Do Not Burn! (Australian Literary Review, July 2009)

Ruth Maier and Jan Erik Vold (ed.), Ruth Maier’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life Under Nazism (Harvill Secker; $34.95; 413pp)

Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz (Polity; $52.95; 202pp)

Sydney Child Holocaust Survivors Group, The Words to Remember It: Memoirs of Child Holocaust Survivors (Scribe; $35; 346pp)

The relationship between anti-Semitism and conspiracy theory has always been a strong one. From The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the current crop of lurid theories linking the Jews and Israel to the global economic meltdown, the Jews, it seems, are condemned to dwell in the most squalid ghettoes of the human imagination. Indeed, it seems only natural – though none the less offensive for that – that anti-Semites at home and abroad now make such a strenuous effort to remove from the historical record the genocide perpetrated by their ideological forebears, a genocide that was itself the climax of centuries of paranoia and credulity. For what is Holocaust ‘revisionism’ if not a gigantic conspiracy theory? The Holocaust deniers ask us to consider the logistical implausibility of putting an entire people to death. But what of the implausibility of making such a story up, of fabricating the evidence and enjoining everyone involved to silence? Precisely how much does one have to swallow in order not to swallow the Shoah?

The answer is, of course, ‘a lot’. One would, for example, have to ignore, explain away or present as lies many of the revelations set out in the three books under review. Taken together, they allow us to chart in terrible and meticulous detail the catastrophe that befell the Jews between 1933 and 1945. Needless to say, it’s a harrowing journey but one the world must continue to make if those other journeys – those real journeys from towns and cities all over Europe – are never again to be undertaken.

Ruth Maier made her journey in 1942 and did not live to tell the tale. She is one of what has been called the ‘absolute victims’ of the Holocaust and as such her story has a special resonance, a resonance that Ruth Maier’s Diary, sensitively and thoughtfully edited as it is, manages to amplify. Maier has been described as ‘Norway’s Anne Frank’ but such a comparison is inappropriate, not because either girl suffers by it but because it robs both of their individuality, and individuality, even more than human evil, is what these diaries exist to affirm. When Stalin said one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is merely a statistic, he was voicing a subjective truth at the expense of an objective one. The objective truth is that a million deaths are, at least, a million tragedies. Documents such as Ruth Maier’s diaries serve to remind the world of this fact, while underlining the lethal cynicism at the dark heart of Stalin’s dictum. When Uncle Joe said a million deaths, what he really meant was a million murders.

Maier was born in Austria on 10 November 1920. Consequently, her eighteenth birthday coincided with Kristallnacht, when the persecution of German Jews, hitherto largely social and economic, erupted into open violence. Sensing the worst, Maier fled to Norway, where she stayed until 1942. In that year she was arrested and deported to Poland. She died in Auschwitz on 1 December 1942. She was twenty-two.

‘Make yourself small’ was the advice often given by Jews to Jews in these terrible years. It’s the advice Maier herself gave to her sister, Judith. But if one thing emerges from the eight books of diaries and fifty or so letters collected in this volume, it’s that her own character precluded any such strategy. ‘I think I’m obsessed by greatness’, she wrote in 1934 (she was thirteen years old). Reading Maier, one has the sense of a great creative energy looking for something on which to alight. Sometimes it was politics that fed her hunger. More often it was love and sex. Possessed of an omnivorous sexuality (‘I’m hypnotised by anything in trousers’), Maier was rarely out of love, and never out of lust, with someone. Her father, Ludwig, died when she was twelve and the older men to whom she was drawn were clearly substitute father figures as well as objects of sexual desire. It is, however, to Gunvor Hofmo, the great Norwegian modernist poet, that Maier was most profoundly committed. They met in the women’s labour service in Norway in 1940 and the diaries leave little doubt in my mind that the ensuing relationship was a sexual one.

Maier was a gifted writer, and while it feels a little inappropriate to assess the diaries in literary terms, her writing was so fundamental to her character that not to mention their literary quality would be to radically misrepresent them. Just how accomplished a writer she was is very easy to demonstrate. For example, at one point she writes: ‘There’s no more touching or tragic sight than that of a ski descending a slope. All on its own.’ That second sentence – which isn’t strictly a sentence – is a little stroke of genius. And what kind of literary instinct is it that compares the sound of machine gun fire to sand being thrown against a window even as those guns draw nearer? The answer, I think, is a very great one, and we can add to the list of Nazi crimes the fact that they deprived us of it.

That other great diarist Victor Klemperer described the Jews as ‘a seismic people’: they feel the tremors of future catastrophes. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jews stood at the epicentre of a human earthquake of unimaginable proportions. That Maier was able to register this event in so assured and intelligent a manner – her pen, I imagine, scratching frantically like the needle on a seismometer – makes this an indispensable document. Interestingly, as the diaries proceed it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish their tone from that of the letters. No doubt this has to do with the fact that the diaries too became a letter – a letter to posterity. And not just a letter, but a warning as well. ‘Skal ikke brennes!’ she wrote on the front of the diary commencing 1940. ‘Skal ikke brennes!’: ‘Do not burn!’

Maier’s diaries were not burned. Her body, however, almost certainly was, along with those of countless others, and Shlomo Venezia is here to bear witness to this final act of desecration. Between 11 April 1944 and 6 May 1945 Venezia worked in the crematoria of Auschwitz, preparing his fellow Jews for the gas chambers and ‘mining’ the corpses for hair and gold before disposing of them in the crematorium ovens. Inside the Gas Chambers is his story, and a uniquely harrowing story it is too.

I say ‘uniquely harrowing’ and I use those words advisedly. For the Sonderkommando, or ‘special detachment’, for which Venezia volunteered, in the hope of a bit of extra bread and in ignorance of its precise function, was subject to frequent murderous purges as the Nazis tried to cover their tracks. Consequently, Venezia’s testimony is the only eyewitness account we have from a survivor of the Sonderkommando, and enormous care has been taken by the publishers to ensure that all the salient facts from this darkest of stories are brought to light. Augmented with historical notes from Marcello Pezzetti and Umberto Gentiloni, the book is in fact an interview conducted by Béatrice Prasquier, who is clearly mindful of the various canards put about by the holocaust deniers. Again, however, and as with Maier, the significance of Inside the Gas Chambers is only partly historical. For in bearing witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Venezia is also bearing witness to a unique personality under appalling conditions.

Born into the Jewish-Italian community of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1923, Venezia, like his compatriot Primo Levi, was a relatively late arrival in Auschwitz. Despite the late arrival, however, and unlike some of the Jews from the ghettoes, Venezia and his fellow deportees had little idea of what was in store for them. In volunteering for the Sonderkommando, Venezia ensured that his ignorance was short-lived. His first assignment was at Bunker 2. Ordered to remove dead bodies from the gas chamber, he watches as more experienced men lay the corpses out in ditches in such a way as to facilitate their cremation. ‘If the bodies were packed in too densely,’ he writes, ‘the air couldn’t get through and there was a risk that the fire would go out or fade in intensity.’ He continues:

The ditches sloped down, so that, as they burned, the bodies discharged a flow of human fat down the ditch to a corner where a sort of basin had been formed to collect it. When it looked as if the fire might go out, the men had to take some of that liquid fat from the basin, and throw it onto the fire to revive the flames.

Coming as it does at precisely the moment that Venezia becomes aware of his involvement in the greatest crime of the twentieth century, this passage may strike us as grimly symbolic, a metaphor for forced complicity. But of course we don’t need a metaphor in order for such a description to hit home. The facts are enough, and the facts are what matter. Perhaps that is what Adorno meant when he said that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

Poetry may have no place in Auschwitz, but there is a telling linguistic reversal on the dust jacket of Inside the Gas Chambers. ‘This is a unique participant’s account of everyday death and life’, it says. It may seem a little trite to say it, but that sense of existential inversion is what comes across most strongly in this book, more strongly than even Primo Levi’s greatest work can quite convey. Prasquier asks Venezia if he ever saw anyone emerge alive from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Yes, he replies, there was one case: a baby girl insulated from the gas by the fact that she was suckling at her mother’s breast. When the guard discovered her, he shot her dead. Venezia relates this incident in detail and I’d describe it as unbearable, were it not for the fact that Venezia has been bearing it, and bearing witness to it, for over sixty years.

The problem of finding an appropriate language in which to register such experiences is, no doubt, a familiar one to the members of the Sydney Child Holocaust Survivors Group, whose individual testimonies go to make up The Words to Remember It. The majority of them, I have to say, put most professional writers to shame, perhaps because they have no need to absorb the principal ingredient of good writing, which is to have something you need to say. Here, that lesson grows naturally from the subject matter. For no subject matters more than this one, and that the people who know the subject best are quickly disappearing from the world make projects such as this one more urgent than ever.

