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Review by Roger Miller
In Marcel Beyer's "The Karnau Tapes" there is one ludicrous moment: The five daughters of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels are playing "Brownshirts and undesirable elements." Not cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, but Brownshirts and undesirable elements. "We'll give the orders," one of the daughters says, "and the little ones have to obey them."
That is as light as it gets in this relentlessly grim novel (translated from the German by John Brownjohn). Now, Nazism is one of the few things in this tired old universe about which absolutely nothing is funny. We can make fun of Nazism, and individual Nazis can be funny, but the ism itself is as unfunny as a boil on the inside of your eyelid.
"The Karnau Tapes" depicts the corrosive effects of Nazism on individual lives. It is told present tense in two voices. One is that of Helga, Goebbels' oldest child, an innocent victim of the Reich's monstrousness despite being the daughter of one of its chief monsters. The other voice is that of Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer.
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It was not that they loved their fuehrer the more but that they loved mankind the less. |
Karnau thinks of himself in terms of his profession. "Pushing thirty, and I'm still a smooth, blank wax disc when others have long since been engraved with countless grooves, when their discs already hiss or crackle because they've been played so often."
He is obsessed with sounds and voices, especially the human voice in "extreme utterances" when it achieves "a singular clarity"; because of this he is sent to the Eastern front where he records the sounds made by soldiers in battle. His dissection of animal throats in an attempt to plumb the mysteries of speech ultimately leads to inhuman surgery on the human larynx -- and worse.
"Is it possible to take what one removes from another's voice and add it to one's own?" he asks. And: "Having embarked . . . with the aim of exploring the foundations of a radical form of speech therapy, we had ended up with a collection of mutes."
However well attuned his ear may be to natural sounds, morally Karnau is tone deaf, though he does have something of a tender spot -- an innocent one -- for the Goebbels girls. He becomes acquainted with them through work he does for their father, and their lives remain intertwined from then on.
If Karnau listens, Helga sees. She is always watching, and her observations are interesting. She can tell, for example, when her father is lying, such as when he has been with some other woman. Helga acknowledges that he is an exceptionally accomplished liar. It all builds to a descent into the maelstrom. Or, more exactly, into the Bunker. At the end, there they all are -- Karnau, Goebbels, his wife, the children -- in the Bunker with Adolf Hitler. While their mother sinks further and further into neurasthenia, their father organizes the Goetterdaemmerung, and Karnau records the screams and rants of Hitler's final days, the children chafe at the cramped conditions of the Bunker.
The end is terrible, and Beyer apparently has been true to historical fact in his depiction of it. The chief thing he has invented is Karnau's catching the children's awful fate on disc. It is not telling too much to reveal that Karnau survives. His mentor/boss had told him, when it was clear the game was up, that when the postwar interrogators hunt him down, he must act like a victim.
"In other words, you'll have changed sides," the boss said. "As your interrogation proceeds, you'll imperceptibly turn into one of those whose treatment at your hands formed the basis of the interrogators' original accusations. You must learn to do precisely what always revolted you in others and inspired the disgust that motivated your activities in the first place."
"The Karnau Tapes" was awarded Germany's Ernst Willner Prize. I know nothing of this prize, but its credibility can only have been enhanced by the selection of this debut novel.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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