While the following title is not from the current, or even last year's, Reading the World list of titles - it is a book that was translated into English and seems to fit with the spirit of the Reading the World program.
8th Book: Review Date May 8, 2006
Gotz and Meyer by David Albahari
Translated from Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursac
2005 by Harcourt Books 168 pages
The Gotz and Meyer of David Albahari’s title are two German soldiers from World War II. The two of them had a single task during the war, which was to drive 5000 women, children and elderly men, about a hundred at a time, from a concentration camp near Belgrade, to their death.
Albahari has helped his readers perhaps stumble onto one more atrocity from World War II that they may have been unaware of. The method by which Gotz and Meyer eliminated the 5000 was by driving these people in a hermetically sealed truck - a Belgrade Saurer – and once they were out of sight of the camp, stopping and re-routing the exhaust back into a hole in the bottom of the truck. By the time they arrived at their ending location, another camp, the 100 people standing in the back were dead. It was at this other camp that the Germans had four prisoners come and dig a mass grave, move the bodies and bury them. At which point they’d shoot those four prisoners. If the narrator of the novel is to be believed, the Nazis used trucks like these, more or less mobile gas chambers, to kill more than 700,000 prisoners over the course of the war.
As Albahari’s narrator, an anonymous teacher, pursues more information about these truck runs, he both becomes obsessed and also begins to share the information with his students. The obsession shows as a great deal of this information the narrator shares is his own imagining of what happened. When he runs into dead ends with actual fact, the narrator moves in this direction, imagining events and conversations in order to learn more. Albahari is clear through his writing just what sort of an affect such an obsession might have on a man as the narrator begins to imagine things in his own life as well, and his tone becomes wearier through the novel, if not even a bit more harried.
Albahari poses the idea, again through his writing and through the narrator’s ideas, that many of the soldiers in the war were aware of what they were doing, but at the same time simply part of a larger mechanism. The narrator’s imagining of these two men clearly allows for the fact that they were well aware they were responsible for killing the prisoners they were transporting. At times, he even allows a slight glimpse into feelings of guilt. However, at the same time, he refuses to even distinguish between the two. Anytime he is imagining an event from their past, he refers to them as “Gotz and Meyer, or Meyer and Gotz,” or some similar phrasing.
Albahari also allows the reader in on the narrator’s breaking down over the duration of the novel by writing it in one single paragraph with no breaks. The book, if read straight through, with the great deal of repetition Albahari includes, which increases in frequency from beginning to end, has the reader feeling as if they are being hammered over and over with information and emotion. It is this aspect of the book that makes it both an interesting, and a slightly difficult, read. It is worth your time though.
4 stars
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