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The Death of the Adversary: A Novel

by Hans Keilson, Ivo Jarosy (Translator)

3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 · rating details · 309 ratings · 78 reviews

Written while Hans Keilson was in hiding during World War II, The Death of the Adversary is the self-portrait of a young man helplessly fascinated by an unnamed “adversary” whom he watches rise to power in 1930s Germany. It is a tale of horror, not only in its evocation of Hitler’s gathering menace but also in its hero’s desperate attempt to discover logic where none exist...more

ebook, 208 pages

Published July 20th 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1959)

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Mar 25, 2011 David rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: feces

Are you kidding me?

This book looked gloomy and philosophical and (best of all) short, so I picked it up at 50% off at the Borders Going Out of Business Sale. They had THREE copies of it. That should have been a warning sign, I guess. Why would a Borders have three copies of relatively obscure midcentury WWII novel -- especially this late in the sale?

Well, this is why: It's horrific. Not 'horrific' in that it evocatively details the atrocities of WWII, but 'horrific' in that it takes place entire...more

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Mar 13, 2011 Ans Luiken rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

COVER!
Ik zie een zwart-witfoto met op de achtergrond de Brandenburger Poort in Berlijn.
Een groep geüniformeerde, vlaggendragende jongens marcheert richting camera.
Zijdelings van de groep loopt een niet geüniformeerde jongen.
De foto is zo gemaakt dat duidelijk te zien is dat de vlaggendragers opgaan in de groep. De individuele jongen steekt als een eenzaam donker silhouet tegen een lichte achtergrond af.
Hoort die jongen bij de groep of niet?
TITEL!
Een jongeman vertelt hoe hij van jongs af aan st...more

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Apr 21, 2013 Ineke rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In de ban van de tegenstander, is een indrukwekkend boek, dat door een ik-verteller word verteld. Het beschrijft de opkomst en de toenemende dreiging van het nazisme. Toen verteller 10 jaar was vertelde zijn vader dat ze een vijand hadden en dat was B. Mijn kinderlijke onbevangenheid was aangetast. Vooral toen hij een foto van B in handen kreeg, kon hij het niet begrijpen dat die persoon tot vreselijke dingen in staat was. Hij ging het merken, werd gepest in zijn jeugd. Werd overal buitengeslote...more In de ban van de tegenstander, is een indrukwekkend boek, dat door een ik-verteller word verteld. Het beschrijft de opkomst en de toenemende dreiging van het nazisme. Toen verteller 10 jaar was vertelde zijn vader dat ze een vijand hadden en dat was B. Mijn kinderlijke onbevangenheid was aangetast. Vooral toen hij een foto van B in handen kreeg, kon hij het niet begrijpen dat die persoon tot vreselijke dingen in staat was. Hij ging het merken, werd gepest in zijn jeugd. Werd overal buitengesloten. Ik verbeelde me dat ik een brandmerk droeg op mijn voorhoofd. Dit gevoel had zich zo diep in mij genesteld, dat ik mij er jaren later nog niet van los kon maken.

Verteller ging zich in de vijand inleven, vroeg zich af waarom hij zo deed, probeerde zijn motieven te begrijpen en te verklaren. Dat leverde wantrouwen op van zijn omgeving.

"Kun je een mens uit het diepst van je hart haten en je gelijk tot hem aangetrokken voelen, ook al heb je hem persoonlijk nooit ontmoet??"

Verteller heeft B een keer horen spreken, toen hij op doorreis was. Hij kwam tot de ontdekking dat B een goede redenaar was met een doordringende stem. Hij kon met die stem mensen opzwepen. Verteller komt middels een vriendin in aanraking met een groep jongeren die een ooggetuige verslag deden van grafschennis op een Joodse begraafplaats. Wat ze vertelden was walgelijk.

Tot slot is verteller ooggetuige van een triomftocht van B , waarbij hij oog in oog met hem kwam te staan. Midden tussen een uitzinnige menigte. Verteller raakt in de ban van B en komt tot de slotsom en inzicht dat hij veel aan zijn vijand te danken heeft. In hem heb ik mijn angst herkend.

