Best-selling author Arno Surminski was kind enough to send me his 2008 novella Die Vogelwelt von Auschwitz ("The Birds of Auschwitz"). The book is something of a departure for Surminski, who is best known for his leisurely Heimat novels about the lost territory of East Prussia and the postwar German refugee experience. With Vogelwelt Surminski enters the epicenter of the Holocaust and offers a short fictional account of an actual historical occurrence.
It was Goethe who defined the salient point in the German genre of the Novelle as "eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit". The unheard-of event in Vogelwelt is an improbable relationship between the SS concentration camp guard Hans Grote and the Polish prisonerMarek Rogalski. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of one of the greatest "heard-of" crimes in the history - the mass murder at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
The camp at Oświęcim is located at the confluence of the Warta and Odra rivers at the center of one of Europe's great ornithological wonders. The area offers shelter to 254 water and mud bird species, of which 174 species have here their nesting grounds. During autumnal migrations, over 200,000 snow geese take rest in this area. Hans Grote, the SS guard, is a zoologist by training and gets approval from the camp commander at Auschwitz (Rudolf Höss) to conduct a comprehensive study of the region's birds, which, after all, are now part of the greater German Reich. By chance he learns that Marek Rogalski, an art student and inmate at the camp, has a talent for drawing birds, so Grote enlists Rogalski's aid to illustrate his academic study. From the beginning this is a mutually beneficial relationship: Grote is relieved of the brutal guard duty and can roam freely beyond the confines of the camp, while Rogalski has access to good food and escapes the back-breaking labor forced on the other inmates.
What is especially effective in this novella is Surminski's juxtaposition of the bird world - die Vogelwelt - with the everyday misery of the camp. The birds are free. And Rogalski imagines himself flying off to meet his lost girlfriend in Krakau. But the birds are strangely drawn to camp; the sparrows dance along the barbed wire, the blackbird is perched on the camp gallows, watching indifferently the bodies swinging in the wind. Gradually, however, the horror of the camp world begins to seep into the bird world. Water fowl are poisoned in the surrounding ponds as Zyklon-B is introduced - experimentally at first - on the Russian POWs. And then, as the crematoria at Birkenau burn day and night, the migratory path of the geese - hard-wired for thousands of years - is altered, as the birds make wide detour around the all-pervasive stench of death. Grotesque as well is the juxtaposition of the Germans' treatment of birds compared to their treatment of prisoners. The commandant Höss issues strict orders that the birds are not to be disturbed in their natural habitat, and any shooting of birds will be severely punished. Meanwhile, the inmates are routinely beaten and arbitrarily shot or hung. Dead birds are lovingly taxidermically preserved while the corpses of prisoners are thrown in ditches and burned.
In this highly accessible novella Surminski deals effectively with the dilemma of moral culpability, which makes Die Vogelwelt von Auschwitz ideal for classroom use. Grote sees himself as blameless for the atrocities around him, since he did not participate directly in committing them. Rogalski, and even the reader, develop a grudging admiration for Grote's single-minded dedication to his zoological studies. And so Grote is dumbfounded when after the war he is arrested and imprisoned for his role in the SS. Grote is everyman - no better, no worse - the perfect exemplar of the banality of evil.
See my reviews of other novels of Arno Surminski: Jokehnen, Fremdes Land, Kein schöner Land, Grunowen.
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