Spiegel, Germany
April 17 2005
SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR EDGAR HILSENRATH
“I Felt Guilty Because I Survived the Holocaust”
Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath survived the Holocaust in a Ukrainian
ghetto and then went on to become a best-selling author. He spoke
with SPIEGEL about his life in the ghetto, about writing satirical
Holocaust novels and about the Turkish massacre of the Armenians.
SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR EDGAR HILSENRATH
“I Felt Guilty Because I Survived the Holocaust”
Jewish author Edgar Hilsenrath survived the Holocaust in a Ukrainian
ghetto and then went on to become a best-selling author. He spoke
with SPIEGEL about his life in the ghetto, about writing satirical
Holocaust novels and about the Turkish massacre of the Armenians.
DDP
Edgar Hilsenrath survived the Holocaust and went on to become a
well-known author.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Hilsenrath, in your novels you write about living and
surviving in the Jewish ghetto. Some people find it unsettling that
you talk about your experiences there with a certain amount of humor
and satire. Can you see what they mean?
Hilsenrath: If I could, I wouldn’t write like that. I just have a
rather perverse take on the events of the Holocaust.
SPIEGEL: There are some people who find that attitude offensive.
Hilsenrath: In Germany people want to make up to the Jews for what
happened by idealizing them. The Jews in the ghetto were every bit as
imperfect as human beings anywhere else. There are people who
criticize me for portraying the Jews in my novel “Night a Novel” as
suspicious, miserable and mean. I can only respond by saying that in
“Night a Novel” it is not the Jews that I was describing, but rather
the poverty of the ghetto…
SPIEGEL: …as well as what makes human beings human. “Night a
Novel”, your first novel, describes everything in such horrifying
detail that it is almost a descent into hell. Did you initially set
out to write a literary, rather than a factual, book?
Hilsenrath: Yes, I wanted to write a literary piece of work. At the
age of 14 I had already decided that I wanted to become a novelist.
Edgar Hilsenrath
Edgar Hilsenrath was born in Leipzig in 1926 as the son of a Jewish
merchant family. He survived World War II and the Holocaust in a
ghetto in Ukraine. After the end of the war, he went to Palestine for
a time and then on to the United States where his career as an author
began. His novels “Night a Novel” (1964) and “The Nazi & the Barber a
Tale of Vengeance” (1971) brought him popularity and helped him to
sell millions of books worldwide. In conjunction with the publication
of his annotated complete works by the Dittrich Verlag publishing
house, his 1989 novel “The Story of the Last Thought” has been
re-released. The book deals with the slaughter of the Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire.
SPIEGEL: Was the ghetto which you describe in “Night a Novel” similar
to where you lived in Mogilyov-Podolski in Soviet Ukraine?
Hilsenrath: It is actually the exact same ghetto. Just with a
different name.
SPIEGEL: Really? In your autobiographical novel “The Adventures of
Ruben Jablonski” you get the impression that your family was more
privileged than most of the ghetto.
Hilsenrath: That’s true. My life wasn’t ever really like the lives of
the characters in my novel “Night a Novel”.
SPIEGEL: Why were things different for you?
Hilsenrath: I arrived there with a whole group of Jews from Siret in
Bukovina (in present-day Moldavia). The leader of our group knew the
commander who was in charge of the ghetto. He not only allowed us to
use an old school building, but also gave us papers so that we were
not transported on again. The whole group, about 40 people, lived in
three classrooms. Everyone in the ghetto suffered hunger; there was
absolutely nothing. But we had smuggled jewelry, fur coats, dresses
and other valuables into the ghetto, even though this would have been
punishable by death.
SPIEGEL: Did you trade these goods on the black market?
Hilsenrath: Yes. We would sneak out of the ghetto at night and trade
the goods for food with farmers living in the area. We then sold the
food to the people in the ghetto. This was how the group from Siret
survived.
SPIEGEL: Was your whole family in the ghetto?
Hilsenrath: No. My father went into hiding in France. I actually grew
up in (the eastern German town of) Halle and then, in 1938, I went
with my mother and brother to my grandparents in Bukovina because
Germany had become too dangerous for us. The whole atmosphere was
impossible. My school in Halle was a real Nazi school. Every day I
had to fight with the other pupils, who gave me horrible nicknames.
The teachers bullied me.
SPIEGEL: Was it any better in Siret?
AFP
After World War II, Hilsenrath spent time on a kibbutz in Israel.
Hilsenrath: Yes. I was happy there. It was a miracle. They spoke
German in Bukovina and I felt really at home. I had lots of friends
and loved the Jewish music I heard there. There were also lots of
gypsies and gypsy music. It was an atmosphere which I really fitted
in to. Admittedly it was dirty: the people and the muddy streets. But
there was a real feeling of warmth and comfort. I really liked it
there.
