Fear in Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939

“Every summer they would return there, toward the round tables, like old accomplices. The rich, the swindlers, the charlatans, the naïve caught in the trap of an illusion, the young girls to whom men promised the moon.” To be sure, “they were not many,” but loud enough for a “village of two streets, or rather a single street that ran along the river.” In this little center, “people bought, sold, and played poker late into the night.” As for “the boarding house, with its recently built outbuildings, [it] was packed full in summer. It sometimes happened that, for lack of a bed, guests stayed outdoors all night and gambled by the light of the streetlamps.” It was strange: “the place was neither well situated nor sumptuous, the river was not particularly renowned, the flora was sparse, the plain marshy, [and] yet people had for the round tables the same attachment one has for old acquaintances.”¹

So begins Les eaux tumultueuses (The Tumultuous Waters, 1988) by Aharon Appelfeld, whose action unfolds in Fracht, a small locality which, as the narrator explains, “for many […] evoked cupidity and debauchery, but [which] for a few faithful [retained a certain magical something, to the point that] everything that existed outside [its perimeter gave the impression of being] gray, without savor or joy.”² We are at the end of the 1930s, and in this remote corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Zaltzer house is an ideal place of reunion for vacationers — bachelors and Jews for the most part — eager, at least once a year, to break with their routine, to pass the time among friends, to drink and make love. One year not like the others, “they [are] not many in coming; at first glance the place seems deserted, abandoned by its inhabitants.”³ Despite the strangeness of the situation, the arrival of Rita Braun takes place, once again, “in a commotion.”⁴ She is impatient for the tourists to invade the boarding house again, so that their din may make her forget, if only fleetingly, the anguish that grips her. But the wait drags on, a storm breaks, the river in flood swells, grows menacing, and ends by spilling its mud into the courtyard of the inn. In a landscape transformed by the mire, there surfaces what remains of a world destined to disappear: a synagogue, a bar, a bridge over a river. Far off, as in a dream, someone thinks he glimpses the contours of a Promised Land: under a sky once more open, Rita heads toward this country “with long beaches and a clear sun”⁵ whose name is so strange that someone remarks on it to her in passing, “as if it were [not a question] of a piece of land, but of a being young, fabulous and [seductive].”⁶

The plot reduces to this: a sequence of images snatched from oblivion, a few snatches of conversation, silences hard to bear — especially in the evening, just before going to bed — and the hope that, by going to settle elsewhere, the problems will not do likewise. The departure with which the narrative ends is not without recalling the one that closes Badenheim 1939 some twelve years earlier. There too, in conclusion of the last chapter, under a sky once more clear, crossed by a few rays of sun, colorful characters leave, at the end of a season “not like the others,” their favorite holiday spot. That said, in this novel the departure does not take place in the same manner, nor for the same reasons. Indeed, at the nearest station, a locomotive followed by four freight cars awaits, among others, the old rabbi — incapable of interacting with the people around him, save in an indistinct mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew — Sally and Gertie — the two oldest prostitutes of the area, well accepted by the community and henceforth an integral part of the local folklore — Leon Semitzki — musician and storyteller of Polish origin — Nahum Slotzker — the yanuka, the “prodigy child” whom the villagers take turns caring for — Dr. Langmann — as proud of his Austrian lineage as he is ashamed of his Semitic origins and, consequently, incapable of understanding why he finds himself sharing the same fate as his most eccentric traveling companions, in whose stories he hardly recognizes himself… While the people are directed toward the platforms and dispersed throughout the train — which, like an apparition, detaches itself from the landscape from which it surged forth and jolts on the rails — someone has time to pronounce one last sentence, just before disappearing himself, swallowed by the ironwork. His words, meant to be encouraging, resound in the reader like a funereal sentence: “If the cars are so dirty, that means we shall not be going very far.”

This sentence abruptly interrupts the related events, plunges us into an ellipsis, suggests the presence of an impenetrable “off-screen” that only the intervention of an extradiegetic instance is able to interpret. It also underscores, in extremis, the naïveté the protagonists have all displayed over the course of the pages, with the exception perhaps of a few moonstruck artists, the most religious, and the youngest. It is neither inspiration nor proximity to God that sets these last apart from the rest: if, blinded by the perverse myth of assimilation, they end by differentiating themselves from those around them, it is rather because, like the animals, they develop an out-of-the-ordinary instinct — or one perceived as such in a closed universe where each tends to think like his neighbor. Dear to Appelfeld, the motif of “the wild child”⁷, cut off from the rest of the world, is expressed here only very marginally; by contrast, that of the heightened sensibility, resulting from a gaze as little pre-oriented as possible upon the reality of things, asserts itself without detour.

