Now, however, all these pillars of the postwar order are collapsing at once, and largely in the same theater. The American-Israeli war in Iran, the ongoing migrant crisis at Ceuta, the dismantling of Hamas’s hold on Gaza — it’s easy to imagine these are discrete events. But they aren’t. They are the load-bearing assumptions of the postwar settlement giving way altogether. When empires are ready to collapse, the gods of history have a way of creating splintering geopolitical emergencies that push toward entropy. The Dow Jones might hit 60,000, and the world might soon have its first tech-trillionaires, but on some level we all know these signs of progress and stability are just mutually agreed-upon fiction. What we’re living through now is the Great Unspooling of the postwar liberal order.

The postwar order began with the Holocaust. The discovery of the Nazi death camps completely remade the Western moral imagination. Thereafter, any sustained suggestion that ethnicities or religious groups differ in their readiness for Western institutions became taboo. Out of that hesitation to acknowledge the reality of profound cultural differences came the belief that nations must henceforth be “ideas” rather than long-fought inheritances. Along the way, the West promised that Jews would never be left to the mercy of antisemitism — a vow that took institutional form in the state of Israel. For 80 years, these vows held. But now they’re breaking down, with the war in Iran and the attempted dismantling of Hamas.

To that extent, Marx got it wrong. It wasn’t class-conflict, exactly, but immigration and a dependence on population growth, that are the great “contradictions” of liberal capitalism. The West has become a system dependent not only on cancer-like growth to survive, but also on population enlargement, for which it must have ever-increasing markets and thus ever-increasing populations capable of supplying them. Insert mass immigration from non-European origins to societies with mostly European ancestry, wrap it all in a narrative of innocence in which every migrant merely seeks a “better life” — with no ancillary consequences whatsoever — and you have liberal capitalism’s core contradiction, its timer set to explode.

Over the last decade, it’s become increasingly popular among the more cynical portions of the online Right to believe that the West will “fall” as a result of mass migration from non-European societies. Even the anti-populist Right suspects, as Jonah Goldberg argued in The Suicide of the West, that Western culture is in the midst of an extended self-immolation. Certainly, the ground-swell of resistance to mass migration explains President Trump’s rise as much, if not more, than any other factor. Ten years ago, in that fateful GOP primary loaded with more than a dozen “serious” candidates, Trump was the only one to realize the fervor of the resistance against immigration boiling up from the American demos. 

And now, a decade later, with Covid and the Biden presidency intervening just to extend the fun, we’re still living through the same dilemmas, except now the immigration issue is more prevalent in Europe, and it all could come to a head with Trump’s ill-fated decision to launch a war in Iran. 

Every US president since Jimmy Carter would have liked to launch a regime-change war against the mullahs. Yet when looking at the practicalities, they decided the chances of prevailing without astronomical financial costs, not to mention loss of life, were simply not viable. The result was funding Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, then two separate military campaigns to remove Hussein from power and of course a two-decade-long occupation of that intractable nation on Iran’s eastern border. Nearly $7 trillion later, here we are: the Middle East less stable than ever, and Iran able to hold the global economy hostage by choking off free passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Insert a chief executive without a sophisticated understanding of either international politics or the tenuous nature of the postwar order, and now we’re six months into a kiss-and-kick battle where even conservative outlets are questioning the sanity of Trump’s decision-making. A rational mind would accept that there are truly only two options left at this point. Either admit defeat and leave with our tails between our legs — just like we did in Saigon in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021, and are now quietly starting with our bases in Iraq — or else “fully committing” as Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and a coterie of others on the Right keep suggesting. That latter approach would likely mean an all-out bombing campaign against Iranian electrical grids and water treatment plants, perhaps even with lower-threshold “tactical” nuclear weapons.

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The fact that Trump hasn’t yet pulled the metaphorical trigger, and indeed seems reluctant to do so, is chock-full of irony. After all, the kind of no-holds-barred military approach Trump continues to threaten is precisely the one used by the Allies against both Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. And while there are plenty of reasons to have qualms about the bombing of civilian targets in Germany and Japan, it’s also hard not to conclude that the ruthlessness of that effort motivated their unconditional surrender, paving the way for the very postwar order now threatened by Trump’s quixotic refusal to go all-in. 

All the while, the President’s own Penelopean method of dealing with Iran — weaving by day, unraveling by night — proves that the United States, and the broader Western world whose helm it still commands, no longer has the stomach to defend its own interests to the actual death. Perhaps it’s simply that in an age where internet-connected video cameras sit in the palms of even the poor and destitute, no Western leader, not even Trump, can green-light the killing of tens of thousands of civilians overnight. 

Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, is not so squeamish. And his willingness to be despised — by West and East alike — exposes a fault line the postwar order was built to conceal. The Holocaust may be the origin point of contemporary Western liberalism, but the modern State of Israel has never mistaken itself for a member in full standing, bound by the same pieties and constraints. In the West, as the notorious GOP operative Lee Atwater understood, “perception is reality” — yet Israel, almost alone among nations, has decided it can live without the West’s good opinion. That indifference is the tell. Even if the Israelis are ultimately correct in their assessment of what needs to be done, their indifference to perception will have consequences. 

The “Judeo-Christian tradition,” it turns out, was always a hyphen doing the work of a treaty — another tenuous invention of the post-1945 settlement. It is now failing like the rest of this dying edifice. From the Israeli perspective, the country is trapped in an existential battle for survival. October 7 proved their enemies will stop at nothing — not even if the result is their own annihilation — to undermine the Israeli “settler colonialists.” In many ways, Hamas’s atrocity was the moral grand finale of the suicide bomber. It proved there are no boundaries of barbarity the Islamists will not cross, while Israel itself clearly cannot constrain itself by the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the make-believe agreements of international law. 

It’s hard, here, to argue that Israeli resolve is wrong-headed. Notice, though, that none of our inherited categories can hold during this war. All through the postwar period, it was easy for America to cast its enemies, whether Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein, as the “next Hitler,” or anyway, something close. But whatever its many cruelties, Hamas is certainly not a threat on that scale, and neither is its ally Iran. With the absence of viable communist and fascist movements, the great tension of world politics, as Benjamin Barber so aptly put it 30 years ago, has become “Jihad vs. McWorld.” Two monoliths of cultural excess, both lacking self-reflection, much less true spiritual or intellectual growth: one neoliberal, the other neofeudal.

It’s a cliche to say that Islam never had something like the Protestant Reformation — and, as Reformation historians like to point out, the cliche gets it backwards. Modern Islamism arguably is Islam’s Reformation, what with its scriptural literalism, its iconoclastic fury, its millenarian certainty. But what Islam has arguably never had is what came after: the cultural exhaustion that provided the space for a genuine liberalism to come about. Perhaps, it will eventually get there. Perhaps it won’t. One thing, though, is certain — neither the United States’ military, nor Israel’s, can force any realization upon it. 

Yet if the settlement can’t be imposed abroad at gunpoint, it will not come from naively believing that all who seek residence in the West come with a willingness to respect its core tenets of tolerance and individual responsibility.

The broader illiberal treatment of women by some non-Western immigrants to Europe is a ticking time bomb. While many of the abusers were only Muslim in culture — they are far from practicing — that only intensifies the point of conflict. As people from Islamic countries dissipate across the globe, tensions are likely to continue rising, especially as Western populations continue to reject mass immigration at every electoral opportunity. Western leaders, of course, are more eager to prove their cosmopolitan bona fides and dedication to postwar liberal principles. 

Eventually, this divergence between what most of the population wants and what leaders prefer will bring down governments across Britain and the Continent, whatever liberal stalwarts like Andy Burnham might do in the short term. Meanwhile, as evidenced by Abdul El-Sayed’s triumph in Michigan’s Senate primary last week — overcoming the party establishment and a record $65 million in outside money — the Democratic Party is living through a takeover by an internal youth faction for whom the entire idea of border integrity is suspect. El-Sayed has previously favored not only abolishing ICE but making Michigan a “sanctuary” state for illegal and undocumented immigrants. 

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Which brings us to something that’s rarely discussed, in the US anyway, about the war in Iran: it has the direct potential to destabilize not just the Middle East, but the whole of Europe too. Whether MAGA were really involved in constructing the crisis or not, what the nearly 70,000 migrants who stormed Ceuta over recent weeks prove is that, in the blink of an eye, mass migration could destabilize nearly any European nation. Or else there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel decided it was a fantastic idea to allow 1.5 million migrants fleeing the war in Syria — some of whom were merely pretending to have been displaced — into Germany. 

Within a decade, Germany, even in its most urban and populated areas, went from a safe nation with high levels of social trust and generous social safety nets, to something rather different. Some 25 years ago, I studied in Germany on a student visa. In the land of the autobahn and Dunkelweizen beer, the concept of ungovernably dangerous areas was simply unheard of. Not anymore. Germany’s a different place now. The change might irreversible. And, depending on how the war in Iran goes, Europe’s political and social problems surrounding immigration could become even more intractable. If the Iranian regime does indeed eventually collapse, Western Europe and the UK would face an immigration crisis unlike anything since, you guessed it, the Second World War.

