History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10 · Translated from French

• Accuracy: Based closely on Rudolf Höss’s testimony at Nuremberg; the name changes (Höss becomes Rudolf Lang), the events do not.
• Readability: Clear and horribly compelling, in a flat first-person voice.
• Plot: From a harsh Catholic childhood through the First World War and paramilitary violence to command of Auschwitz.

Robert Merle built this novel on the notes of Gustave Gilbert, the American psychologist who interviewed Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, including Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz. Merle renamed him Rudolf Lang and wrote his life as a memoir.

The first half shows how such a man is made. Rudolf’s father is a fanatically pious tyrant who intends him for the priesthood. The boy learns obedience as the highest virtue and guilt as a permanent condition. The First World War offers escape and a new authority to obey. After the war come unemployment, paramilitary brutality, and a political murder that sends him to prison.

The second half is the SS. Lang rises through the camp system until he is given Auschwitz and ordered to kill on an industrial scale. He treats it as an engineering and administrative problem, fretting over capacity, throughput and the morale of his men.

The horror is in the voice. Lang never boasts or rages. He explains. He is devoted to his family, conscientious about detail, and incapable of seeing the people he kills as anything but a task. The novel confronted what Hannah Arendt would call the banality of evil a decade before her Eichmann reports.

It is not an easy book, and some have questioned whether fiction should inhabit such a mind at all. The portrait can also feel too neatly explained, with the childhood tidily producing the man.

The 8 reflects a courageous, deeply disturbing book that remains essential. Merle had won the Goncourt in 1949 for a novel of Dunkirk, but this is the book that has lasted. Later novels such as Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones walk a road Merle cleared.ally exciting, but it reads as a product of its moment, and the moment has passed.