Heel indrukwekkend en aangrijpend vond ik dit stuk:

"Ze hebben mijn oudjes meegenomen. Het waren zijn beulsknechten, ze kwamen van hem en op zijn bevel zullen ze...... Ik zal ze niet meer terugzien. Moeder huilde en vader droeg een rugzak. Nog voor jij hem omhing, vader, heb jij, om hem te kunnen dragen, met je eigen rugzak alle rugzakken ter wereld volgepakt met de restanten van een leven dat men als last op de schouders neemt."(less)

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Aug 03, 2011 John David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, favorites

This may be the most enjoyable experience reading fiction that I have had in the last year – and also one of the most profound and unexpected. My attention was piqued in June when I heard of Keilson’s death at the age of 101; I knew he was considered to be a good author, yet I never read him. Having long had a penchant for the bleak, searching quality of twentieth-century Dutch fiction, particularly Willem Frederik Hermans, Harry Mulisch, and Gerard Reve, I decided to read this.

However stunning...more This may be the most enjoyable experience reading fiction that I have had in the last year – and also one of the most profound and unexpected. My attention was piqued in June when I heard of Keilson’s death at the age of 101; I knew he was considered to be a good author, yet I never read him. Having long had a penchant for the bleak, searching quality of twentieth-century Dutch fiction, particularly Willem Frederik Hermans, Harry Mulisch, and Gerard Reve, I decided to read this.

However stunning Keilson’s novels are – and I hope to communicate that momentarily – he is even better known for other work. For many decades, he worked in child psychology and psychiatry, with an especial focus on children severely traumatized by World War II. His keen insight into human nature, thought processes, and motivation is on par with the world’s greatest novelists, and that is no hyperbole. As if his psychological and psychiatric training were not inducements enough to read his work, the horrors of the War were not pure theory for him. Both of his parents perished in Auschwitz.

The novel’s setting is 1930s Germany. We follow an unnamed narrator in childhood; we get hints of his precociousness and impishness through learning of both his penchant for forging stamps, and also through a sustained theory of the history of struggle that he presents and continuously develops throughout the novel. As a boy, he acquires a lifelong fascination with an adversary who is almost always unnamed, but sometimes goes by simply “B.” Some reviews have been only too eager to guess at the existence of “B,” seeing as how we are in 1930s Germany. However, I personally think Keilson might have a good reason for keeping the adversary anonymous; using one name would collapse the entire structure of the novel into a kind of singularity; keeping the adversary nameless (even though we still may continue to guess, and guess accurately), Keilson keeps the narrative at a level of constant psychological, humanistic portraiture, instead of the story of a single couple locked in interminable battle.

As the novel progresses and the narrator grows into manhood, we learn that he has a friend who is utterly taken with “B” and his ideas; another time, we see him spending an afternoon with a girl that he knows and fancies from his workplace whose friends turn out to be sympathetic to fascism, too. Instead of simplistic moralism, Keilson intelligently and deftly engages with the adversary on a human level, at one point realizing the nihilism inherent in the logic of “I want to kill him just as badly as he wants to kill me.”

Narratively speaking, Keilson’s biggest gift is to mix tone and message in such unique and telling ways. On hearing that a novel is set during World War II, one is almost preconditioned to expect the trials and tribulations of the oppressor against the oppressed and hiding in safe houses; it is assumed that we will root for the good, the just, the persecuted, and that evil, in the end, will be vanquished. Keilson presented us with nothing so sugar-coated. His efforts at characterization drive toward showing the similarities between himself and B, not the vast differences. He is not interested in showing you how morally superior he is (we already know that), but instead wants to show how existentially, a word applied perhaps too liberally to this novel, he and “B” are similarly situated.

