THE WHITE HOTEL

Novel by D.M. Thomas, 1981

D.M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel, published in 1981, combines an account of the Holocaust, in particular the mass murders at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, with the author's interest in sex, psychoanalysis and its limits, and death. The novel was, and continues to be, a source of great controversy.

The novel's prologue is made up of fictional letters between Freud and other key figures in the birth of psychoanalysis discussing the case of "Frau Anna"; much of the rest of the book purports to be a case study by Freud. It begins with a poem, "Don Giovanni," followed by "The Gastein Journal." Both tell more or less the same story, of a chance encounter between an opera singer and a recently demobilized soldier and their subsequent affair at a white hotel in the mountains. The accounts are erotically charged and phantasmagoric. They are followed by a longer section, a widely admired pastiche Freudian case study along the model of "Dora" or "The Wolf Man." This reveals the earlier sections to be writing submitted as part of the analysis by Freud of one Lisa Erdman, a Jewish singer suffering from neurosis, breathing problems, and severe pains "in her left breast and pelvic region." The origins of her neurosis and her partial cure (the pains continue) are described.

The fourth section continues the singer's story, her smalltime operatic successes, her marriage and the birth of her son, and her settling in Kiev. The penultimate section is the story, told in a neutral way, of the massacre of Erdman and her family and (by Thomas's figures) 250,000 others by the Nazis at Babi Yar. She is shot in the breast and later, slowly dying, is raped by official looters of the corpses and has her pelvis broken. (That the rapist is named Demidenko—a Ukrainian, not a German—is not only controversial but was also surely signifi-cant for the "Demidenko affair," the dispute that surrounded the publication of Helen Darville's The Hand That Signed the Paper. ) Some of the symptoms for which Erdman receives analysis foreshadow her death rather than reflect her life, and so for Thomas they indicate the inability of psychoanalysis to come to terms with the traumas of history. This section also incorporates an account of a survivor, Dina Pronicheva, taken from Anatoli Kuznetsov 's "true novel" Babi Yar, a mixture of fact and fiction that was another source of controversy. The novel concludes with a sort of "heaven," where both the traumas from the massacre and from Erdman's early life are resolved.

A number of critics have argued, with some justice, that the book is pornographic, that the violence of Freud's analysis and the portrayal of the hysterical victim-woman and of the Holocaust are all of a piece. The aim of the book, however, seems to be to restore a "human" dimension to the numbers murdered in the Holocaust. Thomas writes of the 30,000 killed on the first day of the massacre that "their lives and histories were as rich and complex as Lisa Erdman-Berenstein's. If a Sigmund Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still not have explored even a single group, even a single person. And this was only the first day." In this light the psychoanalytically inspired "pornography," if it is seen as such, might be taken to represent the unique and particular complexities, conscious and unconscious, of each victim of the Third Reich.

—Robert Eaglestone