{"id":140286,"date":"2019-10-18T09:00:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140286"},"modified":"2019-10-21T13:54:06","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T17:54:06","slug":"emeric-pressburgers-lost-nazi-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/10\/18\/emeric-pressburgers-lost-nazi-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Emeric Pressburger\u2019s Lost Nazi Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column,<\/em>\u00a0Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, the words \u201cwritten, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u201d are considered a stamp of genius. The mid-twentieth-century creative partnership between the son of a Kentish hop farmer and a Hungarian-born Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 is the stuff of legend. Powell and Pressburger met in 1938, when Alexander Korda, then the owner of London Films, hired Pressburger to rewrite the script for The Spy in Black<\/em>, which was being directed by Powell. The chemistry between the two men was immediate. \u201cI was not going to let him get away in any hurry,\u201d Powell recalled. \u201cI had always dreamt of this phenomenon: a screenwriter with the heart and mind of a novelist, who would be interested in the medium of film, and who would have wonderful ideas, which I would turn into even more wonderful images.\u201d Theirs was a unique collaboration, not least because Pressburger should have been Powell\u2019s subordinate; \u201cin the 1930s,\u201d the director (and Pressburger\u2019s grandson) Kevin Macdonald explains in the biography he wrote of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter<\/em>, \u201cthe scriptwriter had about the same status as the electrician\u2014the foreign scriptwriter even less so.\u201d Instead, the two worked together on equal terms. When, in 1943, they formalized their relationship\u2014what Powell called their \u201cmarriage without sex\u201d\u2014creating their production company, The Archers, \u201ctheir separate creative identities\u201d were, according to Macdonald, fully \u201csubmerged.\u201d The two men shared equally both the financial rewards and the creative responsibility for the films they made together. The movies that followed in the forties, such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (<\/em>\u201cwhich may be the greatest English film ever made,\u201d surmised T<\/em>he<\/em> New Yorker <\/em>in the mid-\u201990s), A Matter of Life and Death<\/em>, and Black Narcissus<\/em>, are today beloved and admired the world over. Yet mention the The Glass Pearls<\/em>, and the title is unlikely to ring a bell. <\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the dissolution of Pressburger and Powell\u2019s partnership in the late fifties, Pressburger turned to novels. The first, Killing a Mouse on a Sunday<\/em>, published in 1961, is set during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and tells the story of a once notorious bandit, now a tired old man living in exile in France who resolves to cross the border back into Spain, despite the danger to his life, to visit his dying mother. In an interview published in the Daily Mail<\/em> at the time, Pressburger explained that after years of \u201ccommunal\u201d creativity in the world of film, he wanted to \u201cprove I could do something on my own.\u201d The novel met with favorable reviews, was quickly translated into a dozen languages, and adapted for the big screen in 1964 as Behold a Pale Horse<\/em>, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, and Anthony Quinn. (That the film itself died a quick death didn\u2019t really matter.) Everything was set for Pressburger\u2019s second novel to build on this success. Unfortunately, this wasn\u2019t to be. The Glass Pearls<\/em>, published in 1966, was a much darker, grittier tale about a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight in the dingy streets of London\u2019s Pimlico. It garnered one lone review, a damning write-up in the Times Literary Supplement<\/em>. The book barely sold its initial print run of four thousand copies, immediately sinking without a trace. And yet, despite the reception it received at the time, The Glass Pearls<\/em> is a truly remarkable work. It deserves to be recognized both for its own virtuosity, and as an important addition to the genre of Holocaust literature. Indeed, I\u2019d go as far as to declare it a master class in rendering the banality of evil. In the same way that the brilliance of Powell and Pressburger\u2019s very best films wasn\u2019t recognized until the seventies, when critics like Ian Christie and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese began to champion the work, the audiences of the mid-\u201960s simply weren\u2019t ready for the disturbing complexity of The Glass Pearls<\/em>. The novel\u2019s reissue in 2015 by the Faber Finds imprint\u2014with a new preface by Macdonald and an introduction by the film scholar Caitlin McDonald\u2014has gone some way to righting its place in the canon, yet it still sadly remains largely unknown and unread.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Set in the summer of 1965, The Glass Pearls<\/em> opens on the morning of the first Saturday in June, when Karl Braun, a piano tuner, moves into new lodgings in southwest London. Described as \u201chatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build,\u201d Braun is introduced as a rather unremarkable specimen, the kind of man who fits right in to the drab world of communal living and nosey landladies; just the latest in the line of \u201ccountless tenants\u201d who\u2019ve \u201cleft behind coffee-stains and hair-grease as pockmarks of their private worlds by which to be remembered.