.

"Two years before the war began, the bell rope broke. It snapped near the top; the stairs were rotten; the bell ringer was an old man, and he was afraid to climb up there and put in a new rope. So after he announced the time by shooting a hunting rifle into the air; one shot, or two or three or four, That went on till the Germans came. They took his gun away from him, and the village was left without any time." (from If Not Now, When?)

Levi died in Turin on April 11, 1987. His death was apparently a suicide - Levi hurled himself down the central stairwell of his home building. Before and after Auschwitz Levi had suffered from depression, but his death was interpreted as a sign that he had not triumphed over his horrible experiences. In a lecture in 1979 Levi had expressed his deeply pessimistic view of humanity, seeing life as terrible. The last work he completed was the essay collection I SOMMERSI E I SALVATI (1986), where Levi returned to his belief in the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust. He asked how much of the camp is alive and well in our time, and how long it will remain in our memories. Levi points out that anti-Semitism was part of German culture, not merely a Nazi invention, and sees a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor. In the camp system also the oppressed unconsciously strove to identify with their oppressor. Useless violence dehumanises both guards and prisoners. "Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt," he stated.

 

Elie Wiesel's statement, "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all..."stands as a succinct summary of his views on life and serves as the driving force of his work. Wiesel is the author of 36 works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide.

Born September 30, 1928, Eliezer Wiesel led a life representative of many Jewish children. Growing up in a small village in Romania, his world revolved around family, religious study, community and God. Yet his family, community and his innocent faith were destroyed upon the deportation of his village in 1944. Arguably the most powerful and renowned passage in Holocaust literature, his first book, Night, records the inclusive experience of the Jews:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

And Wiesel has since dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews.

Wiesel survived Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald and Gleiwitz. After the liberation of the camps in April 1945, Wiesel spent a few years in a French orphanage and in 1948 began to study in Paris at the Sorbonne. He became involved in journalistic work with the French newspaper L'arche. He was acquainted with Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac, who eventually influenced Wiesel to break his vowed silence and write of his experience in the concentration camps, thus beginning a lifetime of service. Wiesel has since published over thirty books, earned the Nobel Peace Prize, been appointed to chair the President's Commission on the Holocaust, awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement and more. Due to a fateful car accident in New York in 1956, Wiesel spent a year confined to a wheelchair while recovering. It was during this year that he made the decision to become a U.S. citizen and is still today an active figure within our society, as well as fulfilling his role in Jewish politics around the world.

Wiesel's job as chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust was the planning of an American memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The Report to the President on the President's Commission on the Holocaust focuses on memory. Wiesel writes that the reason for creating the museum must include; denying the Nazi's a posthumous victory, honoring the last wish of victims to tell, and protecting the future of humanity from such evil recurring. Always maintaining his dedicated belief that although all the victims of the Holocaust were not Jewish, all Jews were victims of the Holocaust, Wiesel advocated placing the major emphasis of the memorial on the annihilation of the Jews, while still remembering the murder of other groups.

Guided by the unique nature of the Holocaust and the moral obligation to remember, the Commission decided to divide and emphasize the museum into areas of memorial, museum, education, research, commemoration and action to prevent recurrence. In order to come to these decisions, a group of 57 members of the Commission and Advisory Board -- including Senators, Rabbis, Christians, professors, judges, Congressmen, Priests, Jews, men and women -- traveled to Eastern Europe, Denmark and Israel to study Holocaust memorials and cemeteries and to meet with other public officials. The emotional pain and commitment required by such a trip is remarkable, and Wiesel's leadership is undeniably noteworthy.

Wiesel with Yitzhak Rabin

Wiesel remained chairman of the Committee until 1986. He has aided in the recognition and remembrance of Soviet Jews, the establishment of Israel and has dedicated the latter part of his life to the witness of the second-generation and the vital requirement that memory and action be carried on after the survivors have all left us. Wiesel's own words are the best explanation:

Let us remember, let us remember the heroes of Warsaw, the martyrs of Treblinka, the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone, they suffered alone, they lived alone, but they did not die alone, for something in all of us died with them.

