by Allan Massie
THE
SINS
OF THE
FATHER
ALLAN
MASSIE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ALAN TAYLOR
First, as ever, for Alison
Then for Richard Cohen,
whose idea it was
Introduction
by Alan Taylor
The trial in Jerusalem in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann was what we have learned to call a media circus. Between 1941 and 1945 Eichmann was directly responsible for the transporting of over two million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps. By the late 1950s, however, he had sunk into semi-obscurity in Argentina, a favourite hiding place of fugitive Nazis. As his biographer, David Cesarani, acknowledged, he was “a colourless administrator of mass murder” and might well have remained so had the head of the Israeli Secret Service not received a tip off as to his whereabouts.
It was Hannah Arendt who first portrayed Eichmann as just another efficient cog in a wheel that was madly spinning. Far from being unusual or unique, Eichmann, at least to Arendt, was an ordinary man, easily replaceable, unimaginative, the embodiment of her resonant phrase, “the banality of evil”. He had never himself physically murdered anyone. Rather he was the one who flourished his pen and signed the death warrants with no more thought than an author autographing books.
Thus, as Cesarani has acknowledged, “From the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s the mass murder of the Jews was seen as the zenith of modern bureaucracy, rather than as a throwback to barbarism. Nazi Germany was characterised as a super-centralised modern and hierarchical state in which power and authority flowed from the top downwards and officials decided the fate of millions. Mass murder was a ‘medicalised’ process or an economic rationalisation carried out by professional men, doctors and lawyers, in crisply pressed black uniforms, who consigned human beings to ‘Fordist’ death factories on the basis of quasi-rational decisions derived from racial eugenics and economic planning. Eichmann, the bureaucratic desk-killer par excellence, thus became a key to one of the most enduring approaches to the Nazi era and the ‘Final Solution’.”
Allan Massie was not the first Scottish novelist to recognise in the trials of Nazis which followed Germany’s defeat a subject rich in fictional potential. Muriel Spark, of whom Massie wrote a formative study, attended the Eichmann trial for five days at the behest of the Observer and later drew on the experience for The Mandelbaum Gate, which appeared in 1965. For Spark, whose father was Jewish, the sight of Eichmann dissembling and deferring to the bench, as he had once deferred to Hitler and others in Nazi hierarchy, was sickening and disturbing. She had recently completed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which fascism is allowed insidiously to flourish in an Edinburgh school, and here she was looking into its face. Yet she could not side wholeheartedly with the Israelis in their re-established homeland. In particular, she found their attitude to the Arabs whom they had displaced deeply worrying. Out of all of this emerged in her novel in which the heroine, Barbara Vaughan, is made to think that, “Knots were not necessarily created to be untied. Questions were things that sufficed in their still beauty, answering themselves.”
Whether Allan Massie would subscribe to such a philosophy is debatable. What one can safely say, however, is that such knots as he presents in The Sins of the Father are not easily unravelled. Throughout a prolific career as a novelist and journalist, Massie has been concerned with rejecting pat answers or solutions. Quick fixes are not his default. Simple solutions to complex problems are relatively rare. History is worth consulting for precedents and guidance. But the past was no more black and white than the present. The story of human beings is that of choices and circumstances and relationships. Why we act in one way rather than another is freighted with possibility and danger. Sentimentality is as pernicious as deceit. Good men are capable of doing bad things and vice versa, especially, but not exclusively, in a time of a war. That is a fact, the denial of which is a denial of the truth. In the Second World War, there were good Germans and bad Germans, as there were good Jews and bad Jews, even in the concentration camps. Ultimately, we are all Jock Tamson’s Bairns.
In 1977, when he was 39 years old, Massie contributed an essay to a book of that title. In “Retrospective”, he looked back and forward, noting as he did so that, “The past I write down today is then the past for today.” He also decried “the beastliness of Predestination” while speaking up for Calvinism. “The image is the Kirk in the moorlands, man face to face with God: reductio ad simplicitatem. It is God felt as a pure Wind of Reason and also as something beyond reason.” A couple of pages further on he recited Tancredo’s conservative mantra from Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard, to which he has since returned often: “Things will have to change if we want them to remain the way they are.” At the beginning and the end of the essay Massie describes how swans will drown ducks, for pleasure and because they want to.
All of the above sentiments have found their way into Massie’s fiction and, in particular, The Sins of the Father. Interestingly, no overt mention is made in “Retrospective” of World War II. He was of course too young to have other than a bystander’s view of it. What he knew of it and what the effect on him was he does not say. Born in Singapore and brought up in a farming community in Aberdeenshire, he would have been less aware of it than many boys of his age. His early novels, starting with Change and Decay in All Around I See in 1978, followed in quick succession by The Last Peacock (1980), The Death of Men (1981) and One Night in Winter (1984), had echoes, variously, of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene and even, in the case of the last mentioned, James Kennaway.
