Customer Reviews

The German Mujahid

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Move over Bruce Bawer, you've got a novel companion to your eye-opening expose "While Europe Slept" (Broadway Books, 2006). Algierian author Boualem Sansal's 2008 novel "Le Village de L'Allemand ou Le Journal de Freres Schiller" has been translated into English and newly released as "The German Mujahid." The infiltration of European cities by militant Islamists, as chronicled in meticulous detail by Bawer, is now semi-fictionalized (the jacket tells us this story is based on a true one) and, therefore, becomes more immediately recognizable as a here-and-now threat to France, Western Europe, and the world.

Sansal, however, goes beyond the present--1996 that is--and sends Rachel Schiller, the 33 year old son of a Nazi war criminal, on a trek through Europe and North Africa as told through entries in his diary. Rachel is in search of an explanation for his father's horrific deeds and is desperate to reconcile this monster to the man he knew as a loving father and an Algerian freedom fighter. Rachel's teenage brother Malrich reads the diary and retraces his brother's journey, in search of his own peace of mind and also a need to escape the oppressive infiltration of his Parisian neighborhood by militant jihadists.

Two brothers, both in agony, move through two continents, one attempting to atone for the sins of his father, the other coming to grips with both the realities of the Holocaust and the increasingly violent stranglehold of Islamists working to build an Islamic nation in the suburbs of Paris.

Bawer notes that these discontented occupants of Parisian housing projects, veritable ghettos of North African immigrants, are "a looming challenge to twenty-first century European prosperity, stability, and democracy." Sansal, who's clearly knows his way around the 'hood, says, through Malrich, that "the estate has become unrecognisable. What was a Sensitive Urban Area, Category 1 has become a concentration camp." And in exploring the thin border between Nazism and Islamism, has placed himself, we may assume, in a rather precarious position in his native Algiers.

Malrich is consoled by his friend who advises him "It is mektoub, Malek, it is fate, we must accept it." Malrich answers "It's not mektoub, Mimed. It's us, we're the problem." Depressing? Oh yeah, most definitely. But Rachel reminds us that at every moment of our life, we have a choice. And Santayana, of course, told us "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

This is a must-read book. And pick up "While Europe Slept" while you're ordering.

This 228-page novel tells the story of two Algerian brothers living in France who discover that their father was a Nazi. The book is in the form of diaries of the two brothers and explores the contrast between the holocaust and modern Islamic fundamentalism. Published in French in 2008 and recently translated into English the author has a unique voice that is a modern as today's headlines and layered with meanings far beyond the seemingly simple storyline. Once I picked it up, I literally could not put it down.

The older brother gives up his good job in a multi-national corporation to explore his father's life. He travels back to his own birthplace in Algeria and then visits all the places of horror connected with the extermination camps as well as Egypt and Turkey where his father found sanctuary after the Nazi war criminals were being hunted down. Later, the younger brother goes on a quest of his own and also travels to Algeria. But most of his story is rooted in the Muslim ghetto in France, which is being taken over by more and more dogmatic religious fanatics.

The author does not spare the reader the detailed descriptions of the cruelties of the past and the horrible potential for the future. But it ends with a small spark of hope and it is clear why he wrote this book. As I was reading the book I thought it had the voice of a young man. However, when I looked up the author I discovered he was born in Algeria in 1949 and began writing novels at age 50 after retiring from his job as a high ranking official in Algerian government. He lives in Algeria with his wife and children and his writing is internationally acclaimed although his books are banned in his own country. Hopefully, he will continue this kind of writing which clearly can make a difference in the world.

I give this book one of my highest recommendations even though it will be much too brutal for some.

This review is based upon reading an Advanced Reader's Copy. The final published version may differ.

This is a tale of two brothers, Michel and Rachel.

Written in the first-person perspective from both young men, the story unfolds. Rachel the successful and hardworking older brother, tries to understand his father's past by retracing his father's footsteps. We discover through Michel's diary, a journey filled with his father's dark past as a Nazi SS officer and his assimilation into life as an Algerian, converting to the Islamic faith. Can Rachel deal with the truth? How does a son atone for the sins of his father?