At bottom, it is not because he intervenes retrospectively that the narrator seems to possess a knowledge almost wholly foreign to the book’s protagonists; his skill in deciphering signs, the ease with which he establishes links between the phenomena he describes, his nearly “prophetic” powers — despite a not entirely omniscient focalization — depend on a finesse of analysis that only those who seek to enter into relation with the complexity around them with their whole body (skin, muscles, belly, head) seem capable of developing and, where appropriate, of transmitting. “A subdued light, as if filtered through parchment, illuminates the last days of Badenheim,” this timeless voice communicates to us, knowing that the last days are truly the last, more by reason of what it adds than by virtue of the “historical present” in which it seems to express itself. Thus it continues: “[c]igarettes run short. People secretly absorb stolen drugs. Some are gay, others sink into melancholy. The silence is no more. People lean out of the windows or climb to the upper floors. The most recent rains revive the fallen leaves in the Luxembourg garden. The view is sublime. The House now resembles an oratory where one may cry out or keep silent, each as he pleases. In any case, no one will ask anything whatsoever.”⁸

The isolation in which the micro-community of Badenheim is plunged a little more each day is measured by the shortage of necessities and tobacco, by the apathy of the residents — who, gay or melancholy, all end by adopting an attitude out of step with the changes under way — and by the wait for instructions that weighs on the guests, trying as best they can to prepare themselves for the “after,” while ignoring what the reader, by contrast, spontaneously associates with the imaginary of deportation. And yet, a seemingly innocuous detail stands out in the few lines cited: “the fallen leaves in the Luxembourg garden,” whose colors have been revived by the latest downpours. It is perhaps this polychrome carpet that makes, more than anything else, the view from the windows “appear admirable”; there can be no doubt, it is this collage improvised on the ground and demanding to be contemplated from afar that the narrator places before the eyes of his characters, as if it were a matter of recognizing in it — like a “figure in the carpet” — the key to an enigma whose scope is far more universal than one might believe.

Attentive to what, in the surrounding landscape, announces itself as the possible resolution of a mystery, this detached storyteller, with a syntax as sober as it is incisive, limits himself, to be sure, to the essential, yet while granting a fundamental importance to data that might appear superfluous at first sight. His intention is not to overturn a dominant hierarchy, but, more banally, to affirm his own, made of elements distributed within a system whose internal logic of organization escapes those who attempt to explain it in too rational a manner. Often inclining toward synesthesia, the contents of his observations hazard connections of a mystical cast; they alternate between information necessary to the constitution of the narrative and snapshots able to convey “what the narrative [strictly speaking] does not say.” Here more than elsewhere, “to employ the substantive narrative implies a generalization […] beyond or short of the novel, that is, of literature, that is, of the right to say everything and to hide everything, to bear proof of an absolute responsibility or of an equally absolute irresponsibility.” Philippe Daros recalls it well: “[any] verbalization [as] a condition of objectifying exteriorization and of communication […] opens onto the question of what is left unsaid.”⁹ Now, “the narrative as inter-diction of an ‘unsaid,’” as the experience of a performativity intrinsic to the act of “giving form to the literary and, simultaneously, [to the acceptance] within this giving-form of a formless, an unformulated, a [hardly] formulable,” is configured in the same way as a treasure hunt. To tell the truth, this last observation appears as a commonplace of art in general; without formalizing its multiple stakes, Appelfeld is certainly aware of it, and that is notably why he devotes himself to the setting up of narrations where words systematically become the repositories of the “thickness” of existence, more than they become the trace of its ultimate “signification.”¹⁰