SPIEGEL: Also maybe because your grandparents were somewhat better
off than most of the people in the shtetl?
Hilsenrath: Yes, they were well off.
SPIEGEL: When did you have to leave Siret?
Hilsenrath: In 1941, when the war broke out. All the Jews from our
town were transported to Central Romania. First to Craiova, then back
to the area around Siret, to a town called Radautz. We stayed there
for two months and scraped by living from hand to mouth. Then all of
a sudden posters sprang up all over town, saying that all the Jews
from Bukovina would be deported to the east, on order of (then
Romanian leader) Marshall Antonescu. We had to be at the station at
six the next morning. Anyone who was found still at home would be
shot. We were crowded into cattle trucks and for two days we traveled
through Czernowitz and Bessarabia to a small town called Ataki, which
is on the Dnister River. The ruined Ukrainian city Mogilyov-Podolski
was on the other side of the river. We were brought to the ghetto
there on rafts. We stayed until March 1944, when the Russians came.
SPIEGEL: Ranek, the main figure in your novel “Night a Novel”, has
very different experiences of the ghetto than yours. He is one of the
poorest people in the ghetto and at the end doesn’t survive. Why did
you decide to make him the hero of the story?
Hilsenrath: I wanted to describe the ghetto’s lowest social level.
SPIEGEL: Why?
Hilsenrath: I don’t know. Maybe because I had a guilty conscience.
SPIEGEL: Did you really feel guilty because things weren’t as bad for
you as for others?
Hilsenrath: I felt guilty because I survived.
SPIEGEL: While you were living in the ghetto people were constantly
being deported. Did you ever guess what was happening to these
people?
Hilsenrath: Rumor had it that they were being taken to the river Bug,
further out to the east. The SS were stationed on the other side of
the river and shot the Jews being sent across. The Romanians did that
quite a lot. We knew about all that but we didn’t think that things
might be worse.
SPIEGEL: So you didn’t live in constant fear of death?
Hilsenrath: As far as I was concerned, as a 15 year-old, it was all a
great adventure. We heard about things that were happening in Poland,
but we didn’t know any real details. We lived from day to day.
SPIEGEL: Were you allowed to go back to Siret when the Russians took
the ghetto?
AFP
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered in the Ottoman
Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a chapter that
Turkey prefers to ignore.
Hilsenrath: No. When the Russians came, all men over 18 had to join
the army. It was just before my 18th birthday so I got away as fast
as I could and made my way by foot to Bessarabia.
SPIEGEL: Just as you describe in you novel “The Adventures of Ruben
Jablonski?”
Hilsenrath: Yes. I made it to Czernowitz. But there, the Russians
pulled me out of bed at night and arrested me. Then, we were all to
be sent to a coal-pit in Donbass (in present-day eastern Ukraine). At
roll call I met a cousin of mine from Poland. He was good at Russian
and also quite skilful at forging papers. He made me two years
younger, went to the Russian commandant and said: “The boy is only
16. You cannot deport him.” They let me go. The next day, I went to
Romania, which had been liberated by then. I walked 40 kilometers
from Czernowitz to Siret. Bit by bit, my entire family gathered
there. After six months, a delegation of Zionists from Bucharest
turned up looking for young people to go to Palestine. And I said
“Okay.”
SPIEGEL: Because you were looking for adventure or because you were a
Zionist?
Hilsenrath: Both, for sure. The Zionists had arranged for a train
that was to run from Bucharest via Bulgaria and Turkey to Palestine.
In Bulgaria, however, the Russians arrested us alleging that we were
illegal aliens. We were locked into an internment camp for two months
before Ben Gurion himself came to Sofia and got us out. The trip took
two months.
SPIEGEL: When did you arrive?
Hilsenrath: In January 1945 we received our proper papers, a British
stamp, and we were free. The Zionists then divided us up and sent us
to different kibbutzim. I ended up in a kibbutz in Galilee. It was
quite a good life but I was bored. I didn’t like working in the
fields every day. In the end I went Jerusalem to see the person in
charge of the Youth Aliya (an organization which brought youth from
Europe to Israel) and asked, “Can’t you send me to a place where
there are people from Bukovina?” And he said: “Okay, I know a Kibbutz
where Bukovinians live.”
SPIEGEL: You were homesick in other words?
Hilsenrath: Yes. But they kicked me out of the new Kibbutz after two
months because I didn’t want to go to Hebrew-classes every day after
work. Back then, I already spent all my free time writing novels.
