Author(s): Gert Hofmann; Eric Mace-Tessler (Translator); Michael Hofmann (Introduction by)

Novel | Historical | Translated fiction | Germany | Read our reviews!

A powerful novel about prejudice, violence, and complicity in Nazi Germany, this spare and evocative work interrogates shows how a group of people can slip towards extremism and barbarity in the blink of an eye.

The time is the 1930s. Our philosopher is Herr Veilchenfeld, a renowned thinker and distinguished professor, who, after his sudden dismissal from the university, has retired to live quietly in a country town in the east of Germany. Our narrator is Hans, a clever and inquisitive boy. He relates a mix of things he witnesses himself and things he hears about from his father, the town doctor, who sees all sorts of people as he makes his rounds, even Veilchenfeld, with his troubled heart. Veilchenfeld is in decline, it's true--he keeps ever more to himself--but the town is in ever better shape. After the defeat of the Great War and the subsequent years of poverty, things are looking up. The old, worn people are heartened to see it. The young are exhilarated. It is up to them to promote and patrol this new uplifting reality--to make it safe from the likes of Veilchenfeld, whose very existence is an affront to it. And so the doctor listens, and young Hans looks on.

Review: "Hofmann explores terrifying and timeless questions through the gaze of youth...Hans, a German child in the late 1930s, knows that Herr Veilchenfeld is an elderly philosopher...whom his father, the town's doctor, visits regularly...As he comes to understand that something is not right with his kindly, mysterious neighbor-and that something has shifted in the world during this time of great political and social upheaval -Hans experiences a private and deeply moving coming-of-age. The result is a delicate tale of innocence unknowingly lost." -Publishers Weekly

"Hofmann's is a world twilit by bourgeois civilisation and shocking barbarity. It allows us to understand fascism better, to better lament its hatred, and perhaps, to help us recognise it when it returns. His success is testament to his masterly eye and head and heart." -Tom Conaghan, Review 31

"A young boy with clear, unsentimental eyes and a storybook mind tells of terrible events, the more terrible because we know more than he does." -Paul Griffiths, TLS Books of the Year

"Hofmann's writing has a pleasing formality and subtlety (in an excellent translation), which brings us through both depths of thought and violence with the same patient clarity." -Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times

"One of the best holocaust novels in postwar German literature." -Milena Ganeva, Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature

"This unsettling tale concerns the persecution of one man in pre-World War II Germany. . . . Hofmann never uses the words Jew, Nazi, Hitler, or brownshirt. . . . The author surrounds his philosopher with mostly nondescript townspeople who abet, approve, or only quietly, and rarely, censure. . . . A painful, powerful work." -Kirkus, starred review

"The best novel I've read that describes events through the eyes of a child is little known and a minor masterpiece. . . . Hans, the son of a small-town doctor, watches as the life of his fascinating neighbor, Professor Veilchenfeld, unravels and is then destroyed. . . . In this learned old man, Hofmann condenses the industrialized extermination of millions. . . . To recount it through the limited and fragmented understanding of an innocent child was an inspired authorial choice." -Ian McEwan, The Wall Street Journal

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
“One understands only what one expects, says Father.” Through the perspective of a young boy in a small town, Gert Hofmann’s pitch-perfect novel tells of the gradual, sure and awful destruction of a Professor Veilchenfeld, who comes to live in the town after (we deduce) his expulsion from a university. Hofmann is careful to limit the narrative to what the boy knows, learns and asks, and the answers he gets from his parents — answers progressively unable to encompass or explain the situation. Although the novel does not contain the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Nazi’, but narrates the abuses heaped upon Veilchenfeld directly as the actions of persons upon another person — Hofmann provides no buffer of abstraction or identity to Veilchenfeld’s heart-rending fate (the abusers, after all, are the ones motivated by identity) — the novel, evidently set in the years preceding World War 2, gives subtle and devastating insight into how an attrition of civility in German society in the 1930s prepared it to both tolerate and perpetrate the Holocaust. The change in society is seen as a loss, a narrowing, a degradation, a stupifaction; the abusers themselves seem helpless and perplexed even at the height of their abuse. Fascism is the opposite of thought. For others, what cannot be accepted is erased from awareness. “What one does not absolutely have to know, one can also live without knowing,” says Father. What begins as some surreptitious stone-throwing and more general avoidance escalates over the three-year period of the book into community-approved violence and brazen cruelty. As Hofmann shows well, degradation also degrades the degrader, for which the degrader hates their victim still more and therefore subjects them to yet greater degradation — thereby degrading themselves still more and hating the victim still more in a cycle that quickly becomes extreme. Veilchenfeld applies to leave Germany but has his passport torn up and his citizenship revoked by an official at the town hall. Ultimately, his abjection cannot be borne; he hides in his apartment, despairs, loses the will to live, awaits his ‘relocation’. Eventually even the narrator’s father, Veilchenfeld’s doctor, sees Veilchenfeld’s death as the only solution. For the degraded degraders, though, there is no such simple release from the degradation they have wrought, only further escalation. “Reality is a gruesome rumour,” says Father. Towards the end of the book the townsfolk hold, for the first time ever, a unifying and nationalistic ‘traditional folk festival’, with the children grouped into different cohorts supposedly emblematic of the town’s traditions (though nobody actually recognises the supposed woodsman’s costume the narrator is issued to wear). This ludicrous festival is an innovation, a lie, emotive quicksand; all Fascism is retrospective fantasy, fraudulent nostalgia, a mental weakness, a sentimental longing to return to an imagined but non-existent collective past. Hofmann was the age of the narrator in the period described and was concerned when he wrote the book at the ongoing relevance of what happened then. History is a good teacher, Herr Veilchenfeld says, but, time and again, we are proven to be very poor students. 

Author Biography: Gert Hofmann (1931-1993) was a German writer and scholar of German literature. Originally an author of radio plays, he became one of postwar Germany's most prolific novelists, his fiction often examining the continued resonance of Nazism in Germany. His accolades include the Ingeborg-Bachmann Prize and the Alfred Doeblin Prize.

Eric Mace-Tessler is a translator and educator. Born in Brooklyn, he has lived in Germany and Switzerland for three decades.

Michael Hofmann is a poet and translator. He is the author of two books of essays and five books of poems, most recently One Lark, One Horse. He has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Alfred Doeblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jakob Wassermann's My Marriage, and Gert Ledig's Stalin Front, Kurt Tucholsky's Castle Gripsholm, and edited The Voyage That Never Ends, an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry.