What were they thinking?
That’s the question Martin Amis seems to be searching for answers to in his fourteenth and latest novel, The Zone of Interest, set among Nazi officers manning a concentration camp in the 1940s. Trainloads of undesirable citizens keep rolling in, victims who are made to pay their fare to come and die, and who are dealt with very efficiently–that is—either gassed straightaway or worked to death.
Their personal belongings, including prostheses and children’s shoes, are stored in a gigantic warehouse, to be recycled, and the technical problems to do with corpse disposal are discussed more as a practical problem than a moral issue. There are just too many bodies. They pollute. The stink travels kilometres. The drinking water in nearby towns tastes cadaverous. (The Nazis in the novel prefer bottled water or, well, booze.)
And again I find myself returning to that question: What were they thinking, those people, who, over a few years of the Second World War, systematically butchered an estimated six million people in death factories—genocide on an industrial scale never seen before or after in the history of humankind?
The novel’s title refers to the strategically located Auschwitz zone in Poland, which the occupying Germans sought to develop into an industrial hub in the early 1940s. Amis fictionalises the camp’s name as Kat Zet, which simply stands for “konzentrationslager” or concentration camp. Incidentally, this extremely well-researched novel is peppered with German words, expressions and technical details, lending it a sickening sense of authenticity.
These camps have for a long time held a fascination for the author who described visiting Auschwitz (which today is a museum) in his autobiography, Experience, an encounter which also inspired the writing of his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow. Now, in The Zone of Interest, Amis does an exhaustive study of the psychology of genocide through the voices of three separate narrators. Central protagonist Golo Thomsen is the fictional nephew of real-life Nazi chief Martin Bormann. As an SS officer, Thomsen has been deputed to liaison with the rubber factory, Buna-Werke, which the major chemical corporation IG Farben has set up at Auschwitz, chipping in towards the camp construction costs in return for slave labour.
The lecherous Thomsen is more interested in Hannah Doll, ‘first lady’ of the concentration camp and wife to Paul Doll, the cuckolded and perpetually crapulent camp commander who has a drunkard’s warped view of everything —and his narrative adds a certain element of slapstick to this ghoulish novel. However, Thomsen’s attempts at seduction are in vain, because Hannah still pines for her pre-war Communist ex-lover (now vanished). So Thomsen, to gain her trust, instead helps her trace her lost lover. To thwart his wife, the jealous Kommandant Doll uses a collaborating prisoner, Sonderkommandofuhrer Szmul, the most tragic of characters.
Szmul prolongs his own life by making himself useful at the camp—keeping the extermination running smoothly by, for example, organizing the squads that ladle the liquefied human fat back onto the pyres to aid in the cremation process—knowing full well that eventually he too will be killed. Szmul, then, is the third narrator: “I used to have the greatest respect for nightmares—for their intelligence and artistry. Now I think nightmares are pathetic. They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day—and they’ve stopped trying.”
Amis portrays all three narrators as fairly civilized beings, apparently capable of experiencing a wide range of genuine emotions, and yet able to function in the midst of a sickeningly perverse environment.
What makes this gut-wrenching novel possible to read is Amis’s playful prose, which creates a fruitful clash with the gloomy subject matter, resulting in a metaphorical vivisection of dark hearts, one that does not leave as bad an aftertaste as expected. He in fact does an absolutely hair-raising job of evoking the life around the concentration camp by laying open the machinations behind the Nazi project and examining all the big and small things behind mass murder.