Elie Wiesel's statement, "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all..."stands as a succinct summary of his views on life and serves as the driving force of his work. Wiesel is the author of 36 works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism and genocide.

Born September 30, 1928, Eliezer Wiesel led a life representative of many Jewish children. Growing up in a small village in Romania, his world revolved around family, religious study, community and God. Yet his family, community and his innocent faith were destroyed upon the deportation of his village in 1944. Arguably the most powerful and renowned passage in Holocaust literature, his first book, Night, records the inclusive experience of the Jews:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

And Wiesel has since dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews.

Wiesel survived Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald and Gleiwitz. After the liberation of the camps in April 1945, Wiesel spent a few years in a French orphanage and in 1948 began to study in Paris at the Sorbonne. He became involved in journalistic work with the French newspaper L'arche. He was acquainted with Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac, who eventually influenced Wiesel to break his vowed silence and write of his experience in the concentration camps, thus beginning a lifetime of service. Wiesel has since published over thirty books, earned the Nobel Peace Prize, been appointed  to chair the President's Commission on the Holocaust, awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement and more. Due to a fateful car accident in New York in 1956, Wiesel spent a year confined to a wheelchair while recovering. It as during this year that he made the decision to become a U.S. citizen and is still today an active figure within our society, as well as fulfilling his role in Jewish politics around the world.

Wiesel's job as chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust was the planning of an American memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The Report to the President on the President's Commission on the Holocaust focuses on memory. Wiesel writes that the reason for creating the museum must include; denying the Nazi's a posthumous victory, honoring the last wish of victims to tell, and protecting the future of humanity from such evil recurring. Always maintaining his dedicated belief that although all the victims of the Holocaust were not Jewish, all Jews were victims of the Holocaust, Wiesel advocated placing the major emphasis of the memorial on the annihilation of the Jews, while still remembering the murder of other groups.

Guided by the unique nature of the Holocaust and the moral obligation to remember, the Commission decided to divide and emphasize the museum into areas of memorial, museum, education, research, commemoration and action to prevent recurrence. In order to come to these decisions, a group of 57 members of the Commission and Advisory Board -- including Senators, Rabbis, Christians, professors, judges, Congressmen, Priests, Jews, men and women -- traveled to Eastern Europe, Denmark and Israel to study Holocaust memorials and cemeteries and to meet with other public officials. The emotional pain and commitment required by such a trip is remarkable, and Wiesel's leadership is undeniably noteworthy.

Wiesel remained chairman of the Committee until 1986. He has aided in the recognition and remembrance of Soviet Jews, the establishment of Israel and has dedicated the latter part of his life to the witness of the second-generation and the vital requirement that memory and action be carried on after the survivors have all left us. Wiesel's own words are the best explanation:

Let us remember, let us remember the heroes of Warsaw, the martyrs of Treblinka, the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone, they suffered alone, they lived alone, but they did not die alone, for something in all of us died with them.
 

The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal is also part of this cluster as well as the Islamic one. It's common knowledge that, at the end of WWII, many German war criminals fled from justice via "ratlines" to South American countries. Less notorious, though, are the Nazis who, like the title character of Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal's excoriating new novel found permanent refuge in Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria and Algeria. Inspired by a visit to a European-style Algerian village whose mayor was a former SS officer, and by what he views as the Arab world's "erasure" of the Holocaust, Sansal has written a bracingly unsentimental, ingeniously structured story that not only lays bare past collusions between German fascists and Arab governments, but draws explicit parallels between Nazism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, all the while grappling with the emotive question: "are we responsible for the crimes of our fathers, of our brothers, of our children?"