Of those, The Death of Men is perhaps the best indicator of how Massie’s work was developing. Based loosely on the kidnapping of the Italian politician Aldo Moro in 1978, it combined elements of the thriller with a serious exploration of political and personal morality in the 1970s not only in Italy but across Western Europe, climaxing in “a grand orgy of hypocrisy”. Massie’s next novel in a similar vein was A Question of Loyalties, published in 1989, which can be viewed as a loose-fitting prequel to The Sins of the Father. Set during World War II in Vichy France, its central character is Lucien de Balafré, an idealist with a deep sense of duty, his aim during the war being to serve France. But that proves not to be as simple as it sounds and Massie uses Lucien to demonstrate that in a time of war individuals, whose view of the bigger picture is not as clear as it could be, can find themselves on the wrong side at the wrong time fighting the wrong enemy and supporting an ideology that their old pre-war selves would have found abhorrent.
By the time The Sins of the Father opens, however, the war is already slipping from view. The novel begins in the 1960s in Argentina which not only helped Nazis escape pursuit but, under the regime of Juan Perón, consciously offered them succour and protection. It is some two decades since Hitler’s demise and in Buenos Aires it is as if the Holocaust had never happened. Franz and Becky are apparently in love and determined to be married. He is the son of a German engineer who is also a Nazi criminal; she is the daughter of a blind Jewish economist and a survivor of the concentration camps. When the two families are brought together by the impending nuptials, Eli, Becky’s father, recognises – by his voice – Rudi, Franz’s father, and sets in motion his apprehension and removal to Israel where he will be tried for war crimes, following in the footsteps of Eichmann who was found guilty and executed.
If that all seems too neat and symmetrical it is anything but. Nothing, save for Massie’s style, is tidy in a plot that is as intricate as it is raw and discursive. As Rudi sits in the dock, Becky discusses with Luke, a young Israeli novelist, the comparative horrors of the Holocaust and
Hiroshima. For Luke, the Holocaust wins hands down, which, he says, cannot be understood if “you don’t realise that Hitler held out the offer not only of revenge.”
“Revenge for what?” asks Becky.
“What you like,” replies Luke. “Let us say for the humiliation of existence. Not only revenge, but hope. A clean sweep. A new purified beginning. You cannot understand it unless you are prepared to accept how attractive Nazism was in its early days… If I had been German, and not a Jew, I would, no, I might well have been a Nazi in 1928.”
This, then, is the crux of Massie’s intelligent, intellectually challenging and disturbing novel. It is meant, of course, to make us think as well as to entertain us. What happened in Germany from Hitler’s rise to power until his craven suicide, we are led to believe, could have happened anywhere if the conditions had been similar. The exercise and acceptance of power was crucial to the reality of the Holocaust. Who did what to whom and when was, in a sense, as banal as producing motor cars. Moreover, Massie appreciates that the scale of the killing was so outrageous that it was almost beyond imagination and therefore capable of being dismissed from our minds. For who knows what six million people look like? How much space do they take up? Later in his peroration Luke tells Becky that large numbers became playthings. He is talking, initially, about the calamitous collapse of the German currency in the 1920s. Then he adds, “Besides, it is easier to kill a million men than ten. The ordinary person couldn’t even bring himself to kill a single calf, but the slaughterhouse worker kills hundreds and goes home to a good supper.”
It is hard to read this passage and not think of the then prevailing view of Eichmann, who for so long was deemed in the great scheme of things to be relatively insignificant. In that regard he is like Rudi, and much of what he – as a fictional character – tells us about himself is similar to much of the mythology that grew up around Eichmann. Like Eichmann, Rudi as a young man encountered Jews he hated. His life was going nowhere and he dreamt of killing himself. He had menial, dead-end jobs. Then, he tells Franz, he heard Hitler speak and it was as if he had been given a life-saving injection. “He spoke to me, directly to me, in an audience of thousands.” The Bible contains similar descriptions of Christ’s effect on those who saw him preach. “That was his genius,” says Rudi of Hitler. “He spoke to those who had been isolated and who in their isolation had ceased to believe even in the possibility of their own existence. Unless you understand that, you understand nothing. I joined the party. Oh, moment of blessed release and fulfilment! I had become someone.”
Rudi’s conversion to National Socialism was religious in its intensity, as was Eichmann’s. In Hitler, they both found their saviour, someone to lead them to the Promised Land, where there would be Lebensraum aplenty. But how men who had previously been nobodies could become mass killers is a mystery that has perplexed countless scholars and philosophers. What seems the most likely explanation is that somehow, without being specifically ordered to do so, they read his thoughts and gave him what he wanted. The sociologist Max Weber termed this “charismatic authority”, which he described as “power legitimised on the basis of a leader’s exceptional personal qualities or the demonstration of extraordinary insight and accomplishment, which inspire loyalty and obedience from followers.” It is as if a whole population was not free to act individually and according to conscience. They were transfixed, mesmerised, automatised, brutalised, dehumanised. Their sin was made manifest in their inability to react, which makes The Sins of the Father a novel that continues to haunt our thoughts and force us to ask what would we do, what could we do, what must we do, if ever we are confronted with anything remotely similar.
