THE DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN (La Danse de Genghis Cohn)

Novel by Romain Gary, 1967

The Dance of Genghis Cohn, published in French as La Danse de Genghis Cohn in 1967 and in English translation in 1968, is at once a detective novel and an extended essay on the challenges Romain Gary believed the Holocaust posed for European civilization. A satirical treatment of the reluctance of postwar Germany to remember or draw lessons from the Holocaust, Genghis Cohn uses a police investigation as the occasion for a "psychological examination" of German culture. In a small German town an inquiry into serial murder leads the local police into "the Forest of Geist " (Spirit) in pursuit of the beautiful Baroness Lily Von Pritwitz and her accomplice, symbols of "Germany's" murderous past. Gary's grandiose and highly speculative psychological analysis of "German" brutality was a well-established device for writers who sought after 1945 to uphold the virtues they attached to German culture while insisting that the ills that had made Germany genocidal were still deeply embedded in the culture. At its blackest Gary's biting satire does not aim to be humorous, but the book is nevertheless a conscious effort to show that mass murderers and the societies that try to ignore them are a fit subject for humor and ridicule.

The most perceptive attempts at laying bare the flawed representatives of humanity in The Dance of Genghis Cohn lie in the relationship between the ghost of a Jewish comedian, Genghis Cohn, and the detective charged with the investigation, the former SS officer who killed him, Lieutenant Schatz. (His name means "treasure," a common term for a lover in Germany.) Schatz struggles in vain to free himself of his Jewish ghost but instead is forced to learn to speak Yiddish and to observe Jewish customs. Nevertheless, he continues to make remarks that indicate he has forgotten the murders he committed, and Cohn chooses such moments to appear to Schatz. As Cohn tells the reader, appearing any more frequently might give Schatz cause to seek psychological treatment, and the last thing a ghost wants is to be exorcized. The Jewish ghost exists only because he continues to haunt his erstwhile assassin.

The parallels between his bitter commentary and the sense of alienation felt by many Jews in Europe in the 1960s make Cohn a fascinating character. Like the Jewish philosopher André Neher, Gary wrote with evident anxiety at the attempts of other Europeans to rehabilitate the "new" Germany, apparently oblivious to the signs of continuity with the Nazi past that continued to appear in news reports across the West. The Dance of Genghis Cohn presents a subtle commentary on the interdependence of antagonistic European Jewish and German memories of the Holocaust 20 years after the events, with both groups increasingly affected by their responses to the different premises on which they relate to the past. On the basis of their shared experiences and bound by a history of mutual antagonism, Schatz and Cohn also develop an intimacy and solidarity that neither has chosen. By interweaving this complicated fictional relationship with descriptions of real events in post-war German history, Gary created one of the most sophisticated commentaries on Jewish-German relationships that has ever been published.

It is significant that Genghis Cohn (the name suggestive of his own part Jewish, part Asian identity) is a Yiddish speaker from Warsaw, where Gary had spent part of his childhood and which he visited again on the publication of the book. Clearly familiar with the life of eastern European Yiddish-speaking communities, Gary took the opportunity to describe some of the features of the religious and cultural life of a traditional Jew exposed to the modern world. Indeed, the book is as much an exploration of contemporary Jewish identity as it is an essay on the Holocaust. We learn only of the occasion of the killing of the Jews shot with Cohn before the book passes on to a more general discussion of German-Jewish relations in the 1960s. In Cohn's commentary on current events the development of a new generation in Germany with no knowledge of the Holocaust is as dangerous as the persistent survival of former Nazis, who at least were haunted by the ghosts of the past, in leading positions in German society. In Cohn's perspective Jewish and German identities were bound for one brief generation, and for the younger generation the Jews of Europe have already become entirely invisible.

That the Holocaust happened is not Gary's primary target. Rather, it is the apparent fact that the civilized postwar world could respond to the persistence of Nazi influences on the new Germany as if the Holocaust had not happened. The ghost in The Dance of Genghis Cohn embodies a pessimism about both Jewish and non-Jewish memory of the Holocaust that fittingly marked an end to Gary's literary preoccupation with the subject. His subsequent novels on Jewish themes abandoned reference to the Holocaust altogether.

—George R. Wilkes