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Gotz and Meyer

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Gotz and Meyer. To the narrator who has lost all his family to the Holocaust, these non-commissioned SS officers are nondescript, almost featureless, blonde-haired, blue-eyed. Without doubt, they are loyal to the Reich and the Fuhrer. Their truck, a Sauer, is specially made, hermetically sealed and can hold up to a hundred people at a time. The occupants think they are leaving a terrible camp, the Fairgrounds, near Belgrade, in Serbia, climbing cooperatively into the vehicle. After a trip that ends with the death of the passengers, their corpses are unloaded by seven Serbians, who drag them unceremoniously to a ready mass grave. Most of the occupants are women and children, the Serbian Jewish men long since murdered, save a few to keep order in the camps.

The Nazi's have a systematic design for deceiving Jews, setting up the Jewish Administration, convincing them the camps are really reception centers before transportation to an undesignated country. None of the incarcerated Jews ever try to run away, so thoroughly entrenched in the deception, participants in a cogent and orderly world to the end. Gassing is cost-effective, considering the price of ammunition, not to mention easier psychologically on all concerned, but it is the very efficiency that begins to eat at the narrator, as he sifts through facts about Gotz and Meyer's particular assignment, the amount of food and milk allotted to each prisoner, the harvesting of false hope to assure compliance, the stoic resolve of the commanders, the willing Jewish Administration trying to alleviate the suffering in the camp.

His imagination at times paralyzed by conjured images, the bland, dutiful Gotz and Meyer become the stuff of nightmare, the narrator's family members climbing obediently into the truck, their innocence irrelevant. In his mind, the narrator holds conversations with Gotz and Meyer, positing questions about their smoothly consummated work, until finally, the Fairgrounds is silent, empty of life. The author's construct is all the more powerful when told from the perspective of the two faceless men, their surgical precision a contrast to the humanity they deliver to death day after day. The banality of evil achieves a curious balance, the horrors more chilling for their impersonal exactitude. But all of these voices, these imagined personalities have vanished into the past, buried by Serbians in mass graves, their youthful hopes extinguished by the carbon monoxide of a death vehicle, the harbinger of their redemption, "In the tangible world you have no choice".

In a most ingenious manner, the narrator rejoins his lost relatives, finding a measure of peace after a harrowing but necessary journey. At a time when historical revisionists seek to deny the existence of the Holocaust, such books are a reminder that "memory is the only way to conquer death". Luan Gaines/ 2005.

The speaker of this long monologue by Serbian author David Albahari is a teacher of Serbo-Croatian language and literature, a 50-year-old Jewish man who has been trying to fill in the spaces in his family tree after World War II in Yugoslavia. The extermination of Jews started early in Yugoslavia, with most of the Jewish men of Serbia shot to death by the fall of 1941, and "the Jewish Question in Serbia almost completely solved" by April, 1942, when virtually all Jewish men, women, and children were dead.

Imagining the lives of Gotz and Meyer, two SS guards who were responsible for over 5000 Jewish deaths, the speaker examines the events for which Gotz and Meyer were responsible between November, 1941, and April, 1942--the executions of one thousand Jews per month in the Belgrade Saurer truck they drove daily. The truck, with its hermetically sealed rear compartment, had a hole in the floor into which the exhaust was pumped as prisoners were being taken from the Belgrade Fairgrounds camp, where they were housed, to "better" accommodations elsewhere, "a concern of the German government for the good of the prisoners" that the speaker finds "touching."

Albahari exhibits a mordant humor as his speaker imagines the inner lives of Gotz and Meyer. Often juxtaposing horrifying atrocity against simple, folksy observation, the speaker fantasizes about "Gotz, or was it Meyer," a phrase which echoes throughout the narrative. As he puts himself into their minds, he wonders if they had nicknames, if their wives had pet names for them, and if they ever regretted what they were doing, since they were so good at their jobs. "Killing, too, is an art," the speaker says, "and it has its own rules."

As Albahari includes the terrible statistics, he also exhibits the dark ironies of the circumstances, setting the facts into sharp relief and increasing the shock. He imagines reports on the load distribution of the bodies in the truck and how they might have contributed to a broken rear axle, contemplates the comforting effects of a lightbulb in the truck as the bodies start to fall, and "worries" about the red tape of co-ordination.

Gradually, Gotz and Meyer become more human for the reader, and when the speaker takes his class on a field trip to the site of the Fairgrounds camp, he asks each to imagine himself/herself as one of his relatives. As the horror of the events gradually register with the students, the teacher comments: "Memory is the only way to conquer death," he says, "even when the body merely goes the way of all matter and spins in an endless circle of transformations." A strange novel of the Holocaust, all the more shocking because of the contrasts between the facts and the dark humor, Gotz and Meyer is a memorable short novel and worthy addition to Holocaust literature. n Mary Whipple

This addition to the lengthy bibliography of Holocaust-related fiction centers on the Final Solution's application in Nazi-occupied Serbia from November 1941 to April 1942. Specifically, the camp established at the fairgrounds outside Belgrade, where approximately 5,000 Jews were interred. The narrator is a middle-aged literature professor whose ancestors mostly perished either at the camp or in a truck repurposed as a mobile gas chamber. This truck was operated by the titular SS men, who, over the course of a few months, drove the 5,000 away -- ostensibly to a newer, better facility, but in reality to a mass grave. The book is the professor's reimagining of the two men's duties, of the final weeks of their victims, and of the city's non-Jewish bystanders. Over the course of the book, he delves deeper and deeper into archives, records, and history itself, in an attempt to understand it all -- gradually driving himself somewhat mad in the process. In attempting to put a face on the two Germans, he starts to have conversations with them, and then even visions. Along the way, themes familiar to the Holocaust are touched upon: innocence is meaningless, evil can be faceless, mechanistic, and impersonal, and above all is the question of what we would do confronted with the situation. As the professor grows more and more unstable, the author seems to be warning us that to try and understand any of this is a path to madness. It's all moderately interesting, but not 160 pages interesting. And though Albahari's decision to write the story as a single paragraph with no breaks does add to the sense of claustrophobic mania, it's not exactly reader-friendly. Probably unlikely to be of interest to anyone not already deeply interested in the Holocaust or Serbia.

Describing the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt wrote of "the banality of evil." In this attempt to understand the unspeakable, Albahari's unnamed narrator, a Jewish schoolteacher in Belgrade, begins not in anger but with empathy. Götz and Meyer are two noncommissioned SS officers, whose names he has turned up in the records, while researching the fate of his own forebears. He sees them as ordinary Germans, family men perhaps, fond of children, and taking pride in the efficient accomplishment of their job. That this job is to drive the sealed truck that asphyxiates 100 Jews with engine exhaust on each trip from the holding camp to the burial fields does not lessen his interest in inviting them into his mind, and talking with them in his imagination. Eventually, just as his obsession with the ordinary begins to verge on madness, he embarks on a symbolic reenactment with his own pupils, thus "sowing the seeds of remembering" for future generations. This short book, which flows in a single unbroken paragraph of lucid prose, is impossible to put down, and the almost genial understatement of its opening in no way diminishes its cumulative power.

In 1942 the Nazis exterminated virtually all of Belgrade's 10,000 Jews and declared it the only large European city where the Jewish and Gypsy Question had been "solved." This is the topic of David Albahari's Götz and Meyer (2003), a manic first-person narrative of a Jewish literature professor in modern-day Belgrade who, in exploring his obliterated family tree, becomes obsessed with the circumstances of their extermination and the two German officers tasked with carrying it out, Götz and Meyer.

These two men, for which only scant archival evidence exists, are largely embellished by the narrator's imagination. The narrator imagines their wives and children, their morning hygiene rituals, dreams and everyday conversations, and in this Albahari truly excels. His penchant for palpable characters and idiosyncrasy brings to life otherwise cold historical data, a process that culminates when the narrator takes his students on a reenactment of the asphyxiation ritual performed by Götz and Meyer on Jewish passengers. As human beings we have, the narrator (and author) insists, a moral imperative to remember, even to viscerally relive, the past. Through living memory the dead live on and even the victims of senseless tragedies, such as the Holocaust, are in part redeemed.
The elaborate working out of the extermination of the Belgrade Jews, and the characters of Götz and Meyer in particular, serves another important function in the novel, which distinguishes the work from much of previous Holocaust discourse. Although the narrator's tone is complex and often slips into irony and satire, it is largely a bona fide attempt to understand the psychology of these executioners, who slowly and methodically killed 5,000 people. Unsatisfied by simple condemnation and moral outrage (a viewpoint embodied in the story by the woman at the Jewish Historical Society), he envisions Götz and Meyer as complex individuals, with personality quirks, dreams, even brief flashes of compassion and humanity. While the narrator resists anathematizing the executioners, he inevitably hits upon psychological absurdities and callous acts that he categorically rejects. Nonetheless, his novel inquiry leads to uncomfortable conclusions about universal human evil that recall Hannah Arendt's influential work on the "banality of evil." The author fights against, but ultimately seems to accept, "the realization that this is not a monstrous distortion, but the implacable order of things (107)." Thus the novel expresses a philosophical position, akin to that of 20th-century Existentialism, that life is incomprehensible and absurd. But like Sisyphus, the narrator continues to push his boulder up the hill.