Keilson’s search feels so liberating, instead of the moral burden that seem to come with reading so many novels of the Holocaust. As much as I have read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, I found Keilson to be better than both of them. Unfortunately, he is not well known in the United States, but he should be. I should also add here that Ivo Jarosy’s translation from the German is luminous, especially in its ability to capture dialogue. I would recommend “The Death of the Adversary” for anyone in search of a great novel that, like all great novels, is more eager to share questions than answers.
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Mar 10, 2011 Josh Meares rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It is tough to read a book about the Holocaust. And this book is no different, except it is not really about the Holocaust. Hans Keilson has created a book about how the Holocaust could happen. How did the Jewish population react? How were the Germans incited to such hatred? How did one man become so powerful?
These are questions that I don't think anyone can really answer. But I appreciate the way that Keilson dealt with them.

Keilson also deals, rather obliquely, with the question of God and wh...more

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Dec 03, 2010 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This is the second of two novels by Keilson now available in the U.S. A holocaust survivor, Keilson is nearing 101 and his fiction is only now being re-discovered here. A German Jewish doctor he fled Germany for the Netherlands after his first novel was banned in the mid-thirties. He joined the Dutch resistance after the Nazi occupation, was forced into hiding (an experience that informed his novel Comedy in a Minor Key), and after war’s end became a leading psychoanalyst, specializing in childr...more This is the second of two novels by Keilson now available in the U.S. A holocaust survivor, Keilson is nearing 101 and his fiction is only now being re-discovered here. A German Jewish doctor he fled Germany for the Netherlands after his first novel was banned in the mid-thirties. He joined the Dutch resistance after the Nazi occupation, was forced into hiding (an experience that informed his novel Comedy in a Minor Key), and after war’s end became a leading psychoanalyst, specializing in children’s trauma. The Death of the Adversary was begun while Keilson was in hiding but not completed until after the war. Published in Europe in 1959 and in the U.S. in 1962 (with this translation) it was widely praised (a Time magazine Best Book) but soon slipped into obscurity. Republished in conjunction with the first U.S. printing of Comedy in a Minor Key the two novels are a welcome, if overdue, blessing for American readers. (Wouldn’t it be nice if Keilson’s other novels soon find their way into translation?)

Of the two novels, The Death of the Adversary is the more challenging and complex. For one thing, the words Jew, Jewish, Hitler, Nazi, fascism, or anti-semitism don’t appear. The protagonist is also unnamed (but clearly Jewish although he considers himself a German he recognizes that the new leader and his followers consider him an other). The time for most of the novel is the early 1930s (though not identified), just prior to and right after Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler is the adversary of the title. Sometimes he is referred to as B. (Once the letter J. is used to refer to his Christian name.) Ostensibly the notes of the protagonist left with a Dutch lawyer at the mid-point of the war after the narrator has made a decision to act, the anonymity is a theoretical veil intended to protect the writer and the lawyer he entrusts with his pages—though when the lawyer reads the notes he buries the manuscript, as Keilson himself buried the first fifty pages of the novel during his period of hiding. Keilson’s protagonist, however, has a persistent intellectual ambivalence toward his enemy. He hears what B. is saying but somehow doesn’t believe it will come to pass, that it isn’t just a kind of rhetorical means to a political end. He is also fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between adversaries, seeing not just a dependency but a bond between them that opens the door to a reasoned approach to differences. Others around him, including his father, who early on warns his family that should B. come to power “May God have mercy on us.”

The novel follows the narrator’s battle with his ambivalence, his values, and the increasingly brutal reality of his day to day existence. It provides levels of insight, into the uncertainty that precedes history’s hindsight of inevitability and into universal questions of good and evil, justice, reason, and truth. In an early domestic incident the narrator, still a child, forges marks on postage stamps in his collection to increase their value (and his value) with some friends. His father, a failed businessman and struggling photographer, is ashamed by his son’s fraud but doesn’t punish the boy as he might, in part because the son once was upset that his father faked a photograph of a cat and dog sitting harmoniously together for a client. These naïve understandings of what is true or not get challenged in a much less forgiving crucible and are part of the transformation the narrator undergoes. The Death of the Adversary is not as emotionally rewarding as Comedy in a Minor Key, nor is it as easy a read, but it is provocative and insightful. Keilson is an amazing individual and a great writer who deserves a much wider audience.(less)

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Oct 07, 2010 Mark Van Aken Williams rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This novel is set in Nazi-occupied Europe, although it is never mentioned. There is no guessing here. The adversary is the Führer (referred to as “my enemy”) and the word Nazi is never used. All of this creates an atmosphere where the protagonist fails to come to grips with the reality of the ascendance of National Socialism and the relationship between subject matter and context. Written as memoir, we see how a person who is just as caught up in the culture of his homeland as those who seek to...more

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Sep 19, 2010 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is a carefully crafted and structured book. Whether it will engage every good reader is another matter.