\u201d Given the literary preoccupations of the period, namely kitchen-sink realism, this is an immediately recognizable milieu. (Indeed, interestingly, when Pressburger decided to turn his hand to novel writing, it was authors Bill Hopkins and Colin Wilson to whom he turned to for advice, both associated with the Angry Young Men set.) Pressburger, however, is lulling his readers into a false sense of security. Well before the end of the first chapter, it\u2019s revealed that the rather meek Mr. Braun is really the infamous Dr. Otto Reitm\u00fcller, a brain surgeon\u2013turned\u2013Nazi war criminal who\u2019s been in hiding for twenty years, and one of \u201cthe biggest fish\u201d sought by those in pursuit of justice, wanted for crimes against humanity in the form of the inhumane surgical experiments he carried out on concentration camp inmates.<\/p>\n

The central complaint of the disparaging TLS <\/em>review was that the \u201ctwist\u201d in Pressburger\u2019s tale is revealed too soon. The reviewer\u2019s take, unfortunately, is a gross misunderstanding of how the novel works. The horror of the story isn\u2019t in the revelation of Reitm\u00fcller\u2019s real identity, nor in the details of the experiments the doctor carried out, though they are undoubtedly horrific: \u201cHe put a person under hypnosis, bid him tell his personal story in great detail and then he operated. As soon as the patient recovered, he heard his story once again, noted the discrepancies and operated again, cutting out another minute colony of cells. Ad infinitum<\/em>. Or, rather: ad finitum<\/em>. The end came soon enough.\u201d The true horror of Pressburger\u2019s story is in the way in which he forces his readers to sympathize with Braun; it\u2019s in our slow acknowledgement that this \u201ccultured man, a fine musician, an accomplished violinist,\u201d a man who spends his evenings frequenting concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, who chivalrously wines and dines a young woman called Helen, and who still, after two decades, keenly mourns the deaths of his wife and child (killed in the war during a bombing raid on Hamburg), is also a morally bankrupt, cold-hearted killer, who never for one second expresses any regret or guilt for what he\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

Pressburger shrewdly invokes the reader\u2019s sympathy for Braun from the very moment our protagonist\u2019s true identity is revealed. He describes the news that the Bundestag has extended the statute of limitation for the prosecution of alleged Nazi criminals (originally it was only twenty years from the war\u2019s end) as dealing Braun a blow of \u201ccruel ferocity.\u201d A limited ordeal, however lengthy, is one thing, Pressburger points out: \u201cOnly if the suffering imposed upon them appears to be limitless do they go to pieces.\u201d To set Braun up as the one who\u2019s being subjected to cruelty and suffering is an audacious move, but it works. An unexpected visit from an old partner-in-crime\u2014a man who tries to convince Braun to join \u201cthe Brotherhood\u201d in South America\u2014instills a new fear in Braun that the net is closing in around him. He is a man of reason\u2014\u201cAnybody could make mountains out of molehills. He, a scientist, who prided himself on his logical mind, he should know better,\u201d he thinks. \u201cThe natural function of a logical mind was to reduce <\/em>mountains to molehills, not the other way round.\u201d Yet fears increasingly \u201ccrawled like ants all over his mind,\u201d and his actions become rash. Although narrated in the third person, Pressburger is so tightly focused on Braun\u2019s internal, unraveling psychological state the reader can\u2019t help but become enmeshed in his \u201cterror.\u201d For the majority of the novel, for example, it\u2019s actually impossible to tell whether Braun is really being followed, or whether his suspicions are simply the result of his overactive, terrified imagination. To describe the text as cinematic sounds rather unimaginative, but Braun\u2019s deteriorating psychological state is rendered visually on the page\u2014\u201cAnother spark lit another warning light in his mind\u201d\u2014and the tension ratchets up, as in the very best thrillers. The whole novel is something of an extended chase sequence in the same vein as Powell and Pressburger\u2019s brilliant film 49th<\/sup> Parallel<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It takes some knowledge of the details of Pressburger\u2019s life to fully grasp the murky agitation of The Glass Pearls<\/em>. In the same way that his films spoke, Macdonald declares, \u201cfor his personal life,\u201d so too this novel has strong autobiographical elements. As part of his new identity as Braun, Reitm\u00fcller passes off the memories of one of his patient, gleaned during the course of his barbaric experiments, as his own. And yet those memories\u2014of fleeing Germany aboard a night train, hands \u201ctrembling\u201d when the Gestapo officer examined his passport; of queuing at the Prefecture in Paris to be issued a resident permit as a foreigner, and the disabled Frenchman who helped him; of the murder in the house where he thereafter rented an apartment on the rue Quentin Bauchart; and of the parties he threw there, where he served small green oysters known as portugaises<\/em>, within which he and his friends placed worthless glass pearls in order to trick guests\u2014are Pressburger\u2019s own. Already disturbing enough within the reality of the novel, the revelation that these memories are real coats them with an additional sheen of darkness.<\/p>\n

