German Fantasia
This slim volume consists of a series of connected short stories with the underlying theme of the experiences of Germans during and after the Second World War. At no time is the conflict or the country explicitly mentioned, but it is abundantly clear to the reader what the context is. The unifying figure is a man named Viktor who appears at the margins of the stories as an evil camp supervisor, and later as an old man nearing death in a nursing home in Germany.
The stories are literate, intelligent and meaningful, and provoke moral questions – such as how complicit can individual soldiers be in the atrocities committed by the country during the war; and in more recent years, if a selfish and bovine care home worker mistreats a former senior concentration camp guard (Viktor) simply because she doesn’t like his senility and utter dependence – is that justified in any way? As Claudel writes in a long afterword to the book, the text was written with an eye to showing the “incoherence of history” along with guilt and memory, and the nature of truth – which he sees as a metaphor for lives, “which we think we know but which we control so badly”. Germany’s difficult past in the previous century continues to provide much meaningful material for the writer of historical fiction.
