Martin Amis’s ‘The Zone of Interest’

There are three British writers whose adult lives, like mine, seem likely to straddle the Millennium: in order of personal preference, Ian McEwan (b 1948), Julian Barnes (b 1946) and Martin Amis (b 1949). Amis’s works don’t always appeal to me – I haven’t read Lionel Asbo (2012) and his roman à clef, The Pregnant Widow (2010) seemed flawed by attempting to put late-thirty year-old heads on early-twenty year-old shoulders. But, like other and far better qualified judges*, I found his latest novel, The Zone of Interest, impressive.

It is mostly set in an Auschwitz-like concentration camp, Kat Zet, (KZ, Konzentrationslager) in 1942/43, the period when the Red Army at Stalingrad began to roll back the Nazi advance. Events are seen in alternating succession through the eyes of Angelus Thomsen, a young, well-connected middle manager with the contractor IG Farben, Paul Doll, the camp commandant and Szmul, head of the prisoners who dispose of the bodies. Thomsen, an experienced womaniser, falls in love with Doll’s wife, Hannah. The novel ends with an Aftermath covering the years to 1948. It is clear from the Acknowledgments and Afterward: ‘That Which Happened’ at the end of the book, that Amis has an extensive knowledge of the authoritative Third Reich and Holocaust literature (his first Kat Zet novel, Time’s Arrow, was published in 1991).

The reader of The Zone of Interest is not spared the Holocaust’s “horror, its desolation and its bloody-minded opacity”, nor should they be. However, it is, inevitably, a far from easy read. Some reviewers have called it a satire, others a black comedy and no doubt technically they are right, but it’s far from Catch-22. Amis chose to let Doll, a particularly crooked timber who had been a Nazis since the 1920s, use German words in frequent references to female anatomy but to grotesque effect rather than comic. It seems unlikely to pose a problem in translating the novel to German, because, according to the New York Times, Amis’s usual publishers in France and Germany, Gallimard and Carl Hanser Verlag, have turned down The Zone of Interest. However, Calmann-Lévy, part of the Hachette group, has plans to publish for the autumn of 2015. French readers may find it unsettling that as early in the book as Chapter 2, the first transport to be described arriving at the camp is from Paris.

However revolting the activities of the self-styled Islamic State (IS, or ISIS or ISIL) may seem, Amis’s book is a reminder that they have, so far, been small violations by comparison with the Third Reich’s atrocities. Its publication in the UK is fortuitously timed. The British Museum will be showing Germany: Memories of a Nation from next month until January. In a FT Weekend Magazine interview with the BM’s director, Neil MacGregor, Simon Schama observes:

It is just because the public’s general knowledge of German history, such as it is, is so dominated by one immense and hideous narrative – that of the Third Reich and the Holocaust – that MacGregor wants to open minds to something broader and more complex. Those horrors he calls – provocatively – “extraordinary historical anomalies”. What he wants to present to the listener and the visitor to the exhibition is, rather, a strikingly under-determined national identity – one not, from the beginning, driving inexorably on the Autobahn to annihilation.

The Royal Academy has a retrospective until December of the German painter Anselm Kiefer (b 1945) whose work “wrestles with the darkness of German history”.

Anselm Kiefer, Nothung 1973

Tate Modern from October to February will be showing Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010:

Polke [b 1941] grew up at a time when many Germans deflected blame for the atrocities of the Nazi period with the alibi, ‘I didn’t see anything’. In various works in the exhibition, Polke opposes many Germans of his generation’s tendency to ignore the Nazi past, as if picking off the scab to reopen the wound.

And in October the reconstructed documentary, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, will be released as Memory of the Camps. Supervised by Alfred Hitchcock and drawing on film shot in the camps during liberation, it was pulled from distribution after the war for political reasons, a story told in another new film, André Singer’s Night Will Fall.

* Just for example: Alex Clark in the Guardian, Alex Preston in the Observer, Rebecca Abrams in the FT, Wynn Wheldon in the Spectator, JoyceCarol Oates in the New Yorker.

(Post amended on 27 September to include Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern and Nothung)

Grayson Perry at the British Museum

In 2009 many people had the chance to see the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition, Unpopular Culture, which had been curated by Grayson Perry drawing on the Arts Council Collection. Perry is well-known for having won the Turner Prize in 2003 and for his transvestism. Most of his work consists of large decorated pots, and he can be dismissed as a potter rather than an artist. But I thought that the selection of British art he made for Unpopular Culture was informed and informative, and that the thoughts and opinions which accompanied the exhibition and that he inscribed on his pots revealed a sharp and knowing mind. Unpopular Culture had been preceded in 2006 by The Charms of Lincolnshire (left) where he put some of his own work alongside historical artefacts selected from the county’s museums.

Grayson has now curated The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, an installation of some of his new works alongside objects from the British Museum’s collection. On entry visitors are confronted by You Are Here (below left), covered in images of people like themselves and captioned to suggest that Grayson takes a realistic view of his audience’s motivations for coming. What follows provides a dialogue between Grayson’s craftsmanship and that of his anonymous predecessors over the centuries. He has a good eye for an interesting artefact and his own contributions reveal his intelligence and industriousness. His Rosetta Vase, (below right) covered with mid-2011 mots du jour and a satirical map of the contemporary art exhibition scene, amused me (in view of recent posts) with its inscriptions ‘babyboomers’ and ‘post-post-modernism’, as well as a quotation from the now somewhat forgotten Jacob Bronowski – presumably Grayson may have seen his television series, The Ascent of Man, (and counterpart to Lord Clark’s Civilisation), when a teenager in the 1970s.  

Some people may find Grayson’s feminine alter ego, Claire, and his teddy bear/personal god, Alan Measles, off-putting, (the latter had ample coverage in BBC1’s recent Imagine) but I think they should put that aside and look at the creativity of his work before forming an opinion. The BM exhibition continues until 19 February.

ADDENDUM 5 DECEMBER

The Tate has recently made available one of its Bloomberg TateShots of Grayson in his studio during the making of Rosetta Vase.

ADDENDUM 26 MARCH 2012

Decca Aitkenhead interviews Grayson Perry at the Guardian's Open Weekend.