The younger brother, Michel, is an underachiever who has limited involvement with own family, preferring to spend time with his friends. He experiences the changes occurring in his community, a Muslim ghetto in France, as a small group of Fundamentalists impose their beliefs upon the citizens. He is sickened by the brutality and radicalism that tear his community apart. As Michel reads Rachel's diary, he learns about his brother, his search for truth and his struggles with atonement. Through the revelation of their father's role as a Nazi officer, he sees the similarities between events of the Holocaust and the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism in Algeria leading to the death of countless people. How does the younger brother deal with the knowledge that his father, through his duties in Nazi Germany, played a role that lead to the death of so many people? How does he finally deal with the turmoil in his own community.

We see how the two men deal with the truth of their father's past.

The story is difficult to follow, at times, because of Michel's fragmented sentence structure and the lack of historical context. Also, terminology was frequently undefined. I would recommend in the final version to have references for the historical context covering Algeria, a background about the ghettos in France and a 'glossary' (or footnote) of terminology. I do realize that this is an English version whereby some words may be lost in translation or the context may be understand by readers of the native language.

Overall, this was a captivating work that will give its reader insight regarding the ambitions for power and the horrors of racial cleansing. Sadly, we see how history often repeats itself.

Cheikh Hassan, formerly Hans Schiller, was a loyal Nazi, an SS officer, a war criminal, a fugitive, a weapons instructor to the Algerian mujahedin, a convert to Islam, a husband to a village girl, a father of two boys, finally a civil war victim.

The two sons had emigrated earlier to France. The elder one became a yuppi, the younger one remained on the dark side: failed school, tangled with the law, life in the settlement with other unemployed Algerian youths, among Islamic fundamentalists.

The elder brother (my namesake Helmut plus Rachid, contracted to Rachel) commits suicide. The younger one, Malek Ulrich = Malrich, reads the diaries and documents and catches fire: his brother had found out about the holocaust past of their father and could not take it. Malrich follows the trail.

The text is a mixture of diaries of both brothers. We learn a lot about France and its immigrants, about Germany and its past and present (and this all seems true to me, up to a point, while I can't be equally assertive about France and Algeria), about Algeria and its history.

The author is an Algerian living in France. The book was apparently banned in Algeria. The subject was taboo, it seems.

While the book is not well edited (too many printing errors), and the voices of the two narrators are not fully plausible, the book would deserve 5 stars for the sheer guts to attack this magnitude of 20th century history problems: the holocaust, the Algerian independence war, then the Algerian civil war. And we don't underestimate the dynamite in the French immigrant circles. (The story is set in the mid 90s; the book was published in 2008. We don't have a 9-11 situation, but we are in the global build-up.)

Young Malrich becomes an anti-fundamentalist activist. Is that plausible? I don't quite see the curve from realizing what his father did to taking a stance against his former jihad friends.

Rachel's suicide is also a rather unexplained act: he seemed a tower of sensible reason from his diary pages, initially. Then a neo-Nazi tells him, after he has acted plausibly in order to extract information: you are your father's son. Which is exactly what he had tried to convey, yet it rocks him. I ask you, is that plausible?

The author has not made the process of change plausible, not for either of the brothers. That is why I deduct a star.

I also find one potentially killing technical error in the plot: if I am not misunderstanding something, the neo-Nazi whom Rachel meets in the Alsace, a certain Adolphe, the son of Jean 92, who set up the Nazi fugitive network, says of himself that he was born in 42. Yet he talks about his collaboration in the post-war network as if he had been much involved.

I do not appreciate it if the details don't tally.

In other words, after a strong start, some disappointment sets in.

But it is well worth reading for historical context.

"The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living" or so wrote Marx and so too do their sins. In this short but brilliant novel, Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal explores the effects of the discovery of a hidden past by the current generation. While there is absolutely nothing new and certainly nothing unique in this theme, two features distinguish this effort from others. First, as prominently highlighted on the book cover, this is the debut investigation and acknowledgment of the Holocaust by an Arab novelist, a genuine landmark. Second, while the author's style is hardly unique and is obviously indebted to its many predecessors, the writing is compelling and the story well-told.