That everyone has something extraordinary to impart is itself a kind of testimony to the murderous efficiency of Nazi Germany, to the fact that anyone who escaped its clutches was firmly in the minority. Here, for example, is Halina Robinson, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto on foot even as it was being liquidated. And here is Mark Spigelman (cousin of Art Spiegelman), who spent the entire war dressed as a girl. (‘[I]n Poland, a boy could be easily identified as Jewish – you just pulled his pants down.’) Here, indeed, is Peter Rössler, who, when instructed to go ‘to the left’ by Dr Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’, ignored him and followed his brother to the right – an act of instinctive (and unnoticed) defiance that almost certainly saved his life. (To be sent to the left on arrival at Auschwitz meant immediate extermination.)

In Vienna’s Judenplatz there is a Holocaust memorial – a ten-by-seven-metre block into which the ghostly simulacra of countless books has been indented. These are the books that were never written, the narratives that were never narrated. Now more than ever it is important to tell such stories as can still be told. In this regard, these books are a welcome, if deeply distressing, addition to the library.

Beauty Contest (Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, June 2009)

Susan Johnson, On Beauty; MUP; $19.99; 91pp
Roger Scruton, Beauty; OUP; $32.95; 221pp

The first thing to say about these two books is that both are very nice to look at. Of course, in any other context this would be a rather shallow observation, and even in this one may strike the reader as falling some way short of profound. But since the subject dealt with in these books is that quality or combination of qualities that goes under the nebulous heading of ‘beauty’, perhaps I may be forgiven for judging them, to some extent at least, by their covers.

I doubt Susan Johnson would forgive me for so doing. The thrust of her little book, On Beauty, is that beauty is a subjective quality, having less to do with surface appearances than with some deep connection between subject and object. Whether she manages to maintain this thrust, or follow it through to its logical conclusion, is a question I want to come to shortly. But for now let’s just say that Johnson’s argument essentially boils down to the view (which she maintains is a ‘complicated truth’ but to me sounds more like an uncomplicated truism) that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.

The meat, as it were, of Johnson’s essay is a contemplation of the human body. This is a very promising subject and Johnson tackles it with wit and honesty. ‘The disintegration of my features’, she writes, ‘is both fascinating and terrifying.’ Citing Susie Orbach’s Bodies, she suggests that our bodies have become a form of work, ‘something we manufacture through the gym, diets and, increasingly, surgery’. Johnson, by contrast, is determined to meet death ‘looking like my unmade self’. She is very funny about Madonna’s ‘new’ arms, ‘which do not look like they are the arms of a young woman but like the arms of a middle-aged woman who spends four hours a day in the gym’.

It is towards the end of Johnson’s book that her argument begins to show signs of stress. Citing John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts?, Johnson suggests that ‘there is no irrefutable way of declaring this is “beautiful” and that is not.’ In using Carey’s argument, however, she opens the door to the shortcomings of her own. For Johnson, unlike Carey, cannot quite rid herself of the idea that beauty is an intrinsic quality rather than something imposed from without, and this leads her into some philosophical confusion.

This confusion is apparent in her attitude towards art – in particular to Jake and Dino Chapman’s infamous exhibit Insult to Injury, which Carey regards as no less legitimate than the Goya etchings of which it is a despoilment. Johnson, by contrast, is furious with the Chapmans for vandalising Goya’s work. ‘I wanted to spit on them both,’ she writes, ‘transgressively, and quite unbeautifully.’ The problem is that her argument is couched in terms of beauty versus ugliness as opposed to simple decency. However, if Johnson was sincere in her belief that beauty is in the eye of the beholder there’d be no call for her moral outrage, since I could claim that the Chapmans’ actions have enhanced the beauty of Goya’s original. (Others have claimed precisely that.)

No stranger to moral outrage himself, the British philosopher Roger Scruton takes a more intellectually rigorous approach to the subject of beauty in his new book. Beauty, indeed, shows Scruton at his best. In a field where many specialists glory in ambiguity, Scruton is content to say one thing at a time and allow such ambiguities as arise to do so naturally, of their own accord. He’s a deep thinker but a very clear one.

For Scruton, the appreciation of beauty is deeply connected with human morality and involves what he calls ‘disinterested interest’. By this is meant the process by which (uniquely) rational human beings set themselves at a certain distance from a beautiful landscape or work of art in order thus to contemplate it. Again it is the human body, and specifically the depiction of it, that illustrates this thesis best. A pornographic photograph demands our interest, pure and simple, for nothing is more interested, in Scruton’s terms, than sexual desire. By contrast, Titian’s Venus of Urbino does not excite our interest in this way but demands that we regard it from a distance. ‘The Titian nude neither provokes nor excites, but retains a detached serenity – the serenity of a person, whose thoughts and desires are not ours but hers.’

