On Boualem Sansal's Le Village de l'Allemand

The latest novel by Boualem Sansal, published in 2008 by Gallimard, stages two brothers born of an Algerian mother and a German father, then raised in a Parisian suburb by an immigrant uncle. Each of the two brothers will keep a journal — the “journal of the Schiller brothers” — after a dreadful bereavement: the massacre by the GIA in 1994 of their parents and of part of the inhabitants of their native village near Sétif. This drama will lead the elder brother to investigate both the “dirty” civil war of the 1990s and the far more distant, carefully concealed past of their father, from his enlistment in the Hitler Youth to the concentration camps where he served as an SS man, before fleeing Europe through Turkey and Egypt to take refuge in Algeria.

Three different spaces and temporalities thus form the backdrop of the drama that is knotted together in Le Village de l’Allemand (The German Mujahid): Nazi Germany and the Shoah, which the elder brother discovers; the Algeria of ’95, where the GIA and the Islamists make terror reign; and finally the French suburbs overtaken by Islamism.

It is essentially Algeria, his wounded homeland, that haunts the writer. In the lecture he gave at the “Diasporas in Dialogue” Encounters at the Lutetia, on Sunday 25 January 2009¹ (quotations from his lecture in italics), Boualem Sansal chose to denounce tirelessly the Algerian situation since independence, the FLN’s stranglehold over the entire political and intellectual space, the rise of Islamism, and the exactions of the GIA.

In the novel, Islamism is envisaged as the major political peril of the Arab-Muslim societies, in particular because of its legal accession to power: “Papa is dead, murdered, slaughtered like a sheep, and Maman too, and their neighbors, by real criminals, the most hateful the earth has ever borne, who are there, very much alive, in Algeria, everywhere in the world, whom many support, encourage, congratulate, they are at the UN, they are on the posters on television, they summon whomever they want, whenever they want, like that imam of Block 17 who always has his finger pointed at the sky to terrorize people, to prevent them from thinking.²” This compromise of the powers-that-be with the Islamists is also evoked during his lecture: “The young Algerians of today are going to learn that their fathers killed thousands of men and that their State amnestied these criminals.”

“The breeding ground of Islamism is the locking-down, for two centuries, of the entire religious space, which neither the theologians nor the intellectuals make evolve: it is forbidden to answer the questions that everyone asks in daily life — for example, whether television and its images are to be proscribed like any representation in Islam. It is therefore the most retrograde who answer the questions that the young, and society as a whole, ask themselves.” Thus is posed the question of the evolution of religions, “the secular part” and its transformations between fidelity and change, between transmission and abandonment, so that the suffocation may cease. When will the Enlightenment come to the land of Islam?

To the rise of Islamism in Algeria and to the confiscation of the Algerian public space by fundamentalism corresponds, in the French suburbs, an identical peril: “Nothing has changed in ten years except the arrival of the Islamists, lately. It seems it is because of the war in Algeria, in Kabul, over there in the Middle East, and who knows where else. They are supposed to have made France a fallback base, a hub. Fuck them to death, in two shakes they raised troops and seized power. By the time you open your eyes, everything is changed (…) That’s their technique, block the horizons, make noise in the East and impoverish people to bring them closer to paradise. Sheep that they steer at their beck and call.³” And further on: “That’s the problem for me: how to kill six billion refuseniks before they wake up and revolt?⁴”

“Six billion refuseniks” to evoke those who would refuse to submit to the Islamists; and elsewhere: “the housing project is already a concentration camp (…) and to finish, one is enrolled in the death Kommandos bound for the Afghan camps, and not the shadow of a Righteous One on the horizon.⁵” What to make of this constant taking-up of Jewish history, of its dramas and its struggles? Is the “village of the German” so massively a planetary village?

At first, it seems that, under Boualem Sansal’s pen, this is the most adequate image for conveying his immense anguish in the face of a threat that, according to him, is to the Arab-Muslim world and to the whole world what Nazism was in Europe and then in the rest of the world: “Hitler brought down everything that Germany had built: philosophy, culture, etc. In all the countries where Islamism triumphs, one witnesses the same thing. The difference is that nowhere, except in Iran, has Islamism been able to seize hold of the power of a State.”

But in fine, the question the novel poses is that of the value of such an equation, which one may consider less as a device of literary dramatization than as a defect in the reading of history.

When Boualem Sansal chooses to see in Le Village de l’Allemand, and in Algeria as a whole, a planetary village where the tragedy of the Shoah is repeated, he erases the specificities: those of Europe in the German hour, those of Algerian history and of the Arab-Muslim societies. Now, only the precise study of this history, of its parameters and critical moments, could bring to light its functionings and dysfunctionings. That the author should alert us to a globalization of fault and of responsibility, that he should do so with the pen of a wounded Algerian, cannot reduce the question of compromises to an immense cowardice, to a despairing similarity. This distinction, then this distancing, makes possible speech, and struggle, and change.

Notes