At the last war’s conclusion, with Hitler dead in his bunker, more than 10 million ethnic Germans were expelled from East Prussia and across Eastern Europe — many from lands which had been German-speaking for centuries. Few know anything about these expulsions, because to recognize German trauma in any way is to risk association with Nazi sympathies. In the postwar liberal era, we treat as the greatest error in all human history the belief that ethnicity and culture have anything to do with a nation’s aptitude for democratic life, which explains the great contradiction of sustaining the modern liberal order. The West built its dominance on precisely that conviction of its own superiority — then amputated that part of its thinking, with the missing limb now functioning like a phantom appendage, tormenting every political faction with an itch it cannot find a way to scratch.

The West — including very much so the Anglosphere — was not always so polite. From the American Revolution to 1945, most Anglo-American elites — Left and Right — believed the capacity for democracy was a biological trait, available only to what were once complacently called Anglo-Saxons. Supposedly, democracy was invented by ancient Germanic tribes, then carried to Britain by the 5th-century Saxons, perfected by the Glorious Revolution and then perfected again by the United States. This “germ theory” of democracy’s origins was no fringe folklore. Everyone from Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt advanced it, and Woodrow Wilson taught it — his textbook The State tracing the origin of self-government exclusively to “Aryan” racial stock. 

The idea of democracy being limited by Saxon biology was, of course, absurd. Japan and South Korea run more functional democracies than either the US or the UK. The mythical Saxon tribes Wilson revered were in fact illiterate raiders who had never seen, much less cast, a ballot. The point here isn’t that their orthodoxy was correct. The point is that the men who built the America we know believed wholesale in what you might call “ethnopolitical” thinking right up until 1945 made voicing that perspective out of the question.

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In the end, though, the discoveries of the Nazi death camps made every link between peoplehood and political inclinations verboten. For the next 50 years, nearly everyone in the English-speaking humanities pretended the Anglo-supremacist paradigm never existed, or else quickly filed it away as little more than a curiosity within the catch-all term of “white supremacism.”

The taboo against ethnopolitical thinking produced a strange two-way traffic across the Atlantic. Western Europeans looked to America for models of flourishing multiculturalism — importing, in effect, that American civic-creedal idea that a nation is an “idea” rather than an inheritance. Meanwhile, American academics imported the Frankfurt School, German Marxist exiles who managed the neat conceptual trick of outsourcing blame for the Third Reich onto the “authoritarian personality” of intolerant commoners — this from an intellectual Left whose predecessors had written the Weimar Republic constitution, held the Reichstag during the entirety of its life until 1933, and still failed to stop Hitler. Hannah Arendt’s harder lesson, that modern evil becomes banal because bureaucracy strips agency from nearly everyone, sat poorly with progressives and Left-liberals in love with bureaucratic re-engineering, so the Frankfurt version won. Ever since, the transatlantic Left has agreed on a few core principles: the people are the problem, borders represent prejudice, and anyone can be made a good liberal citizen. 

The postwar taboo of ethnopolitical thinking produced a soft-skulled liberalism that can no longer say who belongs. Why? Because belonging is for “everyone.” It’s kind, in a way, to treat every border as a prejudice. But it’s the brand of kindness a 5-year-old offers to strangers whom they should probably not trust. This, to be clear, isn’t to embrace blood-and-soil nationalism, but rather a full-throated embrace of cultural differences and making decisions based on an accurate understanding of them. Iran was always going to fight their “Great Satan” to the death, something Trump both failed to anticipate and seems reluctant to do himself. 

The last irony of the Great Unspooling belongs to Donald Trump: the arch anti-immigrationist, who would happily restore the norms of a world before 1945, may yet be the one who finishes off the Anglo-American, postwar order. Not by tearing up its treaties or even by mocking its pieties, but by refusing to back down in Iran merely to save face, but then excusing this action as what’s necessary to “save Israel.” Thus, unleashing upon Europe precisely the migration wave that its post-Holocaust morality cannot repel and its populations are incapable of absorbing. The further irony may be that doing anything less may put Iran and thus, eventually, Hamas, in a stronger position than it occupied not only prior to the war, but prior to Oct. 7 itself.

The book’s Wikipedia page contains this pleasing phrase: “Word of mouth and enthusiastic reviews soon catapulted sales to such an extent that Gallimard had to stop publishing the latest Harry Potter novel in order to meet the demand for The Kindly Ones.” Littell was reportedly paid around $1 million for its English translation rights, but when it was published by Harper Collins in 2009 in a translation by Charlotte Mandell, The Kindly Ones met with critical derision and sold a fraction of what its publishers hoped it would. Littell has since faded in prominence from the Anglophone literary landscape (while some of his subsequent books have been translated, they have received little attention and certainly earned no seven-figure advances). Articles by Littell on war and geopolitics occasionally appear in the likes of the Guardian and New Statesman; in March 2022, Le Monde published an open letter in which he urged his “Russian friends” to overthrow Vladimir Putin.

The Kindly Ones is presented as the memoirs of a Nazi SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator who, looking back across decades on his activities during the war, recounts in extreme detail and without contrition his active role in mass murder. Put more succinctly still, it’s a 1,000-page novel about the Shoah told exclusively and exhaustively from a Nazi perspective. It takes in, among very much else, the massacre of almost 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Ukraine (described in a gruesome set-piece that might have sprung from the brain of the Marquis de Sade — an author Littell has translated into English), the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler’s Führerbunker Götterdämmerung, and, inevitably, the death camps. There are cameos or more significant roles for virtually every prominent Nazi, from Höss to Himmler, Mengele to Eichmann, Heydrich to Hitler, along with writers and other cultural figures from the era. The novel’s narrator, Dr Maximilian Aue, begins his account of the war on the Eastern Front, where he served as a member of an Einsatzgruppe (the mobile paramilitary units who carried out the extermination prior to the establishment of the concentration camp network), before rising through the SS ranks to a central administrative role in the bureaucracy of genocide.

Part of what makes The Kindly Ones so extraordinary and erratic a war novel is its very Frenchness. We are accustomed to such thick novels tackling the vast subject of war from within a humanist, Tolstoyan tradition, but Littell is rooted in a contrary, largely Francophone tradition of extreme literature. His forebears are Sade, Bataille, Genet, Céline, and Baudelaire, along with renegade non-Frenchmen such as William Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis (Littell was, in fact, born in the United States — his father was a successful spy novelist — but grew up in France). His infernal narrator is both a committed National Socialist and a severely troubled pervert: page after page describe Aue’s depraved sexual acts and fantasies as the strain of committing atrocities, compounded by his closeted homosexuality and memories of childhood incest with his sister Una, brings on a nightmarish psychic deterioration. Rivers of shit flow through the book, amid corpses and gore, vomit and stench, torture and abjection.

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Surprisingly, in light of his penchant for the transgressive, Littell’s professional background prior to publishing The Kindly Ones in his late 30s was in humanitarian work. Before quitting his job to spend a year and a half researching the Holocaust and travelling in the Eastern Front, he lived in multiple conflict zones as an aid worker for Action Against Hunger — work which provided the insight into bureaucracies and conflict that gave texture to his densely realised novel. Some critics suggested that The Kindly Ones — whose perverse level of detail regarding the minutiae of Nazi extermination mirrors the perversity of the Final Solution itself — reads less as a novel than a work of dramatised documentation.

But Littell, with his arsenal of rogue literary influences, animates his vast knowledge of his subject with the added metaphysical, moral, and psychic dimensions of fiction. As he has somewhat grandly put it in an interview: “You can do things with literature that you’re not allowed to do in other regimes of discourse.” And so we’re presented with such phantasmic images as that of a thundering Adolf Hitler, at a rally Aue attends while his sanity is collapsing, transforming before our eyes… into a rabbi.

Reading Littell’s book last autumn, I found myself having one of those overwhelming literary experiences we’re lucky if we enjoy (though in the present case that may not be the right word) every few years, the kind that had me cancelling social engagements. So absorbed was I that, over the weeks it took me to read the novel, I failed to notice myself sink into a black and choking depression. More accurately, I realised I had become intensely hopeless in my outlook, but somehow (this seems incredible to me now) I failed to connect my reading material to this state of dejection.

Meanwhile, I talked fervently to whoever was around about the amazing novel I was reading, which, I assured them, was both a towering work of literature and as black and punishing a document as I’d ever encountered (strangely, I couldn’t quite convince anyone to read it). When I was 200 pages from the end, a friend and I happened to eat some psilocybin mushrooms. As the effects took hold I felt myself being submerged in the hellish, quicksand imagery and suffocating nihilism of Littell’s novel. The universe was evil — life itself was an infinite gas chamber. When the trip was over I’d made the connection that had previously eluded me, and the following morning the gloom had lifted — I finished the novel in sunlight.

A survey of contemporary Anglophone reviews shows (with some exceptions) an array of critics failing, in various ways, to get it. The most sizeable party dismissed The Kindly Ones for what they decried as its prurient sensationalism that passed itself off as seriousness. Perhaps they were reacting against the hype, their faculties muddied by talk of million-dollar publishing deals and Francophone adulation. At any rate, for me their assessment lands at a neat antipode to the truth — I don’t think I could handle a more serious novel.

The repugnance it induces is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. There’s no way to achieve what Littell is going for here while deferring to delicacy, tact, understatedness. The coprophilia and incest are one thing (there really is too much of that stuff, especially in a chapter towards the end in which Aue masturbates in his own shit for 100 pages), but regarding the gruelling depictions of genocide and atrocity, if Littell ever felt the need to defend himself, he need only remind us: that’s what happened. By committing to a first-person narration, he goes where few if any serious novelists had ever gone and sinks us deep into the psyche of a highly intelligent, cultivated National Socialist — not a fervent antisemite, but an energetic, ambitious, sensitive young man who believes in the necessity of the bloody work his cause demands. Reading the novel is like wading through a dense fog wherein all certainties and moral coordinates vanish.

