Siegfried

A fairly short read from the sometimes prolix Dutch author, Harry Mulisch. In lunging after large ideas it is similar to his own ‘Discovery of Heaven,’ and in structure it is something like a cross between ‘Father Smith’s Confession’ in The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy and the meditations on Nietzsche and music in Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, but having the smaller scope of his later French works.

The novel begins with arrival of one Rudolf Herter and his mistress Maria in Vienna for some kind of cultural affairs event. It is soon revealed that Herter is a novelist modeled on – here’s the non-surprise – Mulisch himself. In an interview Herter mentions Vienna’s most prodigal son in an effort to explain the engine that drives his fiction, and what follows is a kind of postmodern fantasy designed to capture the fates driving the darkest forces of History.

In order to do this, Herter/Mulisch expounds on philosophical subjects ranging from Pseudo-Dionysus to the two legacies of Hegel. All this is in the service of obsessing about Hitler, evident in passages such as this:

“In a different way only Nietzsche was as obsessed with Wagner as Hitler was. Apart from that Hitler, too, had decided to rule the world, he also toyed with the idea of a new calendar, and so on and so on – I could continue for a lot longer. With Hitler, Nietzsche’s megalomania and his anxieties became reality from A to Z; it all fits like a glove. Later, when as chancellor he was visiting Nietzsche’s sister in Leipzig, he even had something of a mystical experience there: it was as if, he said, he had seen her dead brother physically in the room and heard him speak. And is that precise coincidence of Hitler’s origin and Nietzsche’s downfall suddenly coincidental? And is it coincidental that they lived to be precisely the same age: fifty-six? Is it also coincidental that Nietzsche’s madness lasted exactly as long as Hitler’s time in power: twelve years?” (167)

Pretty manic. Which is not to say implausible, although I’m not sure how well it works with the story with which it is interwoven. I’ve become accustomed to reading philosophical discourse in novels as a digression offering up a kind of freedom from fate (or plot), so that reading Herter as he connects so many disparate dots left this reader looking for more of the actual story. The ending is a little spooky, and getting there is something of a thrill, but the supporting events struck me as somewhat flimsy, and wanting at that.

A number of questions came up for me while reading: How does the idea of Hitler having a son alter our perception of the dictator? How does the murder of this son by him make him any worse than the ‘abyss’ (Mulisch/Herter’s description) already responsible for the death of so many millions? Are the author’s creation of the diaries of Eva Braun supposed to lend verisimilitude to the description of Hitler? More generally, what exactly does the practice of creating a fictional double for the real author do for the stories in which they take part? In this novel I’m not sure what was gained by having the fictional author so closely resemble his creator. I tried to think of this duality in terms of Nietzsche’s and then Hitler’s obsession with Wagner, but that didn’t really help. Perhaps I’m making too much of what is now becoming a fairly standard fictional device, but it seemed to detract from the story rather than add anything to it.