You know very early on that the narrator is a Jew living in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power and that he is struggling to avoid facing up of the evil that Hitler both represents and fosters. But this is a very abstract book, both in its emphasis on thought or ideas and in its great distance from almost all forms of physical reality. Characters have no names, not even Hitler. No city,...more This is a carefully crafted and structured book. Whether it will engage every good reader is another matter.

You know very early on that the narrator is a Jew living in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power and that he is struggling to avoid facing up of the evil that Hitler both represents and fosters. But this is a very abstract book, both in its emphasis on thought or ideas and in its great distance from almost all forms of physical reality. Characters have no names, not even Hitler. No city, town or country is named. No time frame is given, no character’s age. You find little physical grit and no physical or emotional beauty in this book.

One point of this bloodless approach, I suppose, is to universalize the ideas in the book so that they are not only about the horror of Germany in the 30s and 40s but any horror we do not face down. Another point is that this approach represents the narrator’s own lack of grounding in the reality he seeks to avoid; he’s as far removed from reality as his prose.

The narrator’s way of avoiding a confrontation or even a decision to flee, is to construct a belief that he (everyone?) has a special relationship with the enemy and the enemy with him. He cannot fight the enemy as his blank-faced, unnamed friends wish to do, because enemies need each. We never learn exactly how he thinks this is so because he advances the ideas in parables and generalities. Elks are transported to a land without wolves. The elks, protected from their natural predators, do not thrive but die. We are supposed to see that they are enemies and therefore need each other. Why this is so is not clear either with elks/wolves or Jews/Nazis, although you may find it more believable with the elks. Perhaps the enemy-self idea means something almost tautological, like “police need criminals and vice versa” (for otherwise the police would have no occupation and if everything is permitted, the criminals wouldn’t be ordinary criminals, just bankers). Or the idea might mean “we need each other” in a psychological sense, to understand ourselves or even to come into being, because we define or establish ourselves in part by what we are not. None of the possibilities I could think of were explored, much less elucidated.

The next step in this ideology seems to be that we cannot oppose our enemy even if he intends to kill us. This was not Keilson’s personal belief. He fled to The Netherlands and worked in the resistance. But given the ending of the book, which I’ll not reveal, I think maybe he does have some odd respect for this unlikely idea.

A different dodge constructed by the narrator is strikingly illustrated by the narrator’s version of Miriam’s song of thanksgiving after God has drowned the pursuing Egyptians in the Red Sea. “The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea.” (Exodus 15, New International Version). According to the narrator, God responds to Miriam: "Why sing me a song of thanksgiving, when the creation of my hands is disappearing beneath the waves." The idea he constructs is shared identity, all of us being created by some larger force, and that independent of the idea that we need our enemies, for some reason we should not oppose our fellow creatures.

The few actual scenes with overt interactions are striking, often in their symbolism or thematic quality. In one of the first scenes, we see the narrator’s father, a photographer, trying to please a client with a photo of dog and cat, the enemies, together. When he fails, he merges separate pictures of dog and cat into one–forecasting the idea of a creator creating enemies. The idea of deception, particularly in forms of duplicity (including forgery), is a backup idea here, too, and should be fun for academics to work on.

Perhaps you can say this book united form and substance, or as Francine Prose’s New York Times review said, tone and content. I take it that the form or tone would be the highly abstract ideas that never specifically deal with anything, even time, place or names, just as the narrator never specifically deals with the growing evil. For Prose, Keilson was a genius and this was a masterpiece. Those things may well be true, but for me essential qualities of a novel are missing. The abstract quality sucked all the drama and life out of the material. It’s not that you can’t philosophize in a novel; of course you can. It’s that it must be a human being doing the philosophizing with some individuality derived from something besides the philosophizing itself. The idea of matching form to content is itself only a formal idea, not one about effective engagement with the reader.

