[Open Letter, 190 pp. Translated by Ralph Manheim]
A complex depiction of fascism in action through the eyes of an Austrian-born Jew, written originally in German while living in the UK. Lind’s approach to his subject—which follows the path of a Nazi general who claims to have lost his regiment in a single incident (by drowning in an extremely deep pit of mud, he claims), running into various encampments where he must explain himself, adapt—is immediately provocative not only by way of its subject matter, and taking the voice of a sick side, but also in how slippery his perspective manages to be in how it projects the machinations of its conspirators as they continue through the rampant chaos of their world.
Immediately we are not sure what is wrong with General Bachmann, as though he seems in clear control of his own mind, his ideas about how to unravel his predicament of displacement when forced to explain himself in meeting others prove that something in the most basic essence of his authority is off. Running into another deserter in the wilderness, he claims to only have briefly been thrown off track, eventually conspiring to dream up ways he can insert himself back into a position with his country’s military. There is a early-Beckett-ian absurdity to his suggestion of possible plans for joining up, for instance, that he bury himself with a breathing pipe in nearby ground and burst from the earth when a funeral procession passes, suggesting that, “Anyone who sees a soldier in uniform rising out of the grave is bound to stand up for him.” The interaction between these two is all nit-picking and provocation, which eventually ends in an argument over who gets the liver of a goose they excitedly kill.
The bizarre babbling of Bachmann immediately brings to mind, too, the Judge from Blood Meridian, in how it interlaces righteous authority with psycho-babble, breaking up the means through which we are able to parse the madness that seems inherent in hatred, in designing to establish one’s self’s culture as by default in the right. By allowing us to look through eyes that struggle to see the world straight, and by refusing to dip the cards of such a hand, we are given a look into the actual patent logic that supports atrocity, and how it spreads from one to another through paranoia, patriotism, and other more abstract manifestations of command. It is the sort of war book that feels more brain-damaged in its essence than simply cold; it forces us to read between the lines, creating a much more intimately thrilling and evocative direction for a voice that might otherwise lay too flat upon the page.
This is not to say that we feel fair or conciliatory towards the horror-makers; rather, we are given even deeper pathos to have to parse, to bump up against how the thoughts that bind the far side of a way of seeing to what holds them together through it, until they are otherwise compelled to break. As Bachmann eventually does get drawn back into the war effort, and is immediately put to work in an assassination where he fires before anyone else while wearing someone else’s shoes, we are made to witness him be used as a tool of the State, letting his obvious madness take the reigns and do the dirtiest of work.
After killing several civilians, including women, upon direction from a fellow Nazi, Haftan, with whom Bachmann is paired up, Haftan states: “What we’ve just done, Herr Bachmann, is something I’ve always wanted to do, it was an old dream. In peacetime I never got the chance, but then with the war the chance suddenly came. All by itself. That’s the good thing about war. You come to yourself. You mustn’t be afraid of people, my friend, people are only flesh.”
Thus, those to whom Bachmann is made to serve, depict themselves not as only mad, like those who they employ to do their killing, but as bodies incapable of seeing the effects of their atrocity beyond the darkness programmed in their bones, bred through them by a will that feels as natural, eventually, to them, as breathing, eating. We begin to feel then as if Bachmann is a horse, placed on the reigns and pranced around while he is useful, and ready to prove himself so, from his position of not knowing where else to go. There seems to be very little self-examination in these characters; only rampant mania, whims of sudden provocation, which in turn add to the secret history of hatred the darkest pages. The killing here is cold, common, without any shred of second thought or justification beyond itself as action, and subject thereafter to being pressed right back into the most common forms of daily madness, the means by which the wheels of the sadistic manage to inflict themselves on human lives.
The book is filled with as much in-sleeve chuckling (on the part of the characters) as it is with screaming of their victims, among whom Bachmann is continuously shifted, like a projectile. It begins to seem a kind of book that one could only have written from on the inside of its pain, and shrewd in how it forces the reader to walk in the body of the unimaginable, the leering ill.
The final third of the book takes a strange turn, placing Bachmann in a sexual relationship of sorts with a vociferous woman named Helga, who he meets along the way of his nearly-unknowing sprawl of murder and deceit. He is able, to some time, establish himself in a relationship of sorts with this woman, displaying crude acts of intimacy between them while in the background further Nazi practice carries the direction of atrocity ever forward. Lind even goes so far as to have Bachmann assessed for madness, in reckoning his desertion, and why he is not still on the frontlines, but now in the backrooms of the war, inflicting pain upon command. Even Bachmann seems surprised when they deem him mentally fit and ready to fight, suggesting that somewhere inside him he had known he was walking the edge of some black blade, because he’d been allowed to, because that sort of blood in him had been brought open; his action not so ramshackle as it seemed, but enabled by the scenes that he’s been placed in.
The surreal tinge that Lind uses to make the space of war seem real in its unrealness, or vice versa, is what really holds the book together, I believe; without it, nothing clear would seem to happen, or we would have not learned what we don’t already know. I keep thinking of the mechanical structure-feel of Ann Quin’s work around the same time, and how its flow suspends itself in the physical space evoked by continuous transition in the narrator, flowing around a way of seeing or existing, rather than using direct plot to carry the load.
The book’s ending, which ramps up toward the most unnerving of effects, for how the whole world seems to break off underneath them, eventually splitting open to such descriptions as: “Bright infant’s eyes glittering green in the blue grass. Flaming red cheeks in the hot ashes. The sun hovers red and flat in the sky, unwilling either to rise or to set.” There comes a sort of shifting to the nature of the landscape, wherein all the previously depicted actions of humans feels as if they fall into a vortex of the map, pressing the narrative’s components to a point beyond impossible, so that the facts of war itself cannot predict what history itself will tell us had been done behind the scenes of scenes so bent they almost seem to have already happened before they begin; as if any apparent outcome is not a plot point, but another lens through which the world will continue to be changed.
This feels true, too, in how we can not see what is happening in large scale while forced up so close, and likewise concentrates Lind’s perspective of the war as deeply intuitive and brave, treading back through landscapes of logic and despair we might just rather tie up and call wrong, sick, ill. They are, of course, but how else can we learn to remember how it happened, where it came from, if not what it might look like on the inside upon return. Without such narrative, we are forced to bear forward only direct facts, and not necessarily so clearly the deeper plague of wounds and holes and hate within.