THE
SINS
OF THE
FATHER
Lo pianto stesso lì pianger non lascia,
e’l duol che truova in sugli occhi rintroppo,
si volge in entro a far crescer l’ambascia…
The very weeping there forbids to weep,
And grief finding eyes blocked with tears
Turns inward to make agony greater…
Dante: Inferno, Canto XXXIII
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
THE SINS OF THE FATHER
Epigraph
PART ONE: Buenos Aires, Argentina
One
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
PART TWO: ISRAEL
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
PART THREE: AFTERWARDS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
Copyright
PART ONE
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1964
One
If Franz was English, Nell thought, I would be charmed and reassured, even though he looks more like a best friend than a husband. Her own view of England was out-of-date: Brown’s Hotel and Fortnum’s; the minor public school where her father had been a housemaster for twenty years, and taught history for forty. She could picture Franz there, dewy in white flannels, a boy whom her father would undoubtedly have made a prefect. He was still today, in this city of shining skyscrapers and gaunt blocks of workers’ apartments and the fringe shanty-towns, the sort of boy who would get to his feet when a lady entered a room, and hold the door open for her when she left, and write thank you letters. She was touched by his good and gentle manners.
They were eating chocolate nut sundaes in the Café Inglés, and Rebecca looked at her mother, and said, “Franz is playing rugby for the University tomorrow. Why don’t you come and watch, Mummy?”
She spoke English as they had always done in the family. But Franz wasn’t English, and his blondness was disturbing, not reassuring at all. Which was absurd.
Well, she thought, they are children. They look as if they haven’t even touched each other, and Franz has still three years of his engineering course to go. But then she saw the look on Becky’s face as she watched him, and thought, oh dear, I wasn’t prepared for this, she can’t take her eyes off the boy. And he was a nice boy, no doubt about it.
“Only the second team, I’m afraid,” he said, “the second Fifteen. I would be awfully pleased if you did care to come. Mamma never has, but, you understand, she has a new family to care for…”
He spoke English, like most of them, with a touch of an American accent. How they deplore the Americans, and resent them, yet can’t escape their influence, she thought. He does seem a nice boy. I hope Becky isn’t in too much of a hurry.
* * * *
She might have said, “Yes, she couldn’t keep her eyes off him,” but though she had long ago given up trying not to mention eyes and sight and seeing to Eli, all she said was what she had been repeating to herself since she knew she would have to speak to her husband about it: “We mustn’t be prejudiced.”
It was a weak, silly word and she knew he heard its ineptitude. Ineptitude: well, words weren’t her line.
He continued to stroke Biba, their Siamese cat, but at the same time stretched out his left hand and lifted the arm of their old-fashioned manual gramophone, arresting Bruch’s Violin Concerto in mid-phrase; the record continued to spin. She knew he would allow it to continue doing so, undisturbed by the faint whirring, and then, when they had finished their conversation, or as a sign that he thought it had gone far enough, he would replace the needle – acting by some sense which she had never been able to fathom – at almost the exact bar which he had interrupted.
“No,” she said again, “we mustn’t be prejudiced.”
He smiled at her, making her still m
ore nervous. He picked a cheroot from the open box on the little table and rolled it between his fingers, then lit it with an old petrol lighter. If the cat hadn’t been on his lap, he would have used a match, which was the method preferred, but manipulating the box of matches required the use of both hands, and he kept one stroking Biba to keep the cat happy.
“He seems a nice boy,” she said. “I don’t think he’s political.”
He puffed out smoke.
“I’ve been worried,” she said, “that she would choose someone who was. Rebecca feels things so deeply, she’s got such a sense of injustice. But I want her to be safe.”
“Ah yes,” he said. “We would all like our loved ones to be safe. What does the boy’s father do?”
“He’s an engineer too. He’s building a bridge up-country. They’re divorced. The mother’s married again. To a General, I understand, and they have a young family. I think the boy, Franz, feels a bit out of things.”
“And is the mother German?”
“Oh yes, I think so. But I don’t really know. I didn’t ask. I just assumed.”
He nodded.
“We’ll have to see,” he said, knowing she disliked hearing him use the word so naturally, and picked up the gramophone arm to let the music invade the room.
Nell drove her little Fiat with a zest that would have amazed her own mother. She could feel Becky tense in the passenger seat, but was happy to know that her driving wasn’t the cause.
“Daddy really wants to see Franz? He’s not angry?”
“You are silly, darling.”
“You don’t have to come. Or stay if you don’t want to. We could easily come back to tea.”
“No, I want to come, I’ve told you twenty times I’m looking forward to it. I was brought up on rugger, you know, being a schoolmaster’s daughter. It’ll be a treat, like old times.”