I also had doubts that people trying to avoiding recognizing the reality of evil would construct beliefs that they and the enemy need each other. Or construct a belief that because they and their enemies were created by the same forces, they were somehow required to be passive in the face of the enemies attack. These ideas did not seem psychologically probable to me. I’m willing to be corrected on this, but it strikes me far more likely that we would think others will take care of it; or next election he’ll be voted out; or even “he’s not that bad, just look at . . . .”

Perhaps, though, it doesn’t matter whether the ideas are psychologically probable or not. After all, there is no real person here. Everything stands for something else. (less)

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Oct 04, 2010 Jill rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What is the relationship between persecutors and their victims? In The Death of The Adversary – poised on the brink of what soon will be one of the world’s most horrific tragedies – an unnamed narrator in an unnamed country reflects on an unnamed figure who will soon ascend to power. Although the figure (“B”) is never revealed, it soon becomes obvious that he is Hitler and that the narrator is of Jewish descent.

The narrator – who bemoans his own passivity – is blessed, or cursed, with high intel...more What is the relationship between persecutors and their victims? In The Death of The Adversary – poised on the brink of what soon will be one of the world’s most horrific tragedies – an unnamed narrator in an unnamed country reflects on an unnamed figure who will soon ascend to power. Although the figure (“B”) is never revealed, it soon becomes obvious that he is Hitler and that the narrator is of Jewish descent.

The narrator – who bemoans his own passivity – is blessed, or cursed, with high intelligence. Because he is unable to come to grips with evil for its own sake, he twists his logic to make sense out of the insensible; he knows B hates what the narrator represents, but he believes that the narrator desperately needs that hatred and, in fact, feeds on it…eliciting hatred in return. He goes further: in his “logical” mind, he believes that the adversary and his victims are in a state of symbiosis, feeding upon each other and because of their mutual need, neither adversary will eliminate the other. History, of course, has sadly shown how ludicrous this conclusion was.

Keilson uses a conceit in presenting these musings; his fictional (or autobiographical?) narrator has deposited a manuscript for safekeeping during the war years. Now, as he awaits word of the death of B, he rekindles his memory about the events of those pre-war years.

In haunting prose, he remembers his father’s words when he was only 10: “If B. should ever come to power, may God have mercy on us. Then things will really start to happen.” He recalls being ostracized from a group of non-Jewish children who expel him from their games. He remembers the ending of a close friendship with another man who, it turns out, is enthralled by B. and his ideas. He recounts the two times when his path and his adversary’s intersected.

And, in one of the most devastating parts of the book, he recreates an evening at the apartment of a saleswomen he worked with whose brother and friends are revealed to be Nazi thugs, who desecrate a supposed Jewish cemetery to prove that even in death, Jews will not allowed to experience peace. As the young man describes in exhaustive detail how gravestones – even those of young children – were defaced, our narrator sits transfixed, unable to admit to his heritage or condemn these monstrous acts.

It bears acknowledging that Hans Keilson – now a centenarian – lives in an Amsterdam village, after the Nuremberg laws forced him to flee from his native Germany. He is a psychoanalyst who pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. It is no surprise, then, that the book is underpinned by a deep psychoanalysis of the relationship of perpetrator and victim, and the victim’s sense of denial and self-delusion.

Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn’t. By removing the victim from his more primal emotions, there is a certain sterility that is not normally seen in Holocaust-themed books. The translator, Ivo Jarosy, appears to take a literal rather than interpretive approach, which creates a certain British formality in tone.

Still, as Arthur Miller once wrote, “Attention must be paid.” Hans Keilson is one of the last witnesses to the atrocity that was the Holocaust. In an era where – incredibly – a new breed of Holocaust deniers are rearing their ugly heads, it is important for the world to understand once again the sheer evil and damning repercussions of this most heinous act of genocide.