“What I did,” we read in the first pages, “I did with my eyes open, believing that it was my duty and that it had to be done, disagreeable or unpleasant as it may have been. For that is what total war means: there is no such thing as a civilian, and the only difference between the Jewish child gassed or shot and the German child burned alive in an air raid is one of method.” The Kindly Ones is perhaps best understood as a philosophical virtual reality device that enables us to experience exactly what it’s like to think, feel and act as a committed National Socialist in the inferno of the Second World War.

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Crucially, in depicting the Shoah from the perspective of the perpetrators, Littell — an atheist of Jewish background — cleaves to the truth of the majority, the normal, rather than the exception. Schindler’s List (a film Littell incidentally claims to despise) is beautifully made, heart-wrenching, and deceptive, in that it takes as its subject the moral anomaly: the Nazi who responded to the evils around him by resisting. Most people, of course, did not resist, and even within the SS the overt psychopaths and sadists were in the minority (indeed they were sometimes punished for their excesses). Most Nazi murderers killed without enthusiasm, after finding themselves at the end of a long chain of duties and commands in service to a catastrophic state ideology.

Ventriloquising through Maximilian Aue, Littell wants us to understand that it’s extremely difficult, even arbitrary, to meaningfully separate the culpable from the innocent — in the Nazi genocide and in others. The Kindly Ones’s sinister opening section is addressed to a universal second-person: “If you ever managed to make me cry, my tears would sear your face.” These prefatory pages, in which Dr Aue introduces himself decades after the war while living under an assumed identity — he runs a lace factory in northern France, with a wife and children who are ignorant both of his homosexuality and his wartime deeds — are a warning and a rite of initiation: the hundreds of airlessly intense pages that follow will lock us into the sensorium of a man who was present, lucid, and active in “the heart of the slaughterhouse”.

During this opening address — a précis of the philosophical core that elevates The Kindly Ones above mere atrocity porn or middlebrow historical fiction — Aue makes a further, rarely acknowledged point concerning the nature of war:

“Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, the right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilised human being: the right not to kill. No one asks you for your opinion. In most cases the man standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying, dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit.”

Once these unnerving philosophical preliminaries conclude, Littell’s narrator plunges us into the carnage of the Eastern Front in 1941. We are in Ukraine, where the Wehrmacht has driven out the Soviet forces, leaving the native population free to conduct a brutal pogrom against the Jews. The effect achieved here, and over the rest of the novel, is of total immediacy and total visibility — less “show, don’t tell” than “show and tell absolutely everything”. The style is torrential, with sentences typically long and packed with detail, yet remarkably readable (Céline isn’t just an influence — he also makes an appearance).

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Concerns around visibility dog such art that seeks to reckon with the Shoah. Theodor Adorno argued, in a 1962 essay titled “Commitment” (the one with the line about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being barbaric), that: “The aesthetic principle of stylisation… makes an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims.” Several decades on, the late German novelist W.G. Sebald, whose oeuvre is a sustained exercise in talking about the Holocaust without talking about the Holocaust, remarked in an interview concerning his 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn: “I think it is sufficient to remind people because we’ve all seen images, but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things, and also paralyse our moral capacity. So the only way one can approach these things in my view is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.”

Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest has won two Academy Awards and much breathless praise for its depiction of the simulacrum of bourgeois normalcy enjoyed by SS commandant Rudolf Höss and his family in a pleasant house on the perimeter of Auschwitz. The horrors of extermination occur entirely off-screen, the ominous sound design intensifying the family’s schizoid reality. My feelings towards Glazer’s film were mixed. I left the cinema curiously unmoved, and although the film’s nightmarish juxtapositions stayed with me, so too did the feeling that there’s something precious, snobbish even, at any rate unsatisfactory and philosophically banal, in this principled refusal to show. By contrast, The Kindly Ones’s opposite strategy of total visibility — total obscenity — challenged and affected me more than an oblique and therefore ostensibly tasteful work probably ever could. Void of redemption and fanatically committed to its subject’s suffocating blackness, the novel terrifyingly describes the world evoked in Nietzsche’s parable of the madman: unchained from its sun, perpetually falling as through an infinite nothing, with more and more night coming on all the time.

In J.M. Coetzee’s essayistic 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, as the titular figure — an elderly and much-garlanded writer — meditates on a novel of Nazi horrors she has read that has left her badly rattled, she considers the word “’obscene’: a word of contested etymology, that she must hold onto as talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage.” Costello repeatedly describes having felt, while reading this novel of atrocities, the brush of the devil’s “leathery wing”. The crux of her theologically-inflected argument is that, notwithstanding the Romantic celebration of art’s “heroic right to venture into forbidden or tabooed zones”, no writer can go where the novel’s author has gone and return unscathed — and nor can his readers. The literary encounter with obscene evil, Costello insists, invades, diminishes, and demoralises us. It’s better to look away.

Little wonder that The Kindly Ones was a Francophone sensation and an Anglophone flop — unlike the character Elizabeth Costello, the French have always appreciated being roughed up by their artists and writers. So have I — I need at least some art to assault me like this. But is such a novel — a work that “leaves nothing out”, depicting “scenes that do not belong in the light of day” — ultimately bad for us? Can a book that provoked, at least in me, a dejection so total I hardly even recognised it, really be one that people ought to read?

There’s an oft-quoted remark by Sebald concerning the Holocaust: no serious person ever thinks about anything else. I used to find the line a touch absurd, but as time passes and history’s meat-grinder churns on, it seems to make ever more sense. I finished reading The Kindly Ones shortly before the massacre and torture of some 1,200 Israeli Jews by Hamas on October 7. Together, the novel, that massacre, and the retributive, genocidal crimes against humanity we’ve watched take place in Gaza these past five months (not to mention the atrocities in Ukraine, and other conflict zones I don’t even keep up with), have left me with a sense of the Nazi genocide as being, in some vertiginous sense, the central fact of human history, a catastrophe that stains and alters the meaning of all that came before it and all that follows.

The intoxicating ordeal of reading Littell’s novel left in its wake the feeling that a universe in which extermination took place is, in some ultimate and crushing way, one in which it will always be taking place, where innocence is just guilt that hasn’t yet had a chance to thrive. And this would be true even without the eerie impression that arises from photographs of Palestinian men in their underwear, blindfolded and crammed in the backs of trucks, or of skeletal children being starved to death in real time, of time and space folding in on themselves, of symbols merging, of the victim’s face becoming that of the perpetrator.

Among the questions we may be left asking by both The Kindly Ones and the daily news is how, knowing that such things have happened, and continue to happen, and are happening right now, and knowing too that the good life we enjoy is made possible by the suffering of others, we are able, without recourse to what Maximilian Aue calls “soothing fictions” or the distracting anomalies of righteousness, to live with ourselves. I don’t really have answers. The answer, Jonathan Littell’s novel implies, through the ghoulish image of Aue living his post-war shadow life in France, is simple and dreadful: we live with it by living with it, knowing we’re all guilty and we’re all in hell.

None of these films takes genocide as their primary subject per se. Nor indeed have they been recognised as “genocide” films in the classic mould of Schindler’s List and The Killing Fields. In fact, their chief source of dramatic tension, and sense of artistic danger, comes from the decision to throw their dramatic weight behind the perpetrators and facilitators of mass murder rather than, as is more traditional, its victims and their champions. This has elicited some nervous gulps from critics. “Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit — emotional, social, and eventually legal— of white men,” wrote The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. “If [Oppenheimer] is three hours, I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people,” said director Spike Lee of Nolan’s film, while critic Manohla Darghis said The Zone of Interest “is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone”.

Yet the convergence of all three films at the Oscars seems proof of something more than just the dictum “Hollywood loves a bad guy”. Historically, the subject has brought out both the best and the worst in Hollywood. From Lawrence of Arabia to Schindler’s List, with such lesser examples as Hotel Rwanda and The Promise, the genre is a bastion of “white saviourism”, in which an outsider comes to sympathise with the victimised group and enacts the audience’s own powers of empathy, which are rewarded as solution enough. We weep with Schindler because he did not do enough, but that is enough for us. “American movies, English books —remember how they all end?” asks Gamini, a citizen of Sri Lanka, in Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost. “The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it… That’s enough reality for the West… Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”

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The excoriating comedy of Auschwitz

By Boyd Tonkin

If sanctimony is the genre’s besetting sin, complacency is its most likely outcome. If the backlash over Green Book’s Oscar win in 2018 marked the white-saviour trope for the scrap-heap, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon administers last rites. After making the film, Scorsese and DiCaprio did indeed “hit the circuit” to reveal the changes wrought unto David Grann’s book, which focused largely on the efforts of one of the newly formed FBI’s most upstanding agents, Tom White, to solve the murders of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, originally to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” said Scorsese. Instead, together with DiCaprio and screenwriter Eric Roth, he took the story away from the FBI agent, and let the focus fall on the marriage of Ernest Burkhart, one of the co-conspirators, and the Osage woman, Molly Kyle, whose property rights Burkhart and his uncle were trying to steal.

