EUROPEAN NOVELISTS CONTINUE GRAPPLING ANEW WITH NAZI ERA

Author: By Kai Maristed

Date: SUNDAY, November 23, 1997

Page: E2

Section: Books

Shortly after the Second World War, certain writers from the camps of the victors, but fewer from the vanquished and victims, came forward with stories. In that first wave, ``Allied'' novels tended to dwell on the experience of the battle and of life on the homefront. Naturally, the defeated voices were much less sure of themselves, riddled with self-doubt if not self-loathing; in Germany, it was finally and primarily the writers of the ``Gruppe 47'' -- Heinrich Boll, Siegfried Lenz, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gunter Grass, and others -- who attempted a ``new vocabulary.'' But their main topic remained the war, and deprivation and deceit on the homefront, with the ghost of Kristallnacht and what came after casting only an eerie, phosphorescent light over all.

During those first postwar decades, it was left to a handful of survivors -- personal witnesses such as Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl -- as well as the unsilenceable Anne Frank to give back images of what had been nearly hidden in the shadow of the war, and nearly obliterated from collective memory. Notably, in presenting their experiences of the unspeakable, few of these writers chose the path of fiction.

Recently, a third wave of writing about the Third Reich and the Holocaust seems to have risen in Europe, especially among younger German authors. The past year saw Chistoph Ransmayer's surreal ``The Dog King'' and Bernhard Schlink's morally wrenching ``The Reader'' published in this country. Two new entries, both first novels and both highly praised in Europe, are ``The Lueneburg Variation'' by the Italian Paolo Maurensig, and ``The Karnau Tapes'' by the German Marcel Beyer. There's a marked change in this generation, whose ``memories'' come second- or third-hand: no flinching from the imagined horrors, an unblinking gaze.

``The Karnau Tapes'' interweaves an intense meditation on sound, technical acoustics, and human utterance with an increasingly nightmarish romp through the everyday lives of privileged Nazi leaders and scientists. Not surprisingly, the result places strenuous demands on the reader. The story is told in two diametrically different voices: the squeaky, repressed rhetoric of the eponymous Karnau, an acoustical engineer in the employ of Hitler's regime, and the clear and simple, preadolescent musings and observations of Helga. Eight years old when we meet her, 15 at novel's end, she is evidently the eldest child of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, though for some reason this spicily cartooned, ``revered'' family tyrant's name is never revealed.

The paths of these two cross once, rather improbably, when Karnau does his master the favor of taking all five Goebbels babies under his bachelor wing while Mama is in the hospital delivering the sixth. After that, Karnau and Helga have only occasional loose contact until the final act of the war drives them together again, underground in the Fuhrer's bunker. From the outset, a sort of innocent, static attraction seems to sparkle between them. Karnau is a special friend, with his cuddly pet dog, his bedtime stories, and later his filching from the Fuhrer's personal stockpiles of chocolate for the children. For his part, he treasures the ``bright little thing,'' Helga, who ``far from pretending to be omniscient, as an adult might, [is] delighted when she learns something new.'' Lonely after the children's first visit, he plays back his mental recordings of their voices, ``uninhibited shouts, screams and jubilant cries'' doomed later in adulthood to be ``steadily abraded by prescribed patterns of speech until death supervenes, by which time it has become a strangled sound located at the base of the tongue.''

Karnau -- he is the merest sketch of a character, internalized to the point of abstraction -- finds ample professional opportunity to study the vocalizations of death. More than its heavy intaglio of symbolism and metaphor, the novel's many blood-soaked descriptions of Karnau's ``work'' make reading a challenge. The multiple levels and sustained intensity of ``The Karnau Tapes'' make for an extraordinarily resonant achievement. But at times the eye and mind want to skip off the darkened page and escape, up and out into the light -- much as the Goebbels children and their strange friend, trapped deep below bomb-torn ground in the final days of the Reich, long for the goodness of light.

``Various explanations have been suggested -- suicide, accident, even the occasional whisper of crime -- but no one has considered the possibility that Frisch's death was an execution, albeit deferred in space and time.'' ``The Lueneburg Variation,'' while also rappelling first-person into the Holocaust's abyss, does so with a Faustian vigor. In only 140 remarkably taut pages (here in a lucid translation with an appropriately old-fashined tinge), Italian businessman-novelist Maurensig walks the line between genre and literary risk, and succeeds wonderfully. Again we meet two narrators whose stories intertwine: Hans Mayer, an orphan raised in postwar Vienna, and the reclusive Jewish art dealer Tabori, who will become the younger man's mentor, tormentor, and guiding ``father'' even after death.

As a lonely art student, Hans succumbs to a passion for chess, ``that ideal world in which counterposed polarities constantly strove to merge with and annihilate each other.'' He abandons the Academy for nightlife in the Rote Engel, a most specialized beer hall where ``chess was not a discipline but a demential amusement in which all the rules of the game were bent.'' The club is the haunt of a bitter, mysterious master, rumored to have played even the great Capablanca to a draw. Nothing can discourage Hans in his determination to learn from this man Tabori -- not the ``board of pain,'' a cabalist chess set made of unknown metals, handed down through generations of Tabori's Jewish ancestors, nor the ``immobilising'' gallery of photographs in the master's apartment, ``a strange mixture of features, races, shapes and cultures, sharing only a general feeling of tragedy. The paper itself seemed to have suffered, curled as though wounded, stained by blood or mud.'' He becomes Tabori's acolyte, grateful disciple, then a swift-rising star -- until his master's sudden disappearance.

Unable to play and gutter-drunk, Hans drifts. He fetches up in a hostel for the homeless. At the nadir of indifference, though, he's rescued again and given a second chance -- by the voice of Tabori, who now, ill unto death, adopts Hans as his son, and thus into his own monstrously tortured story.

The novel's core drama lies in the arc of Tabori's life. It culminates in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in a series of life-and-death moves that have the shock-punch of the unforeseen and inevitable. Though his life has been touched with a somber magic that appears as a manifestation of genius, neither genius nor magic could protect Tabori against the camp's corrupting ``alien world,'' where ``one false move brought massacre.'' In a fascinating echo of Beyer's theme, the hero Tabori muses: ``I sometimes wonder -- and it is their salvation I have in mind -- whether all the people who participated so zealously in this vile task heard human voices . . . or whether, by some spell cast on their brains by their leaders' propaganda, they perceived only bleats and bellows.''

Chess as a metaphor, irresistible to writers as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov, Lewis Carroll, and Stefan Zweig, might be assumed to have been pretty well wrung dry. But chess goes far beyond metaphor in ``The Lueneburg Variation'': It is an actor and prime motivator, ``a living thing [with] a kind of instinct for self-preservation.'' In the final match, it will fall to Hans to continue his master's search for the Other, the opposing player who also ``bears lifelong scars, neither body nor soul ever recovering fully.'' One needn't be a chess fan to appreciate Maurensig's own luminous passion and knowledge; by the end of this riveting narration, every reader will have played the game.

The shivers raised by ``The Karnau Tapes'' and the spellbinding sense of fate's ultimate design in ``The Lueneburg Variation'' -- each gives the reader the compelling illusion of participation in the terrible event, whether as victim, experimenter, exterminator, or avenger. Only an illusion, of course, temporary and freely entered into from the armchair or the bus seat, with the expectation of risk -- but also as fiction, of entertainment. Are we then far enough removed in time for entertainment? In the end, in its very artistry and moral sophistication, this new wave of fiction revives the original question: Can it ever be completely moral to write the unspeakable into art?