This is grossly to oversimplify Scruton’s highly nuanced treatise. However, and even in this little snapshot, we can discern both the strength and the weakness of his argument. For in trying to connect aesthetic taste and morality, Scruton’s reasoning becomes slightly circular. This painting is beautiful because it is moral, or treats of immorality in a moral way, and we know what true morality is partly because it can be so rendered. Of course, Scruton never puts it this bluntly. But for me that is what his thesis comes down to, and for this reason I find it unconvincing.

Nevertheless, his book is stimulating, as indeed is Susan Johnson’s. Perhaps it was rather flippant of me to begin this review in the way I did. Then again, and as Oscar Wilde once said, only a superficial person refuses to judge by appearances.

Review of Ways of Escape, by Hugh Mackay (The Weekend Australian, May 2009)

Hugh Mackay, Ways of Escape
Hachette; $32.99; 298pp

Hugh Mackay is better known as a social commentator than he is as a novelist. A novelist he unquestionably is, however, and one whose novels complicate, and even appear to run slightly ahead of, his work as a student of social trends. In his last novel, Winter Close, for example, he anatomised a small community with a view to exploring the ways in which people weigh their need for privacy against their sense of social responsibility – a topic Mackay addresses directly in the latest issue of Griffith Review. Here, Mackay suggests that Australians need to invest emotionally as well as economically in what we might call the social infrastructure. His latest novel, Ways of Escape, contains nothing to contradict that view, but it does suggest, implicitly, that it isn’t always quite that simple. Neighbourliness is all very well, but isn’t there, buried deep within all of us, a desire to take off and start anew?

So pervasive, indeed, is the theme of escape in this enjoyable, if slightly insubstantial, novel that I found myself wondering if Mackay was tempted to call it The Winter of Our Discontent. For it is to the eponymous Winter Close of the earlier novel that the author returns us, reacquainting us with forty-something Tom, who, having divorced his wife four years ago, is beginning to feel the need for a change. Tom has grown a little cynical about his profession, clinical psychology, which he sees as having been commandeered by what he calls the ‘cult of perfection’. ‘People used to have a bit of depression to deal with, or a neurosis shackling them to an unhappy childhood … Now it’s all about measuring their lives against some trumped-up gold standard.’

Tom is in lust with a client, Myra, and quite possibly in love with his neighbour, Ruth, whose husband, Rich, has deserted her for a gay relationship with his colleague, Mervyn. Most of the residents of Winter Close have relationship problems of one kind or another, so it comes as something of a welcome diversion when two new residents, Angus and Holly, move in to the late Mrs Spenser’s place. Angus edits a car magazine and convinces Tom to renew his license and write a piece on cars and psychology. This allows Tom to have some fun and Mackay to introduce a motif: the car as a symbol of both escape and conformity – a symbol that takes on extra resonance when Rich disappears in mysterious circumstances, leaving his own car wiped completely clean.

One possible reason for Rich’s disappearance is the stress he’s been experiencing at work. Rich is a lecturer at the local university, where a new system of transparent marking has caused a minor student rebellion. Indeed, bad blood is the soup du jour at Watson University, an acrimonious election campaign for the soon-to-be-vacant chancellorship having thrown the campus into disarray. Even Tom has entered the fray, on the side of respected historian Len Pearson, an ageing academic blueblood put forward in order to scupper the campaigns of city slicker Simon Fenner and bible-thumping Karen Bucknell. Unfortunately, Pearson is not a well man.

It is here, perhaps, that Mackay will be suspected of a little transparent marking of his own. I resisted this judgment, thinking it unfair that Mackay should be accused of heavy-handedness when in fact it is merely our familiarity with his views that makes them discernable. But there is something just a little too convenient about this ugly rumpus on campus, with its vision of a liberal institution under attack from God and Mammon. That Mackay has more than one of his characters use the odd word ‘busyness’ does not, in my view, help his case, since the only person I recall ever using it is Mackay himself, in various op eds.

