I accept that everyone is focused on next year’s reading challenges but I have one last bit of unfinished #GermanLitMonth and #NovNov business to attend to.
I’m going to get straight to why Iris Hanika’s The Bureau of Past Management is such an interesting book – it captures so much of the ‘guilt’ that I have observed in German people my age. A few qualifiers – firstly, people my age did not live through the Holocaust. Secondly, I use the word ‘guilt’ hesitantly because it is far more complex than that. It’s sadness, a need for atonement, it’s fear, it’s shame, feeling accountable, and a sense of needing to repair something that is not their ‘doing’.
Most of the nation’s living citizens were not yet born when the crime happened… All the same, the monstrosity of their forebears’ crime weighed heavily on them, and when they approached this monstrosity, they expected nothing but to unmask their forebears and find criminals. They proceeded without hindrance – it was a continuous loop. The crime was so large.
The story focuses on Hans Frambach, who works as an archivist at the Bureau of Past Management. For Hans, it’s the crimes of the Nazis which have preoccupied and distressed him for as long as he can remember – ‘…he was now plainly used to his unhappiness…’. In fact, the Holocaust is all pervasive.
As long as he’d believed it stemmed from Auschwitz, his misery had substance. And the cause of his misery wasn’t just the fact that Auschwitz had happened, it was his fixation with it. He thought constantly about what he could do and what the Auschwitz prisoners couldn’t, and that Auschwitz had had a very different meaning for them than it did for him. When he went to bed, for example, he thought about how they couldn’t go to sleep when they wanted, how they’d had no beds, they’d had berths – that’s what he thought about as he lay in his bed.
Hans’s ‘memory’ work – documenting the past and researching historical narratives in order to ‘…cultivate an understanding of the nation’s history…’, is essential to who he is.
…he did whatever was in his power to relieve the survivors’ misery: so that their suffering would never be repeated, and so that what had happened to them would never happen to anyone again….
Through the character of Hans, Hanika shows how the crimes of the Nazi era hold the Germans in their grip to this day. She goes further to highlight the sometimes questionable and ethical boundaries of ‘commemoration’ – how do we remember ‘appropriately’?
I always thought this work was my duty, but now that obligation makes me feel like a concentration camp guard – only it’s as if the guards are there to keep the memories fresh. Because we’re guarding the concentration camps, too. Because we’d all be unemployed without them. What a horrible thing to say and much too simplistic.
Hans begins to feel desensitised by his work, and to question his purpose, all of which results in him becoming completely unmoored –
Shocking now that it hardly hurt. That was the essential horror: for to him this was the essential thing. That this crime, which was so enormous, could have stopped hurting. That that was possible. That such a thing is possible – it was terrible. And that amplified his misery.
There are other elements to this story (notably his unrequited love for his friend, Graziela, and his extreme loneliness) which actually form the bulk of the plot but, as mentioned, it was the starting point for the character of Hans that grabbed me.
Without misery he would have been unable to define himself. It was never his; in reality it didn’t belong to him. It was not his misery but The Misery. If he removed it from himself, nothing of him would remain, nothing.
Hanika presents some very challenging ideas in this book and there were many parts that I have thought about since finishing. In particular, it highlighted that for people who have always lived with shame (and that that shame is an unquestioned, intrinsic part of them), to then be free of it, is completely foreign. They know no other way to be.
The book also demonstrated how a nation bears the weight of its history (and I wondered if the atrocities that are happening in so many places now will carry the same legacy).
The German past is public property and has been adapted for mass audiences. At best, it is calcified, every nuance rubbed away.
I made a decision some time ago to avoid reading any books about the Holocaust that were not written by survivors or, if examining inter-generational trauma, the descendants of survivors. Instead, I have focused my reading on contemporary authors who incorporate German history into their work in a way that very much belongs to them, and is part of their experience. Strictly speaking, The Bureau of Past Management is classed as a dystopian novel (the fantasy/ futuristic element is the ‘Bureau’), but Hanika’s original concept demonstrates how there is always an opportunity for a new perspective.
4/5