Sansal's protagonist, Rachel Schiller is the elder of two sons of former SS Captain Hans Schiller, an expatriate hidden away in a remote traditional village located in pre-independence Algeria. Capt. Schiller distinguished himself in the guerrilla movement (the FLN, National Liberation Front) as a weapons instructor, gaining the titles "mujahid" and "sheikh". During the Islamist insurgency (which occurred in the 1990s in response to military intervention in election results), brutally but effectively suppressed by the Algerian military, Schiller and his Algerian wife were murdered, along with a score of townspeople by rampaging members of the Armed Islamic Group, a vicious Islamic fundamentalist movement, itself an offshoot of the fundamentalist, populist "Islamic Salvation Front". The urbane Rachel, highly placed employee of a French-based multinational business, travels to the small town of Ain Deb to investigate the matter himself. During the course of his examination of family effects, he discovers paperwork which clearly implicates his father in not only the SS, but one which suggests an intimate involvement in the extermination mechanism of the Nazi state. It turns out that Hans, a chemical engineer, probably turned his talents to developing, testing and supervising use of poison gas against Jews and other riff-raff who fell afoul of the Nazis and their diverse eugenic enterprises. Rachel, being unable to intellectualize or otherwise rationalize Hans' behavior, subsequent flight from justice and burial of responsibilities, begins a journey of self-realization and self-immolation, one which culminates in suicide and which reenacts the extermination routine used in the camps. His diary falls into the hands of the police (the politically correct but astute "Com'Dad") who turns it over to the slacker younger son, Malrich for didactic purposes. Malrich recognizes the linkage between the totalitarian tendencies of the Islamist movement operating in his "estate" (a French banlieu) and Nazism and makes discursive efforts to intervene. Whether he eventually undertakes meaningful acts based on his insights remains unclear.

Of course, the attraction of a novel is in the tale's telling as well as the story, itself. Here, for instance, is Malrich on the local "jihadis": "They looked funny in their old-world suicide-bomber getups, with their martyr's belts, their scruffy beards, their battered faces, their staring eyes, their all-terrain sandals, we liked the way they talked, like Allah's rap crew; the way they were always available, the way they were like superheroes fighting for the poor. There were only about a dozen of them, but there were hordes of us and we were all itching to be their right-hand men. We'd do anything, they only had to ask, they had Allah's ear, he was on their side." And here is Rachel's penultimate diary entry, written just before his suicide: "Chance decides whether one is here or there, protected or exposed, on the is side of the channel or that. I chose nothing, I chose to live a quiet, hardworking life and here I am before a scaffold that was not built for me. I am paying for another's crime. I want to save him, because he is my father, because he is a man." The more philosophically inclined Rachel is heavily indebted to Primo Levy, whose work figures prominently in this book. Malrich's notes, on the other hand, borrow from author Richard Price ("Freedomland", "Clockers", "The Wire", etc). Unlike Price's characters, however, Malrich swiftly arrives at the salient insight of this book, one which echoes an observation made by the great physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, made in another context at a much earlier time, but applicable to modern Islamism, nonetheless: "But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth..."

So, is this a derivative work? Is it unoriginal? The answer to both questions is a qualified, "Yes", but that does not detract from compelling attractions of the book. For an exhaustive critique, I suggest Fouad Ajami's review in "The New Republic" (January 27, 2010 issue) which also provides a comprehensive discussion of "La Sale Guerre", the battle between the Algerian military and their Islamist antagonists, the immediate effect of which (the murder of the elder Schiller and his wife) ignite the story, but whose more wide-ranging implications are only hinted at in this book.

"We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us..." wrote J.G. Farrell. However, more often than not, the past serves as a template for current behavior and its myths inform ideology. As Rachel and Malrich discover, its also true that people bury the past in order to repeat it.

"'Tell me, imam, if you had power over the earth, where would you begin the genocide?' `...you round the kaffirs all up into camps...you gas all the useless ones...the rest of them, you divide into groups based on their skills...and you work them till they drop. Anyone who disobeys, you gas them...it's been done before.'"