The violence is entirely devoid of the giddy glamour that marked Scorsese’s earlier work, such as Goodfellas. The murders are filmed with Weegee flatness, mostly in long-shot, the bodies slumping to the ground like the proverbial sack of potatoes. But perhaps most remarkable of all is the ending. After the convictions of Ernest, Hale and their co-conspirators, we cut to a Fifties-style radio revue, in which a troupe of voice actors and foley artists update the listeners back home on what happened next, including Scorsese himself, who steps up to the microphone to read Molly’s sad obituary, which omitted all mention of the Osage murders. As Scorsese told one interviewer. “Yes, I am part of the system. Yes, I am European American. And yes, I am culpable.” In other words: if audience empathy is not enough, then maybe transparency on the part of the filmmaker will do — alongside a weary acknowledgement of the limited efficacy of filmed entertainment.

A similar ambivalence marks Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The film is written in the first-person, a device generally used by unreliable narrators gently veering toward crack-up. And the film plays, in its first half, as a high-end biopic, in which we witness the rise of a great man or woman who advances the cause of human progress in some way. But at the climax, Oppenheimer’s victory falls away from him, and the film executes a very Nolan-like pivot into a Kafkaesque court-room drama, in which all of Oppenheimer’s nuanced expressions of moral ambivalence about nuclear weaponry serve only to damn him. The movie sets a trap for its audience, just as Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), the story’s shadowy Quilty figure, sets a trap for Oppenheimer — engaging our sympathies so that we urge on Oppenheimer in the race against the Nazis, before pulling the rug out from under us. At the film’s central point, Oppenheimer’s triumph literally turns to nuclear ash in his hands: as he gives a jingoistic speech to his fellow physicists, the sound drops away, and in eerie silence, he imagines his audience ravaged by nuclear fire. Blink and you’ll miss it but there in the credits, listed as a “burn victim”, is Nolan’s own 18-year-old daughter, Flora, who happened to be visiting the set. “The point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you,” Nolan said. “This was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms.”

The use of sound to summon unimaginable horrors off-screen is the central device, too, of The Zone of Interest. Set in the shadow of Auschwitz, where the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and their children go about their daily lives, the film is a sustained exercise in moral disquiet void of catharsis. What we see is the Hösses going about their daily lives — the children wishing father “auf Wiedersehen” as he departs for work, Hedwig receiving guests for tea, tending to the garden, swimming in the pool — as, over the garden wall, we hear the screams of prisoners, gunshots, and the infernal rumble of the crematoria, an “ambient genocide”, in the filmmaker’s words. Like Oppenheimer, the film uses the disjunction between sound and image to convey the intense dissociation practiced by the Hösses to divorce the mundanity of their lives from the horror that surrounds them. But where they experience that dissociation as numbing, we experience it as nightmarish.

Only at the end, as Höss exits a conference in which the fate of the Hungarian Jews is decided, and finds himself convulsively retching in the stairwell, do his actions seem to catch up with him, or in any way correspond to the horror we feel. Glazer has said the scene was inspired by a similar scene at the end of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, in which the Indonesian butcher Anwar Congo, after merrily re-enacting his methods of murder for the cameras, is bent double with dry heaves upon trying to answer the question of why he killed his victims. No matter how dissociated from his own guilt he is, his body cannot lie. All three films — The Zone of Interest, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon — are to varying degrees studies of dissociative guilt: men who have no idea how guilty they are, who find out only after the fact that they are damned. In Gitta Sereny’s biography of Albert Speer, the Dutch Protestant theologian W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft is quoted saying of the Holocaust that “people could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror and that they did not have the imagination, together with the courage, to face it. It is possible to live in a twilight between knowing and not knowing.”

That twilight between knowing and unknowing is where all three films live, eat, sleep and breathe. You might be tempted to say that all three films deal with “white guilt”, and yet their audience ambit feels wider than that. It’s probably safe to say that, among the citizens of the industrialised West — certainly those with the freedom and inclination to watch Oscar nominees about mass murder — the great majority of us are more likely to find ourselves bystanders to genocidal or genocidal-adjacent policies than we are to find ourselves the victim of them. “It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims,” writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. “It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.”

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That is the unnerving thrust of all three films, but Glazer’s in particular. By the end of The Zone of Interest, the Höss’s garden wall is more than just a wall. It symbolises the bureaucratic structures that allowed the Nazis to see themselves as merely “getting on with the job”; or the gas chambers themselves, which Himmler intended to shield German soldiers from the damaging psychological effects of point-blank executions; or the “compartmentalisation” that allowed Oppenheimer to divorce the “technical success” of Trinity from its ghastly human effects. Is it any wonder Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest feel more like horror movies than war movies? The absence of victims from both films is not some act of artistic negligence or authorial oversight, but a deliberate absence that haunts both dramas, ionically charging what we do see: technocrats haunted by their own eerie success, numbed by a sense of mission, dogged by miasmic guilt.

Every development in warfare since the Trinity Test — the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, proxy wars, drone technology, cyber-weaponry — has served to further shield civilian populations from the killing done in their name and the sacrifices that make countries so reluctant to enter into wars in the first place. “You cannot surrender to a Reaper,” points out Durham University professor John Williams. “Ambient genocide” comes very close to describing if not the modern state of war, then the state to which it secretly aspires. Most citizens of the US have little idea they are currently pursuing anywhere between five and 15 wars or shadow wars, depending on your definition. All of these killing zones are off-camera; all its kills are “clean”. If the government you have empowered with your vote enacts a policy which kills a group to which you bear no ill will, and of which you may not even have even heard, what exactly is the extent of your moral culpability?

Perhaps that is the wrong question — not “How guilty should you feel?” but “What does guilt, at that distance, even feel like?” Nothing like the war guilt of old, perhaps, but something far more fleeting, diffuse, pixellated. Something like the feeling you get from this year’s Oscar nominees.

The living numbers of those who were there diminish by the year. The New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany last week reported that the global total of Holocaust survivors now amounts to 245,000 souls, with a median age of 86. When the Third Reich fell, the vast majority were still small children; adult memory of the camps may soon disappear. At the same time, outright denial of the genocide of Jews or pseudo-scholarly scepticism gathers force. In December, one poll found that 20% of young Americans (18-29) agreed that the Holocaust was a myth, and fully 30% more neither agreed nor disagreed with such a claim.

So esoteric debates over the adequacy of Holocaust stories might benefit from an urgent reality-check. While critics parade their tender consciences over the missteps of this or that camp-themed novel or film, growing numbers believe that such fictions have little or no historical basis. This piece, like many others, hopefully (naively?) assumes a shared community of knowledge, and value. As, in different ways, do two recent works of Holocaust art: Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest, out in the UK this weekend, and its source material, Martin Amis’s decade-old novel of the same name.

Glazer’s German-language film is based only loosely on the book — it lacks any version of Amis’s three narrative voices for instance. Still, it shares with the original an urge to interrogate the ghastly parody of “ordinary” life created by and for the Nazi officials who oversaw the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in occupied Silesia and the industrial plant — the Buna Werke — manned by slaves from the camp. Glazer works with silence, sound and image; Amis with torrential but evasive human speech. But each creator rests implicitly on a context of understanding that gives meaning to their efforts to show how human beings dodge or disguise their own most atrocious acts. What happens when that context crumbles?

Evidently, Glazer has thought hard about his audience’s limits. He has, pretty much entirely, eliminated the grotesque humour that animates two of Amis’s three voices. Queasily, guiltily, readers may laugh with Amis’s Angelus (“Golo”) Thomsen as this sardonic, dandyish liaison officer schemes to bed Hannah, the buxom wife of camp commandant Paul Doll. Scornfully, haughtily, we laugh at the dim, pompous Doll himself as he frets over the “great national programme of applied hygiene” he manages in a deluge of stilted clichés (Doll, like all deadly bores, prides himself on being blessed with a great “sense of humour”). Only the plain, bleak words spoken by the anguished Jewish Sonderkommando leader Szmul — saddest of all among “the saddest men in the history of the world” — retain a link between language and reality amid this empire of ashen lies.

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Glazer, however, seems to have no residual faith in voice of any kind. In place of the Amis shtick and patter, a tar-dark comedy that requires the knowing laughter of active moral agents, he stages long, near-wordless shots of the death camp’s bucolic outskirts. These tableaux are punctuated by humdrum chit-chat as the commandant and his wife — here given their actual names, Rudolf and Hedwig Höss — go about their mundane business with hell itself just across the fence. Filming around Auschwitz itself, in the family’s reconstructed villa, Glazer took the crew off the set. He installed fixed miniature cameras to catch the deeds and (few) words of his remarkable lead actors, Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel, and the bullied staff they laconically boss about.

Here, words do not simply fail; they atrophy almost completely. In their place, Johnnie Burn’s extraordinary sound design and Mica Levi’s ominous music take us into the charnel house we never see — save as puffs of smoke or drifts of ash. Ambient birdsong and summer breezes chirp or whisper in the background. Barked commands, stray gunshots and distant cries of pain and fear apprise us of the unseen world beyond the watchtowers. Industrial blasts, groans and roars erupt like the death-agonies of the stricken earth itself. Complete silence partners empty black, then blood-red, screens.

It’s a riveting transformation. A work by the most joyously, shamelessly wordy of post-war British authors has given rise to a meticulously chill essay in fatal silence and infernal noise. Indeed, only one of Amis’s unsettling gags has made an almost-intact transition from page to script. Asked at the theatre whether he enjoyed a play, Höss says that he couldn’t stop thinking about how to gas the audience in a space with such high ceilings. Otherwise, Glazer offers not so much an adaptation as an inversion. “I need something more than words,” laments Amis’s moral anchor Szmul as he endeavours to fathom “the near-farcical assiduity” of German hatred. The frozen pastoral of Glazer’s imagery, and the chthonic horror of his sound, supply that something with imagination and ingenuity.