The German Mujahid is narrated by Malrich, a disaffected, thuggish teenager who lives on a deprived Arab housing project outside of Paris in the mid-1990s. After being expelled from school, he'd been passing the time all too typically for a kid of his background: "I hung around the streets, took a couple of courses and a few part time jobs, did a bit of dealing, went to the mosque, wound up in court." But when Malrich is seventeen, his educated and professional 33-year-old brother Rachel commits suicide and leaves behind his diaries, which turn Malrich's world upside down. He discovers that their parents, who had sent the boys from Algeria to live in Paris as children, were massacred by Islamists in their village, Aïn Deb, two years earlier during Algeria's "dirty war," and that when Rachel returned home to visit their graves, he unearthed a secret even more horrifying than the manner of that brutal death. The contents of a suitcase in the family home—medals, military records, and souvenirs—revealed unequivocally that Rachel and Malrich's German father, Hans Schiller, was a highly-decorated SS officer personally responsible for the extermination of thousands of Jews at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Malrich's own diary with its pitch-perfect voice—streetsmart, bemused, loyal and lovable—is interspersed with excerpts from his brother's diary, whose entries are at first measured and reflective, but become increasingly traumatized and desperate as Rachel is eaten up by guilt, rage and an obsessive need to absorb every last detail of the agonies experienced by prisoners in the camps. Retracing the steps of his father's ghastly career, Rachel "travels back through time," to Germany, Austria, Poland, Turkey, and Egypt. It is while at Auschwitz and Birkenau that he decides he will kill himself, "for my father, for his victims, I will pay in full."

As Malrich attempts to somehow come to terms with what has happened to him and learn about the Holocaust—which, he admits, "he didn't know anything about…I'd heard bits and pieces, things the imam said about the Jews and other stuff I'd picked up here and there"—he resolves that "where my father and Rachel had failed, I had to survive." But both brothers' lives are inescapably determined by their father's actions. Rachel literally turns himself into a concentration camp victim, growing more emaciated and haunted until, head shaved and wearing striped pyjamas, he gasses himself on the anniversary of his father's death, "the day Hans Schiller finally eluded the justice of men." Malrich, on the other hand, directs his shame outward to save his beloved "Sensitive Urban Area, Category 1" housing project, which has slowly but surely been taken over by Islamists who are creating "a concentration camp," with an atmosphere of "all conquering Islam." Telling his friends that "we're going to live, we're going to fight," Malrich considers it his legacy and his duty to first declare war on the "Nazi jihadist fuckers," and then to "tell the truth, all over the world."

Sansal's own compulsion to tell the truth all over the world is hampered, sadly, by the reality that although The German Mujahid has won plaudits in France including the RTL-Lire Prize, has been translated into German and Hebrew, and is being published in separate American and British editions, not only are there no plans to translate it into Arabic, but Sansal's work is banned in Algeria. The author, who refers to himself as "secular in every bone in my body," had published several novels that sold well in his home country, having turned to writing after retiring from his job as Director of the Algerian Ministry for Industry. But with the publication in 2006 ofPoste restante: Alger. Lettre de colere et d'espoir a mes compatriots—an open letter to his fellow citizens decrying the Nationalist-Islamist regime, which he says is teaching young Algerians an edited version of history—all of his books were removed from shelves.

Such censorship is particularly ironic given Sansal's mission as an artist. In writing The German Mujahidhe wanted "to ask what it might mean to take responsibility for ensuring that such crimes are never repeated," and the answer the novel gives is clear: it means heeding Primo Levi's insistence to "Remember these words…Repeat them to your children." In its unflinching exploration of the horrors of history and its clear-eyed journey across the entire spectrum of humanity from good to evil,The German Mujahidmesmerizes from the very first sentence and commands you not to evade or recoil. Even the comfort of a hopeful conclusion is resisted; the closest thing to a consolation offered to the reader is the knowledge that Malrich will, as he promises, survive, and some day do what Rachel had wanted to: visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem: "I'll read the names aloud, and, after every one, I'll ask their forgiveness in my father's name." Yet although reaching the end will leave you drained, devastated, and reeling, you'll still want to go back to the first page and start again. Sansal is a novelist at the absolute height of his powers and has, in raking over such ugliness, created a work of extraordinary beauty.

