Written while Hans Keilson was in hiding during World War II, The Death of the Adversary is the self-portrait of a young man helplessly fascinated by an unnamed “adversary” whom he watches rise to power in 1930s Germany. It is a tale of horror, not only in its evocation of Hitler’s gathering menace but also in its hero’s desperate attempt to discover logic where none exists. A psychological fable as wry and haunting as Badenheim 1939, The Death of the Adversary is a lost classic of modern fiction.
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Praise for Death of the Adversary
“For busy, harried or distractible readers who have the time and energy only to skim the opening paragraph of a review, I’ll say this as quickly and clearly as possible: The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key are masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius . . . Although the novels are quite different, both are set in Nazi-occupied Europe and display their author’s eye for perfectly illustrative yet wholly unexpected incident and detail, as well as his talent for storytelling and his extraordinarily subtle and penetrating understanding of human nature. But perhaps the most distinctive aspect they share is the formal daring of the relationship between subject matter and tone. Rarely has a finer, more closely focused lens been used to study such a broad and brutal panorama, mimetically conveying a failure to come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name . . . Rarely have such harrowing narratives been related with such wry, off-kilter humor, and in so quiet a whisper. Read these books and join me in adding him to the list, which each of us must compose on our own, of the world’s very greatest writers.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
“A welcome reissue of a classic . . . This psychologically subtle and acute account of denial in the face of Hitler’s rise to power received strong acclaim before disappearing from print. With the celebration last year of the 100th birthday of Keilson . . . the novel has lost none of its insidious power . . . The narrative recalls the existential depth of Camus and the fabulist absurdity of Kafka or Beckett.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The power of the unsaid haunts this devastating novel . . . A profoundly affecting exploration of the inextricable nature of love and hate, friend and enemy, Keilson’s work . . . is as stimulating today as it was half a century ago.” —Publishers Weekly
“Since Adolf Hitler, an outpouring of writing has tried to explain the violence that human beings do to one another . . . Perhaps the profoundest explanation to date comes from the pen of a Jewish writer driven from Germany in 1936 and now living in Holland. Hans Keilson’s novel subtly and eloquently probes the ambivalent relation of victim with aggressor . . . Keilson traces the growth of hatred in his leading character as other writers trace love or self-knowledge.” —Time, Best Books of 1962
About the Author
Hans Keilson is the author of Comedy in a Minor Key. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel in 1933. During World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. Later, as a psychotherapist, he pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. In a 2010 New York Times review, Francine Prose called Keilson a “genius” and “one of the world’s very greatest writers.” He died in 2011 at the age of 101.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
48 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Rise Of Evil,
By
This review is from: The Death of the Adversary: A Novel (Paperback)
This is a brief novel that is not beach reading. First translated in 1962 from Dutch into English, it is a psychological examination of how good people merely watched the rise of Adolf Hilter in the 1930's. It was written by Hans Keilson, a German Jew who fled to the Netherlands before World War II, participated in the Resistance against the Nazis and made the Netherlands his permanent home after World War II. The book is not a thriller, but an inner dialogue of a future victim who can not comprehend the evil he is observing. The prose is in a detached style with sentences that needs to be re-read again and again to fully understand them. It is worth reading.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The horror! The horror!,
By
This review is from: The Death of the Adversary: A Novel (Paperback)
What is the relationship between persecutors and their victims? In The Death of The Adversary - poised on the brink of what soon will be one of the world's most horrific tragedies - an unnamed narrator in an unnamed country reflects on an unnamed figure who will soon ascend to power. Although the figure ("B") is never revealed, it soon becomes obvious that he is Hitler and that the narrator is of Jewish descent.