A more serious problem than this, however, is the ‘flatness’ of some of Mackay’s characters. Mackay, indeed, has rather a habit of flagging characters as stereotypes, as if the fact of having thus flagged them renders them less stereotypical. But a cliché in inverted commas is still, at the end of the day, a cliché, and I don’t think I will be alone in not wanting to read that Len Pearson looks ‘like the chancellor from central casting’, that his office is ‘a caricature of an academic’s office’, that Angus, with his full moustache, wavy hair and leather jacket, ‘fits my stereotype of a motoring journalist’ or that tenacious copper Sefton Hardwick looks ‘every inch the police officer’. Nor, for that matter, do I want to read that the vice-chancellor had ‘the look of a man pinned to the metaphorical wall’.

For all that, I did enjoy the novel, which is saved by Tom’s intelligent voice and especially his sardonic take on certain aspects of modern life. Mackay has drawn a convincing picture of a man whose mind is beginning to carp but has not yet succumbed to misanthropy. I’ll be interested to know if Ways of Escape is the second book in a Winter Trilogy.

Review of The Darwin Poems, by Emily Ballou (Sydney Morning Herald, May 2009)

Emily Ballou, The Darwin Poems
UWA Press; $24.95; 220pp

Only the most unevolved of life forms can have failed to notice that 2009 marks the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth. That it also marks the fiftieth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ is, I imagine, less well known, but for those of us who take the view that literature remains largely unadapted to the intellectual environment engendered by the ‘scientific revolution’ the concurrence is a stimulating one. For Snow identified, or claimed to have identified, a rift between ‘literary intellectuals’ on the one hand and scientists and engineers on the other, and to reconsider his influential thesis while immersing ourselves in the work of a man who was not only a great scientist but also a great writer is simply too good an opportunity to miss.

Sandwiched between two impressive quotations – one from Samuel Taylor Coleridge insisting on the necessary opposition of poetry and the sciences and one from the birthday boy himself lamenting the fact that he hadn’t devoted more of his time to poetry and music – the seventy-three poems in this collection by Sydney-based poet Emily Ballou afford an excellent point of departure for just such a reconsideration. In them, we are assured by the blurb, we are brought ‘extraordinarily close to Darwin’s life and mind’; indeed, ‘Ballou’s sensitive and beautifully imagined verse-portrait of Charles Darwin’s life saves the man from the legend’ (my emphasis). Ever on the lookout for the random mutation that augurs the birth of an exciting new species, I took up the book with trembling hands.

I wasn’t completely disappointed. The poems dealing with Darwin’s faith suffer from portentousness (I’m afraid I just don’t buy the idea of a ‘terrible secret / growing daily within him’) but contain some very striking images. In the marvellous poem ‘Ink’, for example, the fact that Darwin’s scientific discoveries at times weighed very heavily on his mind finds an unimprovable metaphor in the image of an octopus unable to lift its head from the sand; a metaphor that shades into simile when Charles is spotted shunting round his study on a black stool mounted on caster wheels, and when, in a later poem (‘Symptoms, Cures’), the scientist’s eyes are ‘overhung / by a beetling appendicium of bone / that held in place the weighty toppling brain’ (note the pun on ‘toppling’ there). Other images are less successful. Take, for example, these lines from ‘Jungle’:

The darkest parts of the jungle then
matched his mind; curved ferns bending
over an ancient water course,
Lepidoptera of thoughts hovering
at the edges of consciousness.

This reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’s complaint in Unacknowledged Legislation that the tendency among contemporary writers is to translate scientific discoveries ‘back into the safe, solipsistic patois that we already know’. Certainly Vladimir Nabokov, a talented lepidopterist, would have been dissatisfied. He wrote, ‘I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.’ Ballou, by contrast, seems wholly uninterested in what the butterflies actually are; they are simply metaphorical props – props, ironically, for the very mind that would have been consumed by them. (The abovementioned octopus, by the way, is described in fascinating detail.)

When it comes to Darwin’s family life, Ballou is on rather safer ground. Incidentally, the new British Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has gone into this subject. Here is ‘Darwin’s Wife’ in full:

7 April 1852.
Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him –
Something about that Chimpanzee over there
reminds me of you.

Not bad, but ‘Marriage’ is even better – richer and, I think, much funnier. Here, Ballou ventriloquises Emma:

we do not mind Mr Arthrobalanus, your deviant little barnacle,
nor the fact that you seem to be
increasingly cirripede-like (I have noticed your whiskers
waving at me), or even that you light your room
with luminous zoophytes at night
but I have been bothered by these strange constant leaks
of saltwater under doors
& do not speak of hermaphrodites
& double penes &c &c over the soup please,
at the very least when the children are present …

Don’t talk about reproduction in front of the children – a delicious irony if ever there was one. I would have liked a second helping.