Yet Amis took that “near-farcical” aspect of Nazi theory and practice seriously — which is to say, comically. And he was right to do so. Edgy, curdled, slightly off like aged game, the humour of his The Zone of Interest tumbles the reader between complicity and revulsion. You can see why Glazer might decide to leave the treacheries of voice and tone aside and seek other, visual and aural, means to convey the kitsch barbarity of this petty-bourgeois idyll. By and large, the movie eschews the savage irony that gives Amis his narrative momentum. It does have some jaw-dropping fragments of dialogue — as when Hedwig escorts her mother proudly around the “paradise garden” that abuts the camp walls or, alarmed by news of her husband’s transfer to HQ, protests that “you’ll have to drag me out of here”.

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Those are plausibly Amis-like moments. For the most part, Glazer lets a soundtrack from the intestines of hell challenge the sun-dappled prettiness of the camera’s truth-defying gaze. Still worried about misreadings, he finishes with another dialogue-free sequence. In a documentary flash-forward, staff clean up in the preserved execution chambers of the actual Auschwitz museum, and scrub corridors lined with piteous vitrines of the victims’ shoes. Despite his notable artistry, he doesn’t quite trust every viewer to get the point. For Amis, in contrast, the language of fiction — a language torn between laughing and screaming — must do all the moral work.

I talked to him while he was completing The Zone of Interest, and asked about the inevitable charges of bad taste that duly landed at his door when the novel appeared. “I don’t deny myself bitter mockery as one of the weapons of excoriation,” he explained. “It was a ridiculous ideology, with huge irrationalities within it” — absurdities mocked by the secret dissident Thomsen, and upheld by the bombastic toady Doll. As that plodding fusspot wrestles with the nightmare bureaucracy of mass corpse disposal (blow the Stücke up and body-parts hang in the trees; burn them 24/7 and the air-protection chaps complain about after-dark glow), Amis refuses to lend the Nazi machine the dignity of sense and reason, however perverted. Dogged excess always opens a door to comedy. In print, The Zone of Interest opts for “excoriation” through the means of the reductio ad absurdum built into the Nazis’ boundary-free death cult. “It was almost comedic,” Amis said to me. “How far from logic as well as from any possible value it was. The comprehensiveness of the descent into the embrace of evil — you might almost call it Germanic rigour. Once there, let’s do it in the German way.”

“In for a penny…”, he pondered, citing Macbeth. “‘I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.’ ‘Tedious’ is very good.” Thomsen, and behind him Amis, finds a sort of hideous hilarity in the sheer extremism of the genocidal-industrial complex. As he plots to seduce the heretically-minded Hannah, Thomsen tells her in a letter that future ages will consider the National Socialists “exotic and improbable as the prehistoric meat-eaters” — the unfeasibly gross T-Rexes of history. Much commentary on Glazer’s film has aligned its averted-eyes domesticity with Hannah Arendt’s familiar thesis about the “banality of evil”. Amis’s fiction, in contrast, does almost the opposite. In the fantastical floridity of its wickedness, his Auschwitz has — even the doltish Doll recognises this — “the decisive asset of being beyond belief”.

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Amis’s humour, as ever, wields an ethical edge. Genocidal cruelty pursued via super-sized bureaucracy merits more than a platitudinous notion of everyday “banality” — and Arendt’s own thought about Adolf Eichmann took a subtler shape. In prose fiction, if not through the camera’s irony-free lens, only an epic absurdity might begin to approach this place where reason fails and all “whys” expire. (Amis’s afterword quotes Primo Levi, informed by an Auschwitz inmate shortly after his arrival that “Hier ist kein warum [Here there is no why].”)

Which is not to say that, as a novel, The Zone of Interest invariably hits its mark. Authorial insights — and stylistic tics — jarringly intrude on Doll’s ineffably dumb soliloquies (“There was I… offing old ladies and little boys”). Thomsen’s conspiratorial banter and badinage sit uncomfortably beside his wolfishly cynical collaboration with an evil he can see. The final chapters drop all grotesquerie to shift into downbeat post-war reflection: “The beginning of the German compromise with sanity. Social realism was now the genre.” They read like an anxious afterthought, in case the preceding antic scenes had felt too much like fun.

“Under National Socialism,” muses Thomsen after 1945, “you looked in the mirror and saw your soul.” Amis the novelist looked into that benighted glass and saw a defiantly incorrigible comedian who thought that scourging laughter not only could dare to breach the gates of hell, but should do so. To achieve that depends on a public able both to see the joke, and see beyond the joke. Perhaps, a decade ago, Amis was already mistaken in the underlying optimism that laid such a bet on a supportive context and community. Perhaps Glazer is correct to assume that parts at least of his audience would misjudge any irony and stumble over satire. Even on screen, however, The Zone of Interest takes it as read that we turn up because we know, and care. “You had to be there” — in spirit, in sympathy, in solidarity. But what of the ever-increasing millions who choose to stay away?

My first literary obsession, aged 15, was with Kafka. Night after night I stayed up late, immersed in the phantasmagoria of his stories; for a while I felt bereft that I had nobody to discuss them with, until I practically bullied a school friend into reading Metamorphosis. (Yes, I was a normal, well-adjusted teen.) It was largely my desire to talk about literature that motivated me, for several years, to maintain a Twitter account. Mine was probably the most benign corner of social media. Instead of engaging in daily orgies of outrage and denunciation, I and the few thousand people I followed, and who followed me, spent our time online liking each other’s photos of paperbacks by Annie Ernaux or Rachel Cusk next to flat whites.

But by this summer I’d begun to feel that social media was corroding, if not destroying, my life as a reader. Having been told by a few people online that they enjoyed my book recommendations, I found myself not-quite-unconsciously tailoring my reading for them. Even when I learned to turn my phone off and put it in another room while reading, something in my brain’s wiring felt off. I still loved books, but my last experience of full literary immersion had come when I ran out of mobile data while reading Steinbeck in Turkey.

At the same time that I was discovering Kafka, W.G. Sebald was writing what would prove to be his final book. Austerlitz was published in 2001 and the question of how to be a “true reader” is central to it. The book contains no dialogue; it is the story of a story, a report almost entirely made up of memories relayed by the Czech-born Holocaust refugee Jacques Austerlitz to an unnamed Sebald-like narrator (whom I’ll take the liberty of calling “S.”). This is what gives the book its distinctive formal tic: almost every page contains the phrase “said Austerlitz”, or a more layered attribution such as “Vera remarked, said Austerlitz” or “Gerald once commented, said Austerlitz”. At times it becomes a set of nested stories; here is Austerlitz describing Balzac’s Colonel Chabert:

Je suis le Colonel Chabert, celui qui est mort à Eylau are the words with which he introduces himself, and then he tells the tale of the mass grave (a fosse des morts, as Balzac describes it, said Austerlitz), into which he was thrown…

A modernist like Kafka undermines our faith in subjectivity, but what are we to make of this more radical challenge to the possibility of narration, where Chabert’s story of returning from the grave is transmitted fifth-hand via a chain of proxies (Balzac, Austerlitz, S., Sebald — and now, to add a sixth, me)?

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Such conundrums have prompted the critic James Wood to call Sebald a “postmodernist”. But the label sits uneasily, because his books display a passionate (if anguished) commitment to necessity of truthfulness. Primo Levi reported in The Drowned and the Saved that almost all concentration camp survivors experienced a similar recurring dream: “they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to”. For this reason Levi had no patience with the “frivolous and irritating” postmodern idea of “incommunicability”. Communication, for Levi, is a responsibility of humans, and especially of survivors: “When the destruction was terminated, the work accomplished was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to recount his own death… We speak in their stead, by proxy.”

What kind of readers, what kind of people, must we be if we are to hear, and to bear, the tales of those come back from the grave? This is one way of stating the problem that obsessed Sebald, a German born in 1944 who was appalled by the “conspiracy of silence” caused by his compatriots’ “inability to mourn” their wartime losses and inability to confront their wartime crimes. Modernist and postmodernist novels emphasise the difficulty of telling our tales, but Sebald is as concerned with the problem of hearing the tales of others as the problem of transmitting them. For a member of a guilty people to attend and attest to the sufferings of its victims is not easy, nor should it be.

Except for one 11-page sentence, Austerlitz’s prose is syntactically conventional, and Anthea Bell’s translation (overseen and authorised by Sebald) contains some of the most beautiful English writing of modern times. But, with its 415 pages divided into five sections of a single paragraph each, the book makes substantial demands on the reader. By repeatedly obliging you to break off from its elliptical story mid-paragraph before reorientating yourself by circling back a few lines, the novel evokes the sense of a recurring dream, and one that never quite leaves you during waking hours.

It is easy to overlook the fact that Austerlitz is the story of a relationship. Jacques Austerlitz has much in common with earlier Sebald characters: his fissured sense of self; his parents’ death in the Holocaust; the fact that he is (as Freud wrote of one patient) “suffering from memories”. But it is in the depiction of his almost brotherly relationship with the book’s narrator (“S.”) that he is unique in Sebald’s oeuvre. We meet S. — a saturnine German-born scholar who has been living for many years in England — for the first time in Sebald’s first novel Vertigo, where he seemingly suffers a psychotic episode on a trip back to his homeland. After a brief disappearance from the text he returns, and becomes a constant presence in Sebald’s fiction.