The novel engages other important strains of 20th-century philosophy. Foucault's idea of "carceral continuum" is central to the inner-workings of the Belgrade concentration camp. The micro-mechanisms of power and enforcement were not limited to Germans, but the Jews inside the camp were tasked with policing themselves. The author's exploration of the need of many Jews for illusions and the desire to be "an ostrich with its head in the sand" (80), further problematizes Holocaust discourse. This complex psychology culminates in the narrator's acceptance of chocolate from Götz and Meyer, which he eats with pleasure and shame.

The novel consists of three planes of narrative that correspond to the narrator's three lives: his contemporary life as a literature professor; his vicarious experience of the lives of his relatives killed in the Holocaust; and his imagined life as Götz and Meyer. The story abruptly shifts time periods and points of view according to the his increasingly unstable consciousness. The entire novel is in fact a single stream of consciousness monolog, without chapter breaks, paragraphs or pauses. The narrator's voice becomes increasingly unstable during his research, which provides a rhythm to the story. Nonetheless, some readers will find the manic and disjointed narration exhausting. Moreover, the mediation of all events and characters through the narrator's highly subjective imagination leaves the reader without any other non-imagined voices or points of view. The uncomfortably intimate account of the narrator's thoughts draw the reader into a psychological state of instability and growing despair. While Albahari skillfully achieves this, some readers may find themselves longing for a more traditional style of narration toward the end of the story. On the other hand, the candid exposure to the narrator's mind provides a wealth of interesting psychological material. One wonders, for instance, about his preoccupation with Adam, a 13 year-old boy who was preparing for his bar mitzvah in 1942--could he be a manifestation of the narrator's own repressed memory?

David Albahari's Götz and Meyer is a rich and complex postmodern account of the experience of the Belgrade Holocaust. It draws the reader into the experience of not only remembering, but reliving these tragic events, and through this act of memory attempts to find some redemption for an otherwise horrific and incomprehensible moment in history. The novel also provides a unique psychological portrait of the executioners Götz and Meyer, and in doing so explores universal questions about human frailty. The text is, furthermore, enriched by its engagement of various 20th-century philosophical strains. The formal qualities of the work--its uneven and increasingly manic voice, its internal rhythm and lack of traditional structure, its imaginative nature--mimic the act of remembrance and uncomfortably engage readers and draw them into the narrator's psychological state. Götz and Meyer is a rich and complex work and an original addition to the canon of Holocaust literature.

This is an exceptional and different book about the Holocaust.It is written ,not by a survivor,but by someone born in Serbia a number of years later, in 1948.
Having lost a large number of his family to Hitler's Final Solution,he does a large amount of research to find out what happened to them,what it was like at the time,and what went through the minds of the perpetrators as well as the victims.
Gotz and Meyer,were two SS Non-Commisioned Officers, who the author had found to be charged with the responsibility of transporting about 5,000 women and children from Belgrade's Fairground concentration camp to Jajinci for extermination.They drove the truck,which held about 50 prisoners. The victims were led to believe they were being taken to a better place and would receive decent treatment. A short time after the truck left,it stopped,and the drivers would connect a hose from the exhaust to an attachment that would direct the exhaust fumes into the enclosed truck,thus killing all the prisoners as it continued on its way. Upon arrival,other prisoners removed the corpses and dumped them into trenches already dug by other prisoners. Gotz and Meyer really met face to face to the victims. They seemed to think they were just truck drivers;despite the fact that they really were the murderers when they connected up the exhaust pipes.
The author tries to get into the minds of the SS and the victims, trying to determine how they rationalized their actions.Try as he might,there are no way this evilness can be understood and he finds it is madness all around;and he almost loses his mind in attempting to make sense out of it all.
I guess the only thing that comes out of all the author's effort is that there is no understanding madness.

This one paragraph book is interesting in its style and in its subject matter. The book becomes a little tedious when it is (truly) one paragraph but it is worth sticking with (it's quite short as well) for a captivating conclusion. S.