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Friday, February 18, 2011

A chilling account of the rise of Nazism : The Death of the Adversary

The narrator in Hans Keilson's excellent novel "The Death of the Adversary" refuses to recognize the evil nature and the danger of his enemy or adversary, referred to only as B, but obviously Hitler in 1930s Germany. The narrator rationalizes and intellectualizes everything - he knows that B has named the narrator's people, those bearing the mark, as he calls it, Jews, obviously, as the enemy, but he rationalizes that there's no real danger, that B simply needs an adversary in order to build support and sharpen his views - he sees the entire cataclysm of the rise of Nazism as a dialectic, something playing out in the realm of ideas. Why is this? He's clearly full of shame and self-loathing, ashamed of his parents and their timidity and accommodation; also, a refusal to recognize himself as in any way different from others in his (unnamed) country - he cannot bear the shame of being ostracized, as he was in childhood. So now we see him, half-way through the book, as a young man - he's traveling somewhere, staying at an inn, and as it happens B is giving a speech at the inn, which the narrator listens to - and he's captivated and moved by the power of B's voice and his oration - rather than horrified or terrified at what B is saying. Eventually a mob breaks in, tears apart the tavern - these are evidently an anti-B force, perhaps other Jews, but the narrator will not join, in fact just coolly rationalizes again and commiserates with the innkeeper. A very strange novel told with a chilling narrative style.

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