This emerges particularly where the incursions of the one who narrates are accompanied by a summary restitution of the characters’ thoughts — it is in the gap between the ones and the others that the possibility of a “response” takes shape — or else at the very beginning of the last chapters, when it is a matter of reinforcing the dramatic tension while suggesting the irreducible polysemy of associations one would tend to qualify as “obvious.” Take by way of example the extract that follows: “the dogs try to make a breach in the walls, but they have not the strength for it. The guards push them back inside. They have grown much thinner and show hostility toward the people. The maître d’hôtel strokes them gently, telling them that, if they behave well and prove obedient, he will take them to Poland. Everything depends on them, on them alone. It does indeed seem that the dogs do not understand the substance of this affair. The viciousness gives their eyes a gleam of polished metal. At night, they tear the silence to shreds. People have nightmares. Mitsi affirms that never has she been terrorized by such horrible dreams. Salo softens the impression by putting it all down to the dogs; without them, one could sleep peacefully. In autumn, the mild air is favorable to sleep.”¹¹ In this passage, the dogs that try desperately “to make a breach in the walls” without managing to escape are opposed to the maître d’hôtel who “strokes them gently, telling them that, if they behave well and prove obedient, he will take them to Poland.” Of course, the former feel without understanding the approach of danger: they “naturally” sniff out the menace represented by that strange “Sanitation Service” which, in the book, refers metonymically to the whole of the operations conducted by the National Socialist party as it grappled with what would enter History under the name of “Final Solution.” The maître d’hôtel, for his part, utterly fails to understand what is happening and, like most of the other boarders, cannot envisage the evacuation in preparation otherwise than as a simple collective “move” — indeed, his incomprehension is such that, in addressing the animals, he gives to understand that taking them with him represents a favor to be earned. That said, if the human beings repress while the beasts “tear the silence to shreds” with their cries and their whimpering, it is not exclusively by reason of a different type of sensory perception, but also and above all by virtue of the mastery, or not, of language. In a certain way, if the absence of the latter in the dogs prevents them from articulating their growing anguish, the use the human beings make of it protects them, but above all distances them, from the truth.¹²

The relationship that the characters of Badenheim 1939 maintain with language manifests itself in varied ways: some replace the letters and newspapers, which no longer reach the little town following its quarantine, with a succession of stories reported orally, each new version of which contributes to watering down the previous ones; a few set about learning Yiddish, on the one hand in order to “better prepare for the arrival in Poland,” on the other because deciphering an unfamiliar alphabet is without doubt simpler and more reassuring than seeking to decode current events¹³; still others abandon themselves to interior monologues that the narrator decides not to make explicit. The narrator, haunted by Appelfeld’s memories of his last holidays with his parents, is not quite an alter ego of the author, but rather a storyteller to whom the writer seems to have ceded his place. Primo Levi noticed it immediately and, in a review of Badenheim 1939 (Le lance diventino scudi, 4 November 1981, La Stampa), suggests that if the book as a whole is “strange” and “chilling,”¹⁴ it is not only by reason of the matter addressed, but also of the use of such a device — redoubled, in the Israeli edition, by the illustrations of Appelfeld’s son, Meir, around fourteen years old at the time of the text’s publication, but able to furnish an “interpretation through images” somewhat compensatory with respect to any coming-to-awareness one hopes might be obtained, right to the end, from at least one of the novel’s protagonists.

Deceived by contingency, paralyzed by a total incapacity to take a step back from their own situation, the characters convey a problematic and somewhat generalizing representation of the victims: not always likable, very often pretentious despite their ingenuousness, they seem to head docilely toward the place of their own massacre. Nevertheless, far from feeding the stereotype of the Jews incapable of defending themselves or of reacting decisively in the face of the injustices of which they are the target and the acts of barbarity perpetrated against them, Appelfeld depicts rather what belongs to the order of a “violence of calm” liable to concern each and every one. “Whether it be the Nazi concentration camps, the gulags of the East, the tortures in Latin America, in Chile, individual crimes (and the criminals so quickly baptized monsters), we like to persuade ourselves [that these are] anomalies, tragedies, dramas,” observes Viviane Forrester in an essay every bit as “chilling” as Badenheim 1939. “Now the drama, the tragedy, is precisely that there is none,” she continues, “that their models are internalized, accepted, lived, and propagated in repression and resignation by [the greatest number, to the point that one comes to designate as exceptional, scandalous, what is only an exacerbated, ostensible form of the everyday.” The scandal is that there is none, or else “that there is scandal in designating as rare, astonishing, what (though less spectacular, less abridged, and sometimes less brutal) is everywhere widespread in time, in space [to the point of] merging with the ambient calm.” For “the scandal — and it is a scandal — diverts attention from the true scandal, which is permanent, indiscernible, fundamental in sum”¹⁵; which amounts to establishing a risky system of equivalences between “tranquility” and “unnoticed brutality,” “quietude” and “latent horror.”¹⁶

In Le lance diventino scudi (Let Lances Become Shields), Levi also underscores this other fundamental aspect of Appelfeld’s literary enterprise; once the plot is taken up in broad outline, he isolates the critical perspectives that allow one better to orient its reading. If it is true that Badenheim 1939 can be the object of several interpretations, it is just as evident that it appears in the first place as an attempt to thematize the “I do not want to see” that the previous generation opposed to the Hitlerian menace. Levi nuances his remarks significantly by insisting not only on the question of “repression,” but also on the use of the verb “to want.” In his words, it is not a question of “not being able” — at least it is not that which first holds his attention — it is really a matter of “not wanting,” giving to understand by this the existence of a tacit and shared choice that the characters will end by suffering. Far from concentrating solely on the Jews, Levi introduces from the very beginning of his intervention the idea he will subsequently defend with the most vigor: after alluding to the paper world of Badenheim “inspired by a real universe, but issued nonetheless from a ‘construction,’” he refers to humanity as a whole, to his contemporaries, whom he reproaches at once for a form of convenient myopia and for the refusal to confront without mediation the menaces that weigh upon them. It is this second path, centered on bringing out the value of a book one of whose principal characteristics is its irreducible “topicality,” that Levi decides to develop by means of an analysis ever less “literary” as one progresses through the text. His aim being, among other things, to show that Appelfeld’s characters are no more foolish than the majority of people, Jewish or not, Levi manages not only to propose a different gaze upon the vacationers of Badenheim, but also and above all to make of this sort of collective entity, “plausible more than authentic” — to take up the expression he himself had used in order to describe the epic of the partisan protagonists of his historical novel, Maintenant ou jamais (If Not Now, When?, 1982) — an ontological category of our Western modernity. “We too today, like the Jews of Badenheim yesterday, eat pastries and organize music festivals while the ‘Sanitation Service’ is at work,” Levi warns; to which he adds: “the present situation differs, however, in this, that the menace no longer concerns only a group but the human species, it no longer spreads from a single and perverse center of power, it nestles rather in the precarious equilibrium in which we have grown accustomed to living.”¹⁷ In the midst of the Cold War, in a context profoundly marked by the nuclear arms race, the fear of an “atomic apocalypse” concentrates within itself a series of other fears too often minimized; it intervenes in Levi’s discourse in an obsessive manner, and serves as a pretext for embarking on a reflection that in turn finds a resonance hic et nunc.

“People readily discourse on apocalypses and scourges when they seem far from us, sometimes even jokingly, as in Dr. Strangelove. That film [by Kubrick] was amusing, but today one would be ill at ease watching it,” Levi explains, before specifying: “by contrast, when the dangers approach, people behave exactly as at Badenheim,”¹⁸ in other words they apply themselves to building a system of defenses such that it cuts them off radically from the real. To speak of the atomic menace or of the massive migratory crisis, of the Syrian tragedy, of the danger represented by North Korea, at a time when relations between the United States and Russia seem every bit as tense as in the 1980s, though for other reasons — would be, for Levi, “a moderately positive signal.” Of course, “conferences, round tables, demonstrations” help to raise the awareness of public opinion still further; nevertheless, for words to translate into action, it is indispensable, he insists, to address these subjects “in living rooms, at the table, among friends or with strangers.”¹⁹ Yes, because if the objective is to render the problem concrete, then one must counter by every means the eventuality that the word distances, transfigures dubiously, abstracts away precisely; it is necessary to integrate into daily life analyses able to replace the hollow slogans, as well as the simplifications, indeed the political instrumentalizations at their origin. To discuss the rain and the fine weather — as is done at Badenheim or in the Zaltzer house of Fracht — allows one to escape, to be sure, but it is also a perilous practice (and in the world in which we live this is known all too well), for by discussing only the rain and the fine weather one loses the habit of more committed exchanges, at the risk of conferring on language a power as mystifying as the one on which the “Sanitation Service” (understood in its most paradigmatic acceptation) ceaselessly relies to advance in its proceedings.

Notes