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Aug 12, 2010 Kasa Cotugno rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: era-world-war-ii

In The Death of the Adversary the narrator fantasizes about assassinating B, whose rise to power is interfering with his and his family's state of well being. B, of course, is Hitler, whose name is never used. As with the newly "discovered" works of Irene Nemirovsky and Hans Fallada, Hans Keilson's books, written over 60 years ago, give penetrating insight into European life during the Nazi regime in a way no contemporary author can duplicate. This haunting tale of a young man in Berlin during H...more

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Jan 02, 2013 Jane rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Keilson, who survived World War II in hiding in Holland and working with the Dutch resistance, here tells a fable of a man - nameless - whose life and being is permeated by a constant obsession with a formidable adversary. Never referred to by name, the adversary is obviously Hitler. Curiously, the protagonist - who dreams of killing Hitler and feels that he is called to do so - is also somewhat ambivalent about his adversary, to whom he feels a powerful connection and even, in a strange way, a...more

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Jan 21, 2011 Josie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a very strange book and I can't quite put my finger on why. But I will try. I think what was most strange in it was that at various times I couldn't distinguish metaphor from reality. Also, the book is told as if its scenes are recollections, but the memories are crystalline in detail and thus impossible. And stories told in dialogue during the book are literary such that imagining the character actually telling a story this way makes it bizarre.. These are not bad things, I think they w...more

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Oct 09, 2010 Zeena Price rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history

This is a difficult book to categorize- part history, part memoir, part philosophical treatise. But what a treat it was to read. I can honestly say that this is one of the only books I have ever read that actually brought tears to my eyes. The writing is very sparse, but manages to pack a strong emotional punch at the same time. Written by a German Jew witnessing Hitler's slow yet terrifying rise to power in the 1930s, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the psychological eff...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Maria rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A testament to the palpable disdain the protagonist - ostensibly, Keilson - felt for his "adversary" (clearly, Hitler), and his ensuing internal conflict.

This chronicles the evolution of Keilson's awareness of the ascension of Hitler as a political enemy, juxtaposed by personal experiences of his youth.
Even as a boy, he is able to correlate rejection by his classmates with the ascension of Hitler, in situations where earlier it had not mattered.

Children learn fear through adults, and the prota...more

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Oct 24, 2011 Ross Mckinney rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a fairly amazing book. Hans Keilson wrote this book during WWII as he fled Germany for the Netherlands about the emotions, the inner turmoil, of being a member of an un-named group who is the subject of the exploitative ire of "the adversary". Of course, he's writing about the Jews, about Hitler, but the quiet contemplation of the horror, the building of events, is incredibly powerful. Keilson presents the emotions that fed the events, the self-deception that allowed it happen, the evolu...more

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Sep 19, 2010 John rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, literature

The second of Keilson's works that I have read (see review of Comedy in a Minor Key). This novel was less rapturous that Comedy in a Minor Key, but still an interesting work.
This novel examines a Jewish man living through the approaching terror of the rise of an unnamed adversary (probably a high ranking Nazi vs. Hitler himself) in the 30's as Hitler consolidates power and starts the persecution of the Jewery. Self reflective without slipping into self-pity, this protagonist in this work is li...more

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Mar 05, 2012 Peter rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 20th-century

For the first ten pages or so I thought I was going to have to agree with reviewers who found this boring. And it is much harder to read than the relatively breezy (if also thought-provoking and disturbing) Comedy in a Minor Key. But after the puzzling abstraction of the initial pages, in which the interdependence of the protagonist and his enemy are discussed, the plot becomes gradually more and more concrete. Nazis and Jews are never mentioned by name, but it becomes clearer and clearer why th...more

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Dec 07, 2011 Kris McCracken rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hans Keilson’s The Death of the Adversary is an odd little portrait of a nameless young man tracking an unnamed “adversary” whom he watches rise to power in an unnamed country in the 1930s. Keilson – a German Jew – wrote the book while in hiding in the Netherlands during World War Two. Interestingly, the novel itself has been lauded as a ‘lost’ masterpiece in the last few years.