Born Imre J\u00f3zsef Pressburger, into a middle-class Jewish family in Miskolc, Hungary, in 1902, Pressburger studied in Prague before his life as a student came to an abrupt end when his father died suddenly in 1926. Forced to get a job to support himself and his widowed mother, he wound up in Berlin, where he began his literary career writing short stories for newspapers, after which he got a job as a scriptwriter at UFA (Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft), then the most powerful film company in Europe. When, with the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933, Pressburger lost his job as part of the state-sanctioned purge of Jewish employees, he fled to Paris (as detailed in The Glass Pearls<\/em>). Two years later, he relocated again, this time to London with its booming British film industry. Pressburger met Korda via mutual friends in 1936, and two years later, Korda introduced him to Powell. The rest, as they say, is history.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just that Braun\u2019s borrowed memories are those of the author. Pressburger gives his doctor other significant personal characteristics: he\u2019s a gifted violinist and music lover, as Pressburger was, and he loves a down duvet, as did Pressburger (still a rarity in England in those days). Why, one wonders, would someone who narrowly escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz, where many of his closest family members\u2014including his mother\u2014met their deaths, go on to write a novel in which he mapped so closely his own identity onto that of his oppressor? \u201cCould it be that as a survivor he somehow felt implicated in the crimes,\u201d Macdonald wonders, \u201cfelt that he had not done all that he could to stop them?\u201d Pressburger never forgave himself for his mother\u2019s death, for not having been able to take her with him when he fled Germany. As he grew older, he was prone to increasing bouts of melancholia; it would make sense to attribute these to survivor\u2019s guilt and the potential associated self-loathing.<\/p>\n

As McDonald suggests, however, we can also read The Glass Pearls<\/em> as \u201cthe culmination of Pressburger\u2019s attempt to understand the Nazi mentality.\u201d Anyone familiar with his and Powell\u2019s canon already knows he\u2019d long been preoccupied with the figure of the \u201cgood German\u201d: think of Hardt in The Spy in Black<\/em>, the German U-boat captain who\u2019s reluctant to be a spy; Vogel, the baker-turned-Nazi soldier in 49th Parallel<\/em>; and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp<\/em>. Even the \u201cbad\u201d Nazis Pressburger wrote were never one-dimensional. Take the six Nazis in 49th Parallel<\/em>, for example, each of whom is \u201chumanized,\u201d Macdonald reminds us. \u201cClearly Pressburger is not interested in perpetuating the stereotype of Nazis as inhuman monsters,\u201d McDonald agrees. \u201cOn the contrary, he wants to humanize his protagonists as much as possible, in order to show that the rise of the Nazi Party and the Holocaust are not historical aberrations and that evil exists in us all.\u201d When, in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp<\/em>, the now aging, ex-German Army officer Kretschmar-Schuldorff laments the loss of his sons to the Nazi Party, it\u2019s exactly this potential that Pressburger is illustrating. Take Hannah Arendt\u2019s famous pronouncement about the notorious war criminal Adolf Eichmann: \u201cThe trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.\u201d Exactly the same could be said for Reitm\u00fcller\/Braun, but the trouble with this, as Arendt continues, is that \u201c[f]rom the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this morality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.\u201d Today, Arendt\u2019s theories about the banality of evil have been digested and understood by the culture, but back when Pressburger published The Glass Pearls<\/em>\u2014only three years after Arendt\u2019s Eichmann in Jerusalem <\/em>in 1963\u2014many people still struggled to grasp the concept. As Arendt herself acknowledged, \u201cthe coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and presents the true enigma of the trial.\u201d Bearing this in mind, McDonald closes her introduction with an apt comparison between Pressburger\u2019s disconcerting novel and Powell\u2019s different but equally distressing Peeping Tom<\/em>. Although this film about a voyeuristic serial killer was met with universal disgust and outrage on its original release, it has since been hailed as a masterpiece. \u201c[I]t was simply too shocking for the audiences of the time,\u201d McDonald surmises. It\u2019s a claim that could equally be applied to Pressburger\u2019s magnificent but unquestionably disturbing novel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em> The Financial Times,<\/em> The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Powell and Pressburger were behind some of the most influential films of the forties and fifties. Then Pressburger went on to write a novel far ahead of its time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEmeric Pressburger\u2019s Lost Nazi Novel by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 18, 2019 \u2013 Powell and Pressburger were behind some of the most influential films of the forties and fifties. 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