In Austerlitz S., the book’s narrator, is both everywhere present and curiously absent. It is the work in which Sebald dares to draw closest to one of Germany’s Jewish victims, and so it required of him a kind of shrinking back, a self-recession, in order to make space for the protagonist. After the opening pages, apart from a few autobiographical interjections, the book is entirely given over to Jacques Austerlitz. The pair first meet in 1967 as solo travellers in Antwerp’s Centraal train station and, over several meetings in the succeeding years, S. listens patiently to Austerlitz’s ruminations, disquisitions and speculations, in which certain themes continually recur. For reasons Austerlitz “did not really understand” he is fascinated by trains and railway stations. He is as obsessed with moths as Nabokov (one of Sebald’s literary heroes) was obsessed with butterflies. He is much preoccupied with the history of fortifications, which he regards as an “insanity”, because “the more you entrench yourself the more you remain on the defensive”, helpless to repel the enemy’s attacks.

Early in the book Austerlitz tells S. that he suffers from total amnesia with respect to his earliest years. Raised by Welsh Calvinist foster parents, he discovered his true name as a teenager, but still he is unable to recall the circumstances of his arrival in Wales. There is then an interregnum of some two decades in Austerlitz and S.’s “close and distant” friendship, before they meet again by chance on the platform of Liverpool Street station in east London. This time Austerlitz, who has since had a breakdown, tells S. that he has recently discovered the truth about his past: his birth in pre-war Czechoslovakia, his escape from the Holocaust on a 1939 Kindertransport, and his parents’ capture by the Nazis before being “sent east” to their fate. He now needs the kind of listener S. once was in order to relate his sufferings.

In his eulogy for David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen defined literature as “a way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being”. Foster Wallace had spoken in similar terms, calling literature a space “where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated”. Sebald was as concerned with the problem of existential solitude as those writers but, as a German attempting to confront his country’s crimes and look its victims in the eye, his solution was more complex. He wrote witheringly of the several German writers of the Fifties in whose novels there is a “love story in which a good German man meets a Polish or Jewish girl”, allowing the “incriminating past” to be “‘reappraised’ sentimentally”. The need for “relatively safe middle ground” on which S. and Austerlitz can meet explains why, after first talking in Antwerp, communication breaks down between them while S. spends some years in Germany. But even when their conversation resumes in England, Austerlitz remains for S. (and for the reader) far from the kind of transparent, fully realised characters Franzen and Foster Wallace created.

In fact S.’s meetings with Austeritz seem to take place in a kind of extra-territorial afterlife or dreamworld, usually in the dying light of day (twilight functions as leitmotif in Sebald much like the fog in Dickens’s Bleak House), in landscapes of eerie silence where, in a phrase that recurs in various ways throughout Sebald’s writing, “there was not a soul in sight”. This labyrinthine alternate universe, where the pair are constantly losing and finding one another, is filled (as Sebald wrote of Nabokov’s fiction) with “curiously iridescent effects of light, mysterious coincidences and strange chance meetings”.

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In his 1914 paper “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” the father of dream analysis might almost have been thinking of Austerlitz’s obsession with train travel when he observed that the traumatised patient “does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out”. And his description of the psychoanalyst’s task — to “study the surface level of the patient’s mind” until, liberated from his repression, he “recounts without any difficulty the situations and contexts that he had forgotten” — calls to mind the way S. listens patiently to Austerlitz. The manner in which Austerlitz “put his ideas together as he talked… out of whatever occurred to him”, thus “bringing remembered events back to life”, is a perfect definition of Freud’s idea of “free association”. And it also characterises Sebald’s distinctive narrative style, which (to quote S.’s description of the paintings of Pisanello from Vertigo) succeeds in “creating the effect of the real, without suggesting a depth dimension, upon an essentially flat surface”.

James Wood, writing about The Emigrants, remarked that Sebald’s work is “not really about the Holocaust”. This is true in the sense that a person might undertake psychotherapy and not really speak about her trauma — might, in fact, speak about anything but. And yet the Holocaust is present everywhere in Sebald’s work, even — or perhaps especially — when it appears to be absent or repressed. As early as the second part of Vertigo, S. meets Malochio, a Jewish astrophysicist, who speaks to him of “the miracle of life born of carbon… going up in flames”. Carbon is both the fundamental stuff of life and the part of human bodies that burns; Sebald may also have had in mind the compound hydrogen cyanide (HCN), which some scientists believe may have triggered the evolution of animal life and, in a satanic irony noted by Primo Levi, formed the basis of the Zyklon B.

The word “Auschwitz” — the final destination, it is hinted, of both Austerlitz’s parents — never appears in Austerlitz. But, thanks to what Sebald calls in another context the “phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye” it seems to appear on almost every page, as though it were part of the text’s barely suppressed unconscious.

Just as we have appointments to keep in our daily lives, writes Sebald in one of Austerlitz’s most piercing passages, it may be “that we also have appointments to keep in the past… and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time”. In October 2019, believing I was belatedly ready to keep my own appointments in the past, I agreed to write a book about my upbringing by Welsh Calvinist parents, my teenage crisis of identity, and the addiction with which I had tried to blot out those memories and which had nearly killed me.

Then, on 20 November, my brother Jonathan died suddenly as a result of what had seemed his much milder addictions. A week later I watched his coffin lowered out of sight in a Swansea crematorium, and I began to fall apart. Unable to mourn, I fortified myself against pain by lapsing into silence over my loss, and over my guilt at having somehow survived, as it were, in my brother’s place. At one point, I broke down and was hospitalised. I spoke to several psychotherapists without ever mentioning my brother. We met, of course, in my dreams.

Although I finished writing my history of self-destruction, and saw it published last year, in the time after my brother’s death I receded further and further away from people, or they receded from me. I could no more bear other people’s company than I could bear to be alone. I drew people close to assuage my grief and loneliness and then, hating them for their proximity, repelled them. When the time came for me to talk publicly about my life in relation to my memoir, I increasingly found myself struck dumb, overcome by a sense of irremediable fissure between the self who had survived the past and the self who was struggling to survive the present. Attempting to outrun the same “paralysing horror” Sebald’s narrator describes after his own breakdown in The Rings of Saturn, I travelled — to Istanbul, Connecticut and, as though I might find my brother in our childhood home, Wales. But I felt, in every place I went, abysmally out of place.

Throughout this time, social media — a space where people were both “distant and close” — presented itself as a kind of solution to my problem. Twitter relieves loneliness in the same way that walking alone into a crowd of shouting people surely would. But on some level I knew that the ersatz connection with others provided by its infinite churn of speech was banishing from my life deeper forms of intimacy based on listening and attention. I knew in theory it was possible to possible to maintain both a social media account and meaningful human relationships; after all, I saw other people doing just that. But I began to believe there was a connection between my Twitter use and my growing isolation, my inability to describe my sufferings to myself or others, and my inability to mourn.

Literature, said Sebald in 2001, a month before the publication of Austerlitz and two months before he died in a car crash, “ought to be, as it were, a saving, or at least an attempt at the saving, of souls”. Soon after I left Twitter this summer, something began to shift. In the ensuing quiet, there was relief, and a more complete loneliness too. That, I had expected. I’d decided I had become incapable of being with other people because I was incapable of being alone. By giving up the ability to say anything to everyone at all times, I hoped to hear other things, to give myself a chance to tune into the unspeakable and the ineffable, from within or without.

Then, when the dog days were over, or at least seemingly coming to an end, I began reading Austerlitz. And I thought I sensed, as Sebald wrote (in relation, again, to Nabokov), the “tiny spiritual movement which releases the ideas that are shut inside our heads and always going around in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good sentence, there is a place for everything and everything is in its place”.

History is not some dry mathematical exercise, events mere beads on an abacus. It is built on human imagination: on the myths and ideas that define us. After all, most history today is told as national history — and what is a nation but a group of people who decide they are one? What, for that matter, is an ummah, a diaspora, race or religion? None of these things are facts, but make-believe constructs that are no less real for being so.

And so we return to Israel. On the one hand, we have the brute facts of the past fortnight — the abacus of despair. On 7 October, a coordinated attack by Hamas saw hundreds of Palestinian men break into Israel with the aim of murdering and kidnapping as many Jews as possible. The result was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust; the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history; more than 1,400 dead and 199 captured. Then came the inevitable response: the air assault on Gaza which has killed at least 3,000 Palestinians. And now the fog of war.

Today, a simple recounting of events is all but impossible, each story revealing far more about its narrator than the battle between Israel and Hamas. For some on the Left, for example, it is now “racist” to say the mass slaughter of Israelis was in any way antisemitic. Apparently, to do so is to project European values onto the Palestinians — who do not care about ethnicity, only occupation. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a take come so close to genuine insight, only to fall into the mud at the last. Can there be anything more obsessively Western than such an insistence on framing everything through the lens of colonialism and racism?

However absurd the argument might be, it is now the dominant framing through which history is seen in the West. This racist-coloniser logic runs through the Yale professor Zareena Grewal’s claim, for instance, that “settlers are not civilians” (and so, presumably, legitimate military targets for Hamas). And it is there in the now-common refrain that “Zionism is racism” or even “white supremacy”. In this view, Jews are just white Europeans, a bleakly dark irony of its own.