The narrator - who bemoans his own passivity - is blessed, or cursed, with high intelligence. Because he is unable to come to grips with evil for its own sake, he twists his logic to make sense out of the insensible; he knows B hates what the narrator represents, but he believes that the narrator desperately needs that hatred and, in fact, feeds on it...eliciting hatred in return. He goes further: in his "logical" mind, he believes that the adversary and his victims are in a state of symbiosis, feeding upon each other and because of their mutual need, neither adversary will eliminate the other. History, of course, has sadly shown how ludicrous this conclusion was. The key character muses, "I could not give him up; I needed him. His existence meant my destruction in the near future, that much was certain. But his sudden death, or some other event that would have robbed me of his threatening presence, would equally have destroyed me. Between us two, ties and obligations had come into being, perceptible only to those whose share in the things of this world lie in suffering. A strange and questionable share, perhaps; but who can break the community that secretly establishes itself between the persecutors and their victims?" Mr. Keilson uses a conceit in presenting these musings; his fictional (or autobiographical?) narrator has deposited a manuscript for safekeeping during the war years. Now, as he awaits word of the death of B, he rekindles his memory about the events of those pre-war years. In haunting prose, he remembers his father's words when he was only 10: "If B. should ever come to power, may God have mercy on us. Then things will really start to happen." He recalls being ostracized from a group of non-Jewish children who expel him from their games. He remembers the ending of a close friendship with another man who, it turns out, is enthralled by B. and his ideas. He recounts the two times when his path and his adversary's intersected. And, in one of the most devastating parts of the book, he recreates an evening at the apartment of a saleswomen he worked with whose brother and friends are revealed to be Nazi thugs, who desecrate a supposed Jewish cemetery to prove that even in death, Jews will not allowed to experience peace. As the young man describes in exhaustive detail how gravestones - even those of young children - were defaced, our narrator sits transfixed, unable to admit to his heritage or condemn these monstrous acts. It bears acknowledging that Hans Keilson - now a centenarian - lives in an Amsterdam village, after the Nuremberg laws forced him to flee from his native Germany. He is a psychoanalyst who pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. It is no surprise, then, that the book is underpinned by a deep psychoanalysis of the relationship of perpetrator and victim, and the victim's sense of denial and self-delusion. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't. By removing the victim from his more primal emotions, there is a certain sterility that is not normally seen in Holocaust-themed books. The translator, Ivo Jarosy, appears to take a literal rather than interpretive approach, which creates a certain British formality in tone. Still, as Arthur Miller once wrote, "Attention must be paid." Hans Keilson is one of the last witnesses to the atrocity that was the Holocaust. In an era where - incredibly - a new breed of Holocaust deniers are rearing their ugly heads, it is important for the world to understand once again the sheer evil and damning repercussions of this most heinous act of genocide.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Elk and the Wolves,
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This review is from: The Death of the Adversary: A Novel (Paperback)
At 100, German-born Jewish author and psychoanalyst (among a variety of other things) Hans Keilson, was surprised to say the least when he read Francine Prose's glowing praise of two of his WWII era novels in the Sunday NYT book review. The re-released novels were "masterpieces", she wrote, the author "a genius". For Keilson, who fled Nazi Germany for the Netherlands in 1936, such praise is merely icing on the bittersweet cake of his life. During the war, he had been unable to convince his parents to escape the motherland early enough. Although they were able to defect eventually to the Netherlands, they'd been too old and sickly, and had never really been able to sense the gravity of the danger they were in. Keilson's parents were soon deported and died at Aushwitz; he still suffers with guilt to this day. In a recent interview in the New York Times, Keilson reacts to Prose's words by confessing that his scientific work in the field of psychoanalysis is truly more important to him in the scope of his life than any of his novels.