SPIEGEL: In German?
Hilsenrath: Yes, in German.
SPIEGEL: Didn’t you feel any need to learn Hebrew?
Hilsenrath: Not at all. The Kibbutz bought me a bus ticket to Haifa
and I went. I took a variety of different jobs, worked as dishwasher,
and came down with a bad case of Malaria.
SPIEGEL: Obviously, you did not develop any kind of bond with
Palestine?
Hilsenrath: The Israeli mentality was totally different to mine. They
just didn’t understand people like me. They couldn’t understand why I
had been in a ghetto. We were totally different.
SPIEGEL: And then you grabbed the first chance you had and emigrated
to France?
Hilsenrath: I first had to wait for two years before even getting a
passport …
SPIEGEL: … and then you were reunited with your family?
Hilsenrath: Yes. My mother and brother had already illegally
emigrated from Bulgaria to France via Hungary and Austria.
SPIEGEL: You hadn’t seen your father for nine years. Did he
immediately approve of your goal of becoming a “writer”?
Hilsenrath: No! My father was totally against it. He wanted me to be
a furrier, just like him. But as you can see, I did not listen to
him.
SPIEGEL: It was only on the next leg of your journey, in America,
that you completed your novel “Night a Novel” and the book that would
become your most famous, “The Nazi & the Barber a Tale of Vengeance”.
Hilsenrath: I had already written two-thirds of it in Germany. I told
my American publisher back then “I can only do it in a
German-speaking environment.”
SPIEGEL: “The Nazi & the Barber a Tale of Vengeance” was published in
Germany in 1977 with a six-year delay. Why? The novel had already
been a bestseller in America.
Hilsenrath: The publishing houses here said that the German people
just weren’t ready for it yet. They said that such a serious subject
couldn’t be dealt with satirically. They didn’t like the language,
they didn’t like the open sexuality.
SPIEGEL: It was finally published by a small publishing house and
became a big hit. But even (literary giant) Heinrich Boell, who
reviewed your novel, wrote that he had to overcome a “threshold of
disgust.” Were you hurt by that?
Hilsenrath: No. I was amused. I mean, sensitive readers do have
problems with my books. A friend of mine worked with (German radio
station) Bayerische Rundfunk then. After I sent her “The fairy tale
of the last thought”, she called me a bit later and was totally
horrified. She had just read the part about the 97-year-old man that
sleeps with a Kurdish nine-year old girl and said she could not go on
reading the book. That’s how it is with my books.
SPIEGEL: You have sold around five million copies worldwide. Despite
that, your name has never been as familiar as Boell, Lenz or Grass.
Do you have an explanation?
Hilsenrath: No. Fame and me just don’t go together. It’s not always a
fair process.
SPIEGEL: In the coming days, your novel “The Story of the Last
Thought” is reappearing as part of your annotated complete works. In
it, you deal with the genocide against the Armenians, a topic that is
now, 90 years after it occurred, suddenly attracting attention again.
Would you write the book today just as you did in 1989?
Hilsenrath: Yes I would. I even think it’s my best novel. The “Story”
is pure poetry. The entire book is poetry filled with black humor.
SPIEGEL: Did the distance help — in that this time you weren’t
writing about your own history?
Hilsenrath: The Armenian genocide was also a Holocaust, but it wasn’t
my Holocaust. To be honest, when I began the book, I didn’t want to
write yet another Holocaust book. But then I stumbled across the
Armenians. I found original sources and even traveled to San
Francisco for research purposes. I’ve even been made a member —
honorary of course — of the Armenian Writers Association.
SPIEGEL: The Armenian genocide is not nearly as present in the
popular conscience as the Holocaust…
Hilsenrath: One could say not at all.
SPIEGEL: Can one risk a comparison between the two slaughters?
Hilsenrath: The Armenians were the Jews of the Ottoman Empire,
although there were also Jews living there — but the Armenians were
considered a cursed race and were seen as businesspeople and as
greedy. Which wasn’t true; most of the Armenians were farmers.
SPIEGEL: For a genocide to take place, both victims and perpetrators
are required.
Hilsenrath: But the Turks have completely repressed this chapter of
their history. It is forbidden; they aren’t even allowed to mention
it — probably out of fear that the Armenians would then demand
reparations.
SPIEGEL: Under these conditions, can you imagine Turkey becoming part
of the European Union?
Hilsenrath: I have to admit that I’m kind of afraid of Islam. On the
other hand though, maybe it would also be a chance for Turkey to
exert a positive influence on the rest of the Islamic world.
SPIEGEL: Thank you very much for this interview.
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