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At the heart of all these claims lies the same grim conclusion: that Israel itself is illegitimate, a settler state which should be wiped off the map as if it were some kind of Levantine Rhodesia. This is the logic behind signs reading “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — not a benign call for national liberation, but a demand for the conquest of Israel itself and, at least according to Hamas, death for the Jews who live there. The founding charter of Hamas is unequivocal on this point.

Yet instead of taking Hamas at its word, there seems to be an effort in the West to reinterpret its language into something more palatable to our own understanding of the world, filled as it is with ideas of endless progress and liberation. For many of us, national liberation is an axiomatic good, part of the progress of humanity towards an ever more perfect union — the opposite of colonialism.

What Hamas’s recent attack exposed, however, is the absurdity of believing that it shares this vision. Hamas is itself a colonial enterprise committed to the idea that there are Muslim lands which, once conquered, are forever Muslim and must expand to cover the whole world. “During the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement,” the Hamas Covenant asserts. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” Even if Hamas were merely a national liberation movement, an Arab IRA rather than a Palestinian Islamic State, such an idea of universal nationalism is surely utopian — as if all nations somehow naturally exist on land that is theirs by divine right.

We did not always assume this was self-evident. “It had been discovered and brought to people’s attention in the course of the 19th century that, in order to possess individuality as a citizen, every person must belong to a definite nationality or race,” spat Joseph Roth with evident dismissiveness in The Emperor’s Tomb, his great novella about the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “I hate nationalism and nation states,” declares his bitter old Prince. “My old home, the [Habsburg] Monarchy, alone, was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for, there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins.”

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The truth, of course, is that Roth’s grand European mansions hardly offered “every condition of men” the same home comforts, which is largely why the nations within them began to yearn for states of their own — including the Jews. The result was that the 20th century was a century of cabin conversions, which often left minorities on the wrong side of new walls thrown up overnight.

Israel is not unique in this regard. Poland only emerged in its modern form after the ethnic cleansing of East Prussian Germans who once lived there. Irish independence left a million or so Protestants in the North so enraged that they launched an armed insurrection to win a separate statelet of their own — which in course left a whole new minority homeless. In every case, how nations obtain their land is always murky, violent and colonial, granted legitimacy only through the slow process of time, power and hypocrisy.

Occasionally, we glimpse the double standards involved in this process — when an American congressman complains about “planters” in Ulster, for example, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he himself is a planter living in the last great European empire. I wonder how many of the American professors blithely declaring that Israelis are “settlers not civilians” would be happy for themselves to be treated as legitimate targets for slaughter by the Navajo or Apache? The very idea of an independent Palestinian state is the product, ironically, of the same belief in nationalism that led the early Zionists to demand a state of their own too.

Of course, the assault that Israel is about to unleash on Gaza is not just an event that will one day become a war of history — but one that is already the product of how Israelis understand their own history. And at the heart of it is a troubling question: is there a “solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, or does the search for solutions ignore the lessons of history itself?

“The history in my regular schooling was all about progress,” the fictional historian Ruben Blum recalls in Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Netanyahus: “A world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself.” This sentiment seems to be buried somewhere deep within the Western soul: the idea that, as Cohen writes, “the past was merely the process by which the present was attained”. In this understanding of history, an independent Palestinian state will eventually emerge, sovereign and democratic, at peace with its neighbour, just as Ireland and Ukraine will do the same.

And yet, as Cohen writes, there is another way of thinking about history: a Jewish understanding. “My Hebrew school history was closed,” says Blum in comparison. “It was no history; there was no past, no present, no future. Rather, there was time, as round and perfect as the earth, which from the moment it emerged from God’s spoken light had been marked by a constant repetition, not of seasons, or harvests, or astral phenomena and the holidays they governed, but of oppression, violence, and death.”

In Cohen’s novel, this rabbinical understanding of history is shared by Benzion Netanyahu, the real-life father of today’s Israeli prime minister. Benzion was one of the great historians of the Spanish Inquisition and argued that Iberian antisemitism was not the result of religious differences, but of pure Jew-hatred. As the real-life Benzion observed: “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts, carried out by antisemitic leaders and factions that managed to take over whole countries or regions in times of anarchy, civil war, or rebellion. In the areas that fell under their control, all Jewish communities were wiped out.”

Apart from the sudden exposure of Hamas’s genocidal intent, for me, the most disturbing realisation of the past fortnight is that perhaps Benzion was right. Intellectually, I knew antisemitism existed, though I had never witnessed it first-hand. But now I have. After the slaughter in Israel it was Palestinian flags that were being waved in the streets where I live, with Jewish kids told by their schools to pretend not to be Jewish.

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In Benzion’s understanding of history, the only way to survive this circular slaughter of history is to be armed and ready to fight. There is no solution — only vigilance. It is a pessimistic understanding, yet perhaps this is Israel’s fate, its history. This was the lesson of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the great hero of revisionist Zionism who warned the Jews of Palestine that the only way they could survive would be to build an iron wall with their neighbours. And it was also the message of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Chief of Staff, in his celebrated eulogy to Ro’i Rotberg, a kibbutz security officer killed on the Gazan border in 1956. “Yesterday with daybreak, Ro’i was murdered,” Dayan began:

“The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul on the furrow. Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”

But this was no call for withdrawal, guilt or even compromise. Dayan continued:

“Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty… Beyond the furrow that marks the border, lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquillity blunts our alertness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms.”

This, ultimately, is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s understanding of Israel’s predicament and, indeed, of Jewish history itself: fated to fight for survival and to be hated. And today, it feels harder than ever to argue that it is wrong. How could you, after a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was dragged from her shelter and shot in the head not far from where Dayan spoke? The tragedy here is stark: that the more people in the West choose a history which sees the very existence of Israel as illegitimate, the more Israelis will conclude that Jabotinsky, Dayan and Benzion were right all along — that Jews are never safe, that carnage is always lurking in the dark furrows of history.

Instead, Abbas launched into a tirade about Israeli crimes, saying that Israel had committed not only “50 massacres” but, in fact, “50 Holocausts”. The visibly annoyed Scholz did not think on his feet quickly enough to contradict Abbas’s relativisation of the Holocaust. Somewhat surreally, after Abbas had finished the two men shook hands and walked off.

Outrage was quick to follow. Abbas backtracked on his statement, and Scholz publicly stated his anger at what Abbas had said. Some German commentators suggested that Germany should rethink its funding for the Palestinian Authority. That idea did not gain traction. After all, the Palestinian Authority governs over those dense population centres in the West Bank that Israel, the occupying power since 1967, does not wish to govern itself. Germany’s funding of the corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority is in Israel’s interest. Ironically, yet largely unbeknown to the outraged German Twitterati, defunding Abbas is a demand that many of Israel’s strongest critics would happily get behind.

As much as it likes to claim the role of the peace-seeking outsider, Germany is deeply entrenched in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not only because of the importance of the Holocaust to the creation and self-understanding of the Jewish state. Germany played an important role in the conflict via its crucial economic, financial, and military support of Israel, especially before 1967. But the 1972 terrorist attacks, and Germany’s relationship with them even 50 years on, throw a spotlight on Germany’s true role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and its connected efforts to whitewash its barbaric past.

Munich was the second time Germany had been invited to host the Olympics. The first invitation came after the First World War, the follow-up after the Second. Both times, the idea was to symbolically welcome Germany back into the circle of “civilised” nations. When, in 1931, Germany was awarded the games to be held in 1936, the Olympic Committee did not envisage the imminent rise of Adolf Hitler to power. The infamous Nazi Olympics became a showcase for Nazi power and ideology. Jews were largely barred from participating.

In 1972, with Social Democrat and former Nazi opponent Willy Brandt in power, the danger of Germany backsliding into Nazism seemed remote. The Federal Republic appeared to be firmly entrenched in the Western bloc. It was also becoming a more autonomous player on the world stage via Brandt’s Russia-embracing Ostpolitik (itself a policy under much scrutiny these days). For West Germany, the 1972 Olympics were another milestone on the road to normalisation, and an occasion to show the world the friendly face of the “new” Germany.

There was, however, something schizophrenic about this effort. Twenty-seven years after the German defeat, most former Nazis and their legions of enablers were still alive. More than that, they were respected members of society. Post-war Germany had normalised its Nazis even before the world had normalised the new Germany. The bureaucrats, professors, diplomats, teachers, journalists, and captains of industry on which the West German state was founded all too often were compromised figures.

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And it could not have been otherwise. The main reason Western allies never saw denazification through was that getting rid of the Nazis would have meant crippling the German state to such a degree that it would have been unable to fulfil its function as a frontline state in the Cold War. The Cold War enabled the survival of the German state at the cost of letting most perpetrators go unpunished. Most recently, David De Jong’s new book Nazi Billionaires shows to what extent Germany’s tycoon families owe their wealth to their involvement in Nazi crimes. His study is the latest of historical efforts to show the extent to which the new Germany was built on the old.

Due to the manifold continuities of Nazism in the new republic — not least in terms of lingering antisemitic and racist attitudes and an only slowly-eroding authoritarian mindset — West Germany needed to signal to the outside world a democratic and civil character. While this was especially true of the immediate post-war years, virtue signalling to the outside world has long become part of the German foreign policy package (a tough pursuit of economic interest being the other and more important part).