Now, I shall be frank and confess that although I think that the book is a really interesting piece of history, as a l...more

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Apr 14, 2011 Sruts rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Keilson's way of dealing with what everybody knows in a subtle manner is quite fascinating. There are no names, except some first names, and no places mentioned, and yet you know exactly what and who he is talking about.
I suppose it is a bit slow, and sometimes tedious to get through a page, but trust me, getting to the end it worth it.
The book, and writing, is shrouded by the dark looming presence of the adversary as one man tries to weave his way through life, while facing his fears and dealin...more

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Apr 25, 2012 John rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hans Keilson, German born member of the Dutch resistance during WW2, looks into the complex relations between victim and aggressor. The story traces the prejudice he experienced as a Jewish boy growing up in a rural area.

The coming of Hitler at first did not incite him to violence, but rather he saw his adversary as another life, not a direct threat. All that was to change with the taking of his parents. He resisted the role of victim, but became just that through the ensuing events. Well writt...more

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Jul 31, 2011 Sheri rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A first person narrative about the relationship -- really the perceived relationship -- between two mortal adversaries, an attacker & the victim, from the victim's perspective. In this case, the "victim" is a young Jewish man in 1930's Germany, and the attacker is apparently Adolph Hitler. Probably the most fascinating section of the book is the narrator's conversation with another (presumably Jewish) friend. There he posits that Hitler may be a "scourge" inflicted on the Jews by God, so you...more

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Jul 10, 2011 Frank Debaere rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Zie recensie in De Morgen 1-12-2010.

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Sep 16, 2011 George rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This psychological fable about a young man growing up in Germany in the 1930's, watching Hitler's rise to power, is quite dark. The idea behind the title is that, in some way, the the hunted victim needs the hunter to define his life. When the hunter dies, life loses some of its meaning for the main character. This ambivalent relation of victim with agressor was not convincing. It was a short book, so I kept on reading, but I wish I hadn't started. Maybe someone with better psychological insight...more

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Mar 25, 2011 William rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: germany, ww-ii, fiction, 20-ce, translation

Just as Hitler used the Jews as an alien other around which to build up himself and Germany, so the narrator here uses Hitler as the enabling and empowering adversary which gives his life meaning. But were not the Shoah so close to us in time, the reader might not connect the story told here with it. The story could conceivably stand in for virtually any conflict among the Judeo-Christian hoards. For the tale has been universalized and removed from it have been all identifying labels of time, pl...more

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Mar 25, 2011 Anna rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: book-group

This felt like homework. Some kind of existentialist abstraction thing that is frankly a bit dull. Yes, Mr. Keilson is cleverer than I am - message received. There were a couple of things that I did really like. I loved the way that the characters father thought about God. Because he was a photographer, that's how he thought about God. Each different job prior to being a photographer was how he thought about God. We all do this at some level - put things into our own context and taking to the le...more

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Sep 08, 2010 Erik Simon rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Francine Prose called the guy a genius, but this book didn't work for me. Like so many of the European writers that NYRB has been reissuing, I found him a bit dull. This book is Holocaust/Hitler based, and I felt like I was reading about ideas of people rather than about real people. He's aiming at a philosophical look at the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, and I found this to be more effectively done in Coetzee's WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS because its characters were people, not r...more

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Oct 26, 2010 Amy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: arcs-or-review-copy

Translated from the German by Iva Jarosy

“One cannot cut the lines of experience out of one’s face, like the rotten bits in an apple; one has to carry them about in one’s face and know that one carries them; one sees them, as in a mirror, every day when one washes oneself, and one cannot cut them out, they belong there.”

“He had swore to her…that this was how it had all happened, as though he had first to mist the mirror slightly with his breath before he could dare to look into it. […] What can...more Translated from the German by Iva Jarosy

“One cannot cut the lines of experience out of one’s face, like the rotten bits in an apple; one has to carry them about in one’s face and know that one carries them; one sees them, as in a mirror, every day when one washes oneself, and one cannot cut them out, they belong there.”

“He had swore to her…that this was how it had all happened, as though he had first to mist the mirror slightly with his breath before he could dare to look into it. […] What can a man do but breathe at the mirror and look gently at his misted image?”

