NIGHT (Nacht)

Novel by Edgar Hilsenrath, 1964

Like Eli Wiesel 's more famous novel of the same title, Edgar Hilsenrath's Nacht (1964; Night, 1966) is an attempt to probe the depths of horror in an inhuman landscape during the Holocaust. The text is set in Prokow, a fictional Jewish ghetto established by the Nazis in the Bukovina region of present-day Romania and Ukraine. The main character, Ranek, and most of the other characters in the novel struggle daily to survive in a bleak, bombed-out, disease-ridden city with little food or shelter. Each night bands of police roam the ghetto picking up anyone they find outside, thus making it imperative that ghetto residents wishing to avoid deportation and certain death in the camps fight each other to find shelter for the night. Reduced to stealing from the dead and dying in order to find valuables that might afford them another night or another piece of bread, the Jews in the ghetto are robbed of their humanity and reduced by their captors to virtual animals. Human values such as warmth, forgiveness, and mutual solidarity are nearly absent from this place.

A few characters, whose talents are sought out and paid for or who have been able to bring wealth with them into the ghetto, do enjoy a place of privilege among their fellow captives. The narrative privileges them as well—with names. Most of the characters that Ranek encounters, however, are known simply by their descriptions. In this landscape of hopelessness there is one voice of hope: Debora. She is married to Ranek's brother, Fred, who dies in the course of the novel, but she is in love with Ranek. This love, and her ability to laugh, which would seem insignificant in another context but rises to the level of resistance here, makes her an antidote to the ghetto's message of complete desolation and savagery. Her ability to hope and act on her hope is seen too in her decision to adopt a young child others have rejected.

While Debora does offer the narrative a glimmer of hope and goodness, the portrayal of Jewish characters willing to prey on their fellow captives, whether dead or not, broke a postwar German taboo. The image of people who have obviously come from polite and cultured society but who have been deindividualized and reduced to animals was upsetting to both critics and the public. Indeed, though written in German, only about 1,000 copies of the novel were printed in 1964 by its original German publisher, and the book was virtually ignored by the reading public in Germany. Hilsenrath blames this on the philo-Semitism prevalent in Germany at the time, which would not allow seemingly negative portrayals of Jews. Only after more than a decade had passed and after it had been translated into several languages and achieved great success abroad was Nacht republished in Germany, where it has since been accepted into the canon of important literary works on the Holocaust. Readers have also come to understand that Hilsenrath's depiction of the Jews in Prokow does not reflect their inhumanity but the barbarity of those who forced them into the ghetto.

Scholars and reviewers have criticized the episodic and sometimes halting structure of the text and called Hilsenrath's language in the text repetitive or even awkward. This style and structure may be attributed to the immature skills of a young author, but they may also represent Hilsenrath's attempt to portray the ghetto as Ranek and the other residents might have perceived it. Ranek's story is told by an omniscient narrator, albeit one with a somewhat limited viewpoint: he presents only the perspective of the victims. The police and the Nazis remain shadowy figures rarely stepping into the action, though their power is revealed in the fear that they are able to create. Various scholars have discussed the novel's lack of narrative description or emotion and the fact that it presents the horror of Ranek's situation and the desolation around him without reflection. Yet the author manages to straddle the fine line between being distanced and engaged with his characters and his subject, and he does this in a way that keeps readers absorbed by the text. And indeed, if we accept the description of the work as a novel of existence rather than of becoming or developing, the form and the narrative style of Nacht would seem appropriate for a text set in a bleak landscape where existence is all one can hope for.

—Gregory Baer