And so, in 1972, the German hosts wanted to organise Games that were opposite in spirit to those of 1936. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of the master race, the Olympics were meant to showcase the newfound German pacifism. And this they did, uncompromisingly so. Die heiteren Spiele — the joyous games — went the official slogan. To ensure that nothing disturbed the joyousness, German security guards at the Olympic village were unarmed and dressed in light blue suits, the literal opposite of the black-clad and armed SS-men patrolling the grounds in 1936.

By today’s standards, the lack of security measures was baffling. About as baffling as passengers smoking on a plane, or, for that matter, smuggling guns onto a plane and hijacking it. After all, these were the Seventies, a golden age for anti-colonial and radical Left-wing terrorism. As archival research by journalists of German magazine Der Spiegel revealed, German security services were warned of potential terrorist plots on the Games. However, no effort was being made to increase security measures. Showcasing the peacefulness of the new Germany took priority over safety concerns for Israeli athletes.

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On the morning of September 5, eight members of Black September climbed the walls of the Olympic compound and proceeded to the quarters of the Israeli team. They killed two athletes and took nine Israelis hostage. The next day, after a catastrophically botched German rescue mission undeserving of its name, all Israelis had been killed by the terrorists. One German policeman was dead, as were five of the eight Palestinians. Zvi Zamir, chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, was present at the final shootout. “They didn’t make even a minimal effort to save lives,” an exasperated Zamir reported. Zamir was shocked to realise that the German priority had been to continue the Games with as little interruption as possible. Surprisingly and bizarrely, the “joyous Games” had remained uninterrupted almost throughout the whole hostage crisis. While the Israeli team left the Games, the rest of the world continued with the competition.

Two months later, Black September hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Beirut and blackmailed Germany into releasing the three surviving members of the Munich squad. Israel had warned Germany of such a scenario and had asked Bonn not to give in to terrorist demands. Germany did the opposite and expedited the three Palestinian prisoners to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were given a hero’s welcome. Israel was furious. Germany, its crucial ally, had not only refused Israeli help and advice during the Munich hostage crisis but had acted against every principle of Israeli counterterrorism policy.

The attack by Black September was an attack not only on the Israeli team but implicitly also on the political rationale behind the games. Black September named its operation “Ikrit and Biram” after two Palestinian villages razed to the ground after the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and whose inhabitants were banned from returning. All of a sudden, Ikrit and Biram were violently forced into one historical equation with Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement, and nearby Dachau, the first concentration camp on German soil. This was a brutal collision of different historical events and logics. A terror attack rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took on a new meaning: Jews were murdered in what was meant to be the new Germany. And more than just a historical footnote in this context is the fact that Black September was aided in its preparations by a known German neo-Nazi. 

The Munich attacks and Israel’s uncompromising retaliation mission in its aftermath have been covered in academic writing, a Steven Spielberg movie, and the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September. It is the stuff of Cold War spy thrillers. Less attention has been paid to the German role in the whole affair. One question is why Germany had been so insensitive to Israeli wishes and opinions throughout the crisis. Germany had widely been considered a key ally of Israel up to that point, and for good reason. However, wondering why Germany had acted irresponsibly towards Jewish lives on its soil misses the original point of West Germany’s pro-Israeli orientation. This point was explained by former chancellor Konrad Adenauer on primetime German television in 1966: “We had done to the Jews so much injustice, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired if we were at all to regain our international standing… Furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”

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Here, as well as on other occasions, Adenauer stated clearly that the goal behind Germany’s support of Israel was rehabilitation — regaining international standing. That goal is then intertwined with a core idea of modern antisemitism: supposed Jewish influence over world affairs. To Adenauer, this was a natural thing to say to the German public as late as 1966. Rehabilitation, whitewashing the past, faking democracy — whatever you want to call it, the Federal Republic consistently prioritised its international reputation over domestic efforts at working through the past.

Belatedly, the German government is seeking to make amends for its 50-year old failure to protect its Israeli guests. Last week, a €28 million compensation deal was finally agreed with relatives of the Israeli victims. No amount of compensation, however, can undo history.

What Black September did in September 1972 was to crash a German party that was all about celebrating and showcasing a novel Germany to the world. And the German response to the terrorist attack was guided by one overarching desire: to throw the party crashers out the door and to continue the party. In the process, 11 Israeli athletes were killed. Perhaps, when the German journalist asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas whether he wanted to apologise for what happened in Munich 50 years ago, he should have addressed this question to Chancellor Scholz as well.

But I suppose I had some idea what he was up to. Aged 17, studying for my A-levels at boarding school, and more interested in the female company of Munich than in the politics going on around me, my father’s work was off-limits. The Cold War was my adolescent playground.

There is one disturbing thing I do remember very vividly. My father was a member of the American PX in a little town 20 miles or so north of Munich. There was a cheap, tax-free supermarket there, and a recreational facility for its military members, including a golf course. There my father taught me to swing a club at a little white ball, to take pleasure in the satisfying sound of a well-struck shot. I still have the bug. But the name of the town was Dachau. And right next door to the club was the former concentration camp.

I still have disturbing dreams about that course, 40 year later, given how inappropriately it was situated. In some I slice a ball out of bounds and into the place where men, women and children were shot and burned — my fun-filled summer holidays coming into direct emotional contact with the horror of the Holocaust. The dreams interweave my father’s mysterious job, his Jewishness, the ovens of the camp, Hitler’s face on a violently defaced poster in the exhibition at Dachau, images of emaciated men being tortured in ice baths — all jumbled up with my own summer holiday recreation, barbecues down on the banks of the River Isar, the nudist colony in the Englischer Garten, of course, and my own teenage fumblings. Lots here for my shrink to unravel.

Of course, I felt guilty at having so much fun. Sex and golf were my peace dividend. My girlfriend was a pacifist; all of the people I met my age were pacifists. We sang 99 Luftballons by Nena. And in the year I arrived in Germany, 1981, a peace demonstration was held in Bonn, a protest both at the existence of nuclear weapons and at the presence of American and British bases on German soil. Around 300,000 people turned up that day: Christians, union members, students. I didn’t tell my new friends what my father did.

I also remember the graffiti. Munich was a seriously tidy and ordered town, but hate-filled graffiti was still puked up on the walls under flyovers, mostly about Turkish Gastarbeiters — immigrant workers. “What is the difference between a Turk and a Jew? Forty years”, was the one I cannot forget. The tidiness of the place wasn’t able to hide the fact that this was Hitler’s home patch.

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How different Germany today is from the Eighties. At Berlin’s train stations — yes, trains too are inevitably a part of the nightmares — tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are now being welcomed by generous open-hearted German volunteers, providing shell-shocked families with hot drinks and food, advising them where to find permanent shelters. In 2015-16 Germany took in over a million refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. During my lifetime at least, the Germans have been the conscience of Europe, responding to their defeat in the war and their national shame with a reinvention of their national consciousness.

This process — Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “overcoming the past” — was the only way Germany could come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust. Nobody wants to look at the darkest parts of their history. It is the equivalent of discovering that your parents were killers. After decades of post-war denial, a new German generation, coming of age in the Sixties, insisted on digging up the past. They were called Nestbeschmutzer (“nest-foulers”) and were derided. But what they began set in motion the process that created modern Germany.

Today, the country pauses to engage in what the historian Susan Neiman calls “public rites of repentance” around events such as Kristallnacht, and the liberation of Auschwitz. There are the “stumbling stones” — plaques placed throughout Berlin to mark where Jews lived before the Nazis deported them. And, where it cannot be missed, at the centre of the capital: the Holocaust Memorial.

Of course, there was (and is) some barely hidden recidivism — especially in the East. But I never really encountered it, apart from dark messages scrawled under flyovers. I lived in Germany before the wall came down. For me, Germany was a place of peace and love. But also a place of hidden secrets. They only met in sleep, when a golf ball was sliced from one psychic realm to another.

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Two weeks ago, the new German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced a massive €100 billion rise in German defence spending. This includes the purchase of F-35 fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The rational side of my brain thinks this is a good thing, the Germans rising to the challenge of this new era of Russian aggression. For too long, the Germans have not contributed their fair share to Nato — something Nato has calculated as 2% of GDP — or to the defence of the vulnerable globally. Some might say that they have freeloaded on the defence spending of other countries, and kept their own hands clean by relying on others to make the impossible moral decisions that keep down dictators like Assad and Putin. But my emotional side mourns the final end of that 1981 summer of love in Germany and fears the sight of what looks to me like an Iron Cross on the side of the aeroplanes that my father helped to develop.

Putin’s war against Ukraine has destroyed the long taboo about Germany and the military. After the war, the Germans were allowed to maintain a small army, looking East across the wall, towards the Soviet Union. Out of the ruins of the Forties, a kind of default pacifism was established as the norm.

As recently as 2019, the German government refused to even consider an American request to send ground troops into Syria. One year previously, 72% of the population were against committing the German military against Assad, even if he was using chemical weapons against his own people.

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On the 70^th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy, the head of the German Evangelical church, Margot Käßmann , refused to countenance the idea that the defeat of the Nazis could constitute a just war: “There can be no just war,” she said. “That was even true of the Second World War”. No one pushed back against this. “German pacifism is here to stay,” wrote the political editor of Die Zeit in 2019, “and there is no use asking the country to be what it isn’t.”

All of which makes the events of recent weeks so much more extraordinary. German pacifism is no more. Germany is about to have the third largest defence budget in the world, behind only the US and China. Some will feel that this is as it should be. For others it will bring back dark and disturbing memories. For me, it is both.