At the outset of one of those novels, Death of the Adversary, the narrator explains that the manuscript herein was given to him by a Dutch lawyer, who had, two and a half years into the war, obtained it, along with other important personal documents, from a client of his, an enigmatic German, a mystery man of sorts. The anonymous author had entreated his attorney to keep these papers in a safe place until such time as he could retrieve them. "Read them and tell me what you think of them" says the lawyer to his friend, the narrator, who presumably is a psychiatrist of some repute. The resulting novel consists of the fictionalized memoir of this mysterious German, in which he wrestles with the relationship between himself and the one he calls his "adversary", the enemy of his family, his people. This adversary, who is never mentioned by name, called only B throughout, obviously represents Adolph Hitler; and the memoirist's people, the Jews - a word, incidentally never used in his writings. The title word, Adversary, is an interesting and careful choice since it is commonly an appellation of Satan, and would logically connote the paradisaical serpent along with Hitler (B in our story), as he seductively tempts his fellow Deutsch-landers, bending their will to the perpetration of genocide. This equation of Hitler to the devil would seem hackneyed from a less insightful writer, instead Keilson delves deep into the relationship between adversaries, exploring the magnetism that draws our memoirist to his innate enemy. He learns from his parents at an early age of the rising charismatic politician, the bane of his photographer father and therefore of him. "Who was this man, who made it necessary for God to have mercy on us, something of which my father spoke only in a trembling voice?" he writes, relating his fears as a child. Later in his youth, he is shunned by the other boys on the soccer field. His mother, learning of this, marches him back to the sandlot and beseeches the children to include her child in the game. But after they let him play, he is still abused, and attacked on the field, made to play fullback, not allowed to showcase his natural talents of speed and agility. During one particular play, he decides to fight back. Leaping for the ball with the defender upon him, he kicks with full force, his leg connecting with the other boy. After writhing for some time on the ground, his opponent jumps up to confront him with "indescribable hatred" and "boundless contempt". This experience affects him, he decides never in the future to defend himself in the same manner he is attacked. As our memoirist grows older, he becomes hyper aware of who and what he is and how his enemy, or the mere fact of calling this man his enemy, affects his relationships. A strong friendship goes awry, as he confesses to his friend that he has a secret enemy. "Why didn't you tell me about this before?" his friend asks, adding later, "...your enemy should be more important to you than your friend." After naming the enemy, he realizes the boy is likely involved in the Hitler Youth, yet he launches into a tirade against B, the first time he has unleashed his enmity. But it is through the subsequent discussion that he learns that he may have more in common with his adversary than he would ever dream possible. His friend exclaims that B has great ideas, that he only "needs someone an enemy or something, to achieve his aims". At the end of their visit, the Hitler Youth tell him a story about the Kaiser and his cousin the Tsar. After a visit from his cousin, the Tsar decided to present him with a parting gift: a herd of elk that had lived on the Steppes in Russia. The Kaiser brought the herd back to Germany, selecting a protected area in the country for the elk to roam where he felt they would feel at home. They lived there happily for a considerable time, but soon there came reports of the herds dying out. The Kaiser, upset with this turn of events sent word to the Tsar who dispatched a master forester to investigate the matter. He examined everything that might have affected the elk in their new habitat, and at the end of a year's investigation, he determined that nothing was done wrong relating to their feeding, climate, soil and so on. "So why have they died out?" asked the Kaiser. "They are missing one thing," said the forester. "Wolves." The Hitler Youth, implying that prey lose their will to survive without predators to keep them vigilant and vital, strikes a dissonant chord in our young writer, opening the dam of self doubt. (spoilers) By the end, our memoirist has, among other experiences: come face to face with his enemy, now Der Fuhrer, at an inauguration rally; has his convictions tested when he falls in surreptitiously with Nazi thugs; has aided in counter propaganda campaigns with a friend; and has even come to imagine the death of his adversary. He finally comes to peace with that great wraith that has thrown a pall over his entire life. What Keilson illuminates in the pages of this mere novel is more than just a study of temptation to evil, or of the struggle of good to prevail, it is of the very nature of the human spirit, its will, and dedication to purpose, along with its vulnerability. What the centenarian Keilson has produced here is lasting and profound, much like his own life. ~Book Jones~ 5 Stars
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