Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat by Grete Weil
From the trolley car to the train.
The train will travel east. The east is nothingness.
On May 10th,
1940, the German army invaded the Netherlands and began their five year
occupation of the country under the ruthless administration of the Shutzstaffel or SS, Himmler’s elite Nazi
guard, an especially well-regulated command that in less than three years was
to orchestrate the plundering, deportation, and murder of eighty percent of
Dutch Jewry—Ann Frank and her family included. For many of these Jews the
eastern ‘nothingness’ was the infamous Austrian death camp, Mauthausen. Weil’s
own husband, the playwright Edgar Weil, was murdered there after being arrested
one night in Amsterdam, to where, seeking refuge from the Nazis, they had emigrated
in 1933.
Described as a story of
“memory, guilt, and the meaning of responsibility,” Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat is one of the most complex, most poetically
compelling Holocaust novels I have read in years. Set in Amsterdam, that
“centrifuge,” that “city of pilings, mirror-city, city of circles,” it unfolds
through the eyes, the experience, of a young German named Andreas, a yet
unremarkable poet and reporter posted to Amsterdam during the Occupation, who is
haunted day and night by the incessant rumblings of the trolleys that pass beneath
his window where he lives.
Still, like a good German
of the time, a young man born to bourgeois parents who, even after the war, refuse
to acknowledge Hitler’s crimes, he does his best to distract himself from the horror
unfolding around him each day and from the blatant hostility of the Dutch themselves
with the writing of his official weekly reports and with the novel that he has
been struggling to complete—the story of a man, a painter and forger named Sebastian
L. who forfeits his own style for that of others “out of hunger for money, for
life.”
Soon, however, his life in
occupied Amsterdam gets dramatically more complicated when he agrees to hide a Jewish
boy named Daniel in his apartment, a boy for whom he feels a curious, finally harrowing
affinity. This we learn in retrospect—of his secret friendship with Daniel, of
Daniel’s eventual capture by the Gestapo—the matter framed, complicated, at the
start of the novel, some years after the war is ended, by the protagonist’s troubled
marriage to a Jewish woman, Daniel’s twin-like sister, Susanne.
Art plays a poignant,
often haunting role in this novel, manifesting itself not only in Andreas’ vocation
as a poet, writer, and witness, but also in the fragment of a painting by Paul
Klee that the refugee, Daniel, brings with him into hiding, a painting Andreas
had happened to glimpse in full in the Rosenbusch home—“green branches, with
yellow birds sitting on twigs, hanging upside-down, standing on their heads,
and flying without spreading their wings. Above them hovered an orange crescent
moon.”
At heart, Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat is the
story of Andreas’ guilt and complicity as a German, of his overwhelming need to
reckon with the past, which he attempts to do, at last, by returning alone to
Amsterdam, then, finally, by visiting the death camp Mauthausen itself, where
his friend Daniel was murdered, hoping against hope to lay this ghost to rest.
Grete Weil was born in Germany in 1906. The
author of four novels and two short story collections, she lived most of her
life near Munich. Her previous novel, The
Bride Price, was awarded the ALTA Translation Prize. She died in Grunwald in
1999.
Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat was translated by John Barett.
Peter
Adam Nash
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