Malrich Schiller is an Algerian ex-patriot living in an Islamic controlled ghetto in France. Malrich is faced with a crisis of conscious when he discovers his German father was a Nazi whose training led him to gas millions at Auschiwitz. Having escaped justice by fleeing to Algeria, he converted to Islam, married an Algerian woman, and eventually died at the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists in the Algerian civil war.

The journey of self discovery is further complicated by the suicide of Malrich's brother, Rachel. Upon the murder of their parents, Rachel returned to Algeria and was the first to discover their father's deep, dark secret. Having decided to keep this information from his younger brother, Rachel is eaten up with guilt over what his father has done. His diary, bequeathed to Malrich on his death, details what Rachel has learned about their father's history and why he feels he needs to atone for those sins. The diary starts Malrich on his own path, but with differing results.

The German Mujahid is the first novel to compare the Islamic jihad to the Holocaust during World War II. The protagonist, Malrich, is faced almost daily with requests that he join the jihad in his neighborhood, forcing him to draw correlations between his own experiences and the indoctrination his father faced in Nazi Germany. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, no matter what the dogma, and the results are invariably the same. Boualem Sansal is himself an Algerian living in France and based this novel on a true story which was inspired by Primo Levi.

Whoa, spell bounding and impossible to leave unread. The novel gets you on the first page. There is no turning back. A powerful memoir of two brothers' story of what happened to each of them once they learnt of their father's past. The story was narrated through their personal diaries: cleverly put together by the author who takes you on a journey of emotions and discoveries, both past and present. Unspeakable emotions were carefully detailed on how each of the brothers dealt with their father's past. Their observations of the world were intensely categorized that you could feel and smell the world they were in. Each brother handled the information differently, but the rawness of their emotions was so well expressed: gripping, harrowing and bitter. You really felt you were in these personas for the duration of the narrative. The author's ability to take you though the journey was seamlessly smooth with the impeccable research and attention to details was spell-binding. In such a small book: the punch was huge. I believe we all through our own tragedies and bad news, this novel taught me that there are more than one way to handle the initial emotion reaction: inwardly or outwardly. Which ever road you took, there will always be an impact to the people around you. The human side of the story was immense and well overrides the generalization of the muslin-jew divide. Bravo. Thank goodness an english translation was made on this amazingly written novel.

Boualem Sansal's second novel centers on two immigrant brothers, Malrich and Rachel, living in Paris. They have emigrated from Algeria, in a village where their Algerian mother and German father still reside.

The novel is narrated by both Malrich and Rachel, via their journals. Malrich discovers his older brother's diary after his death; as he reads it, he learns of the terrible family secret that led to his brother's demise. Their father was an SS officer in Nazi Germany. Through the journals of the brothers, the novel depicts how each deals with the vicarious shame and horror of what their father has done. Rachel's voice is pained and poignant; heart-wrenching to read and impossible to turn away from. Malrich's adolescent voice is equally poignant but also tinged with a cynical, sardonic humor somewhat reminiscent of, but to me, much more likeable than, that of Holden Caufield in "Catcher in the Rye." The writing style is just gorgeous; it gathers momentum and pulls the reader right into the story and emotions of the characters.

The story delves deeply into the atrocities of the Holocaust and themes of responsibility and restitution. Simultaneously, it explores the similarities between Naziism and Islamic fundamentalism, and makes a compelling argument that the ideas behind and the ultimate outcome of the two are very closely related. Malrich, living in a "sink estate" or ghetto in Paris, finds his estate taken over by fundamentalists and fears that, just as with the Holocaust, no one will take action until it's too late.

This is a beautifully written novel that is often painful to read, but in a necessary way. It provides no easy answers, but raises important and timely questions. Very highly recommended.