Mirrors are a repeating motif in Hans Keilson’s novel, The Death of the Adversary. Written during WWII, this novel has been republished this year. The Los Angeles Times wrote enthusiastically “It's as if, one morning, we were to learn that not only had Anne Frank survived the secret annex but was also still among us.” (Sept 26, 2010*) Mirrors generally symbolize self-reflection and contemplation, and are fittingly used to describe the inner questions that plague a young man as he realizes that Hitler’s influence was inevitably going to change his life. First, he hears his parents whisper and worry, and tries to decipher the codes they seemed to be speaking in. Next he finds himself an outcast in the neighborhood as the other children begin to avoid him. His mother takes the well-intentioned step of intervening on his behalf, trying to convince the children that they are all alike and should play together. His humiliation is complete, and never fully leaves him. Thus, he begins focusing on his “adversary”.

“…enemies will never die out in this world. They are recruited from former friends.”

The next salvo comes from a close friend who reveals he supports Hitler’s agenda. He explains to the unnamed protagonist that it is simply a matter of balance: just as elks need wolves to control their species and balance their habitat, so too, Germany is balancing itself. For the greater good, he implies. Their friendship quickly dissolves. The young man now explains the details of his experience, from strained friendships to watching his parents change to going into hiding.
Certainly, this novel has a more mature voice than Anne Frank’s diary. The protagonist is more somber and definitely more pessimistic. I didn’t find that the story gave any exceptionally new revelations about the time period, but it does provide a new perspective to describe the experience. One brief passage about the change in his parent’s attitude reveals a surprising aspect of human nature under trial: his father who bitterly lamented the rise of Hitler’s power becomes almost giddy with excitement when the horror begins, while his religious mother, who started out optimistic, begins to withdraw into depression and anxiety.

One thing that is especially fascinating is that Keilson never actually defines his adversary as Hitler. He uses the term “B” to represent him, although it’s clear of whom he speaks: a man with an evil plan and the power to implement it. Yet, at times “B” is also portrayed as an intangible force, a concept of evil bigger than the Holocaust. The ambiguity gives the reader pause to consider what defines evil and apply the revelations experienced to virtually anyone suffering oppression. Incidently, I was curious if by using the initial rather than the name, Keilson is attempting to lessen the power of Hitler’s name, giving it less fame. For example, notorious killers today are well known by name: Ted Bundy, Lee Harvey Oswald, or John Wayne Gacey. After a period of time when their horrific deeds are forgotten, they become simply a pop culture reference. By not using Hitler’s name, it could be that in some small way, Keilson doesn’t want to give him any further notoriety.
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Dec 22, 2010 Katherine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

“He, too, knew the secrets of the dark-room and its temptations—the scope it offers for tricks and retouchings, the complete or incomplete likenesses that always remain unsatisfactory” (105).
“ ‘Fairy tales, I tell you, nothing but fairy tales. Even then, of course, during the so-called childhood of mankind, and equally now, when the human race is getting ready to go to sleep or dies. The world is governed by fairy tales’” (110).
“Everything has to be complicated, I thought, nothing is simple, and...more

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Dec 29, 2010 Garry rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Read this book. Read this book.

I want to be really clear about this one: At about page ten or so I realized this was one of the best books I have ever read. It joins my little list of elite books that are those I will perennially recommend and cite as the great books I have read (Handful of Dust, Hundred Years of Solitude, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Remains of the Day...being others).

The book is an incredibly insightful, eloquent, look at human nature and the failures of human nature that al...more

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Nov 01, 2010 Suzanne Auckerman rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read a review of this book in NYT and it was highly recommended. It was originally published in 1959 and was recently re-released. The author was a Jew, who spent part of the war hiding before joining the Dutch resistance. After the war, he was a psychohoanalyst, pioneering the treatment of war trauma in childre.

It is a psychological fable and at times, I was completely lost. However, I am looking at it from the perspective of knowing how it all turned out. The character did not.

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About Hans Keilson

Hans Keilson is the author of Comedy in a Minor Key and The Death of the Adversary. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel in 1933. During World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. Later, as a psychotherapist, he pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. In a 2010 New York Times review, Francine Prose called Keilson a “genius” and “one of the world’s very greatest writer...more

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