 

Jonathan Littell

Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones begins, “Oh my human brothers.” In so doing, he loses no time in posing the question that the next thousand pages seek to answer: How can men treat their human brothers with calculating and unrelenting cruelty? The speaker is a former SS officer. His direct address is essential to this enterprise, and more than one note of chilling irony can be heard therein. One such is his uncommon cultivation. Littell, a dual citizen of France and the United States, wrote his novel in French, and many of its first readers recognized the famous opening line (“Frères humains qui après nous vivez”) of François Villon’s “Ballade des pendus,” in which the poet, awaiting execution, begs for clemency. Unlike Villon, however, Littell’s narrator, Maximillian Aue, seeks no pardon—and needs none. He has already eluded capture and, more than half a century after the war’s end, leads an outwardly tranquil life manufacturing lace in northern France, married and with two children (who know nothing of his earlier life). He has decided to tell his long, grim tale. As he does, apostrophe will turn to accusation: “Now of course the war is over. And we’ve learned our lesson, it won’t happen again. But are you quite sure we’ve learned our lesson? Are you certain it won’t happen again?”

Aue’s story begins with the entry of the German Army into Ukraine in 1941 and ends with the fall of Berlin in 1945. The intervening stations are among the most horrific the war offered, from the massacre at Babi Yar to Stalingrad to Belzec and Auschwitz. Aue notes early on that what follows is “a bleak story, but an edifying one too, a real morality play.” For it to be edifying, however, Aue must be something other than what’s expected. While he may witness and commit acts few would hesitate to call evil, his evil is far from banal and in no way corresponds to a stereotype. Aue is neither a blinkered lackey nor a bloodthirsty sadist. On the contrary, he is independent-minded, sensitive, and articulate. He does not believe Nazi propaganda concerning Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, or foreigners (he is himself bisexual and half-French). Nevertheless, he is at the tip of the spear—in the SS.

The result for the reader is a thought experiment of a special sort. We are inclined to declare that killers are not my human brothers. It’s much more difficult to see that evil is made up of the same stuff as good. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn remarked that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” Aue makes a similar case, stressing that not only psychopaths made the Holocaust possible. There were indeed such tortured and torturing souls, but they were a tiny minority, just as they were in Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, and the other places Littell has spent time working for aid organizations. Some surely loved violence and craved blood; some suffered from madnesses we may be unable to understand. But there were also those—the vast majority—whose positions we can all too easily imagine. “There are psychopaths everywhere, all the time,” Aue says. “Our quiet suburbs are crawling with pedophiles and maniacs, our homeless shelters are packed with raving megalomaniacs; and some of them do indeed become a problem, they kill two, three, ten, even fifty people—and then the very same State that would without batting an eye send them to war crushes them like a blood-swollen mosquito. These sick men are nothing. But the ordinary men that make up the State—especially in unstable times—now there’s the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you."

An unknown American writer (even a bilingually educated one) who attempts to write an immense novel in French would usually expect to receive nothing but mockery for his trouble. As if the linguistic effort weren't audacious enough, then there's the subject matter: an epic of World War II gore and phantasmagoria from the point of view of a reflective--but largely unrepentant--German SS officer. It's the sort of literary high-wire act that should have ended in a face plant. Instead, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones somehow swept France's top literary prizes when it was published in 2006. Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette histoire?

After a brief prologue in which the narrator introduces himself as a war criminal in hiding, the action opens with the Germans' brutal invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and concludes, almost a thousand pages later, with Berlin in ashes in 1945. The protagonist and narrator, Dr. Max Aue, bobs along with the flow and ebb of German fortunes on the Eastern Front like a stormtrooper Candide--except that he inflicts as well as endures enormous suffering.

Aue is not only an enthusiastic Nazi, but a first-class catastrophe of misdirected sexuality. Without giving anything away about his issues, let's just say that he gives anyone in Dr. Freud's files--or Greek tragedy--a run for their money. Yet whatever sympathy the narrator may occasionally earn for his tortured personal backstory, sporadic self-awareness and reliable literary flair is quickly squandered by his willing participation in many of the Nazi regime's atrocities, as well as several that are entirely his own.

Aue's idiosyncratic psyche is a literary creation and not--as some critics have mistakenly assumed--some kind of psychosexual explanation of Nazism of the sort once popular but now largely discarded. Littell has no grand new theories of evil to offer, and to the extent he makes the rather commonplace observation that we are all capable of it, this is actually undercut by Aue's spectacular weirdness. Nor does Littell shed much light on the "whys" of the Holocaust, although the attentive reader will learn plenty about the "how".