The German Mujahid Boualem Sansal's "The German Mujahid" is a powerfully profound work that is written as a diary by two French Muslim brothers of Algerian German parentage, each exploring their own thoughts and feeling. The elder brother, a successful business man with a multinational company descends into a morass of guilt, shame and ultimately suicide in his struggle to come to grips with his discovery that his beloved father a chemical engineer had been a Nazi and involved with the death camps, gas poising of millions and the Holocaust. His father had converted to the Moslem faith and was a revered village elder in Algeria. The elder brother, know as Rachel, travels to Allergenic after learning of the massacre of his parents and 43 members of his Algerian village by Islamic extremists. It is there that he uncovers the facts about his father's hideous past.

Rachel's memoirs and his profound sense of guilt and remorse because he believes that "to discover that you are the son of a murderer is worse than being a murderer yourself" become too much for him to bear. He visits the death camps, the son of the head of an organization that helped his father, Hans Schiller, escape punishment by relocating him to Turkey after the surrender by Germany in WWII, Egypt where his father spent idyllic days, etc., to search for the roots of evil.

Rachel's underachiever brother, Malrich, continues to live and hang about in the "estate" a primarily Muslim ghetto of a Parisian suburb. Following his brother's suicide, the police liaison to this ghetto presents him with Rachel's diary and thus begins his journey to his Algerian village. Unlike Rachel, Malrich begins to realize that all his and his friends know is what the imam sees fit to tell them. The fundamentalists and Islamic law begin to take over the ghetto resulting in the torture and horrible sanction murder of a young female friend. Malrich however does not turn his anger and rage inward.

The reader is left to ponder: "the jihadists would outdo the Nazis if they ever came to power."

Boualem Sansal, in his autobiographical novel, "The German Mujahid," raises a number of troubling questions with this essential question right smack in the still point: What do we really know? While other questions revolve around our heads, this one reverberates throughout our core. What do we really know?

Of course, closely allied is the question: What do we really know about those we love? Malrich, the protagonist in a modified tragic sense, suffers when he learns the answer. His beloved older brother, Rachel, cannot tolerate that answer and commits suicide in a manner directly reflective of what his father did, connected with what his father was.

Their father was a Nazi chemist, a key player in creating the gas that killed so many Jews and other "undesirables" in Nazi Germany. (This information comes early in the story, thus not a spoiler.) Both boys were born in Algeria to this wonderful German father and Algerian/Muslim mother and sent to Paris, one by one, to live with their aunt and uncle for their schooling. The boys are not close because of their age difference, an entire generation. When Rachel dies, Malrich collects his things and discovers a diary. Wow, what a diary! Inside is all the information--facts that Rachel discovers in his investigation of his father. Malrich feels compelled to follow his brother's studies, only to learn horror after horror.

Malrich presents his findings in his own journal. Most are disturbing, to say the least, and reveal the horror of "not really knowing anything."

1. His father's sickening role in the "Solution" of the "problem" of Jews.

2. The shocking realization that many high-ranking Nazis totally escaped punishment for their war crimes and led "normal" lives in newly invented personas for themselves.

3. What does a reader really know? I always assumed, if I even thought about it, that all Germans supported Hitler's Solution. Not so. At the death camps, pleasant situations were created for the thousands of workers who kept things running efficiently--all to prevent any desertions.

4.In the subplot, Malrich frequently compares the Islamic fundamentalist clergy and rabid followers to Nazism and Nazis. He experiences extremists in the suburbs of Paris where he grew up--an Islamic inner city-like neighborhood referred to as the "estate." A positive from the novel is that Malrich determines to oppose this extremism one person at a time, so that history does not repeat itself.

I've attempted to infuse my review with enough detail to show the quality and depth of Sansal's novel, a must-read experience. A line on the cover says: "The first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust," a line I did not grasp until I read the book. The centuries-old deadly conflict between Arabs and Jews assumes a new dimension, especially because its author is Islamic (a bare believer) and half-Arab.

German Mujahid? "Mujahideen" refers to those groups who struggle to assert Islamic law; a "mujahid" is one who struggles for same. Why German? What is Nazism but a struggle to assert the ideas of the Fuhrer, the Father, the one who leads. The reader must make her/his own connections. Again, this is a novel not to be missed, especially in raising that troubling question: What do we really know?