Landschaft in Beton.

by Jakov Lind

Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front.While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the underbelly of war’s underbelly—deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators—who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they’ve justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.Containing dark echoes of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete is an "astonishing and highly original imagining of (the) dimensions of evil including sadistic cruelty, of the condition of being a victim and the madness abroad which constitutes the virtual victory of Hitler if we fail to translate survival into freedom" (Anthony Rudolf).

Genres: Fiction, German Literature, World War II, Historical Fiction, War, Novels, Literature

Hardcover

First published February 1, 1963

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Don’t give up hope, that’s the main thing, don’t lose faith in the good of man.’

There are few greater rewards as a reader than discovering a new author who fully captures your mind, heart and soul with their work. It breathes new life into us as a reader, stimulates our senses and wraps us in a passion for words like a first love, reminding us why we are so entranced by the possibilities of written word to begin with. Lately, Jakov Lind is that author for me. His Landscape in Concrete, first published in 1963 and beautifully reissued by Open Letter Press in 2009 with a translation by Ralph Manheim, is a brutal and unflinching look into humanity. Focusing on a German soldier manically searching for a regiment to fight alongside with after being declared mentally unstable unfit for combat, Lind unlocks the gates to a WWII-era German consciousness as a direct condemnation of towing the line and a reminder that “just doing my job” is not a moral pass from committing violence. Darkly comical yet horrifying, Lind deftly extracts a maddening moral message from a violent void of morality as a testament to the holes in our souls we sometime must sacrifice in order to keep them.

‘How convenient it is to be a brain cell or a grain of dust—when you ought to live, take risks. To be a man despite it all, that’s the crux.’

Jakov Lind, born Heinz Jakov Landworth in Vienna, 1926 or later Jan Gerrit Overbeek, as his false identity papers declared him and allowed the Jewish born man to walk freely through German streets during the war, and even later still, Jakov Chaklan, is a survivor of the horrors of World War II. Like most WWII literature, Lind examines the war as he experienced it. Lind dodged death amongst the common citizen in Germany and therefore delivers unto the reader tales of everyday life during these tragic times, his prose as elusive and sly as one doing anything it takes to survive. Landscape in Concrete is a deranged allegorical story of survival at any cost, like those found in his collection Soul of Wood, set in a surreal and sadistic linguistic landscape. There are scenes that would make Cormac McCarthy gasp in horror and envy, a book that forces you to react and read your own heart as much as the words on the page. Written in a style that seems to assume good natured laughter—this book is actually quite funny at times, the horrors are elevated to new heights, like watching a brutal murder queued up to a laughtrack and upbeat music. The result is fantastically unsettling.

‘I ought to be glad to be getting out of uniform,’ the German giant and protagonist-of-sorts Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann thinks, ‘instead I’m fighting to keep it on.’ To Bachmann, being a soldier, fighting and possibly even dying beside your brother man is the epitome of manhood and if nothing less, Bachmann wants to honor his lineage and prove his “masculinity”. ‘What you’ve inherited from your fathers, struggle to make it your own.’ Coming from a line of gold- and silversmiths that didn’t flinch when faced with violence to protect their own, Bachmann feels he must honor the soldiers way despite any obstacle, including basic ethics. Lind examines the duty of a soldier and asks the reader to consider the moral implications of violence at the request of one's country, one's duty and job from the point-of-view of Nazi Germany. It forms a bleak yet poignant commentary on how masculinity is propagated towards violent nationalism and corrupts people to commit unspeakable acts.

Most duties a war imposes on us, Sergeant Bachmann, are revolting, let’s face it, insane and yet the soldier who performs them has to be responsible. That’s the way it is, let’s face it.

Bachmann has seen more than his share of violence, pushed to the limits of sanity after being the only survivor when his entire regiment was swallowed into a coffin of mud and blood within a matter of minutes in a bog beneath a sky of bullets, It is no wonder he detests nature, Lind opening the novel with a surrealistic depiction of the forests containing the lines ‘brown pustules that seemed to be made of earth, entrails that looked like roots.’ Entrails and gore surround him, every tree could hide his death-giving enemy. Bachmann searches for his ‘lost paradise’ in such hellish landscapes, wishing only for nature to be desecrated and incinerated, a smoldering landscape his vision of heaven.

‘There is a plague called man.’

Landscape holds the readers eyes open and points them in the direction of vulgarity every chance it gets. Bachmann’s quest to regain a regiment is continuously thwarted by vile characters who take advantage of his willingness to enact their unpardonable crimes. Bachmann, only hoping to prove himself and be respected, finds himself a murderer again and again, Lind pulling a miracle of a literary trick by managing to portray Bachmann as reprehensible and simultaneously likeable. Despite his madness, murders and perversions, we feel connected and empathetic towards Bachmenn even if he only redeeming aspects of him is his willingness to survive and his steadfast faith in the good of mankind despite constant evidence to the contrary as we witness him willfully perform disgusting acts again and again simply to be liked and respected as a soldier. Even Bachmann loses heart and questions his actions in the name of war, believing there is still good and innocent people lurking among the smoldering ruins of humanity.

That’s absurd. In a war nobody’s innocent. Or everybody. Innocence is an obsolete concept. Nowadays you’re either for one side or the other. Active or passive. Nobody’s innocent.

Spoken by the villainous Halftan, a character who commits the most heinous of crimes—or at least convinces others to commit the crimes for him—Lind investigates the morality of wartime, a time when one must be called to action, right or wrong being decided later by the victors. Interestingly enough, Halftan, a self-proclaimed ‘evil-genius’, makes the most insightful points about humanity in the novel, though many of these are cold and removed yet still cutting and accurate. He is another character who survives at all cost, weighing bloodshed and cruelty as a necessary evil to keep living. However, one may survive, but can the actions of survival be digested by consciousness or God. Despite the darkness of the novel, morality manages to sing through.

Lind has created something special with Landscape in Concrete even though the bleakness and nearly unpalatable methods of examination may be enough to repulse many readers. His prose seems rough and dodgy on the surface but makes for a beautiful linguistic representation of the depraved content. With the frequent use of songs and surreal humor, it feels as if the events of Gravity's Rainbow could plausibly be taking place across Europe in the same realm as this novel. This is a story of survival, but survival at what costs? Lind was a fresh and alarming voice that woke me from a reading slump and revitalized all that I love most about literature: a prose that pummels the reader and a message that forces reaction. Gritty and grim, Landscape in Concrete is an overlooked gem and a unique insight into the lives beleaguered by Hitler’s conquests, all leading up to a startling climax and haunting conclusion. If you have the stomach for it, this is certainly quite the feast.
4.5/5

‘You mustn’t be afraid of people, my friend, people are only flesh.’

[Bilal Y. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Romanda olanları görünce dehşet duygusuyla sarsılmam gerekiyordu ama romandaki arkadaşların rahatlığı durumu biraz normalleştiriyordu. Başkalarının acılarına yelken açmanın sağaltıcı bir yönü olduğunu biliyorum ama bu benim pek tasvip ettiğim bir şey değil. Şükürler olsun ki, okuma süresince o huzursuzluk duygusu beni hiç yalnız bırakmadı. Acı dedik ama romanda acının esamesi yok, söz konusu arkadaşların hiçbiri acıdan yana muzdarip olduğunu söylemiyor. Gündelik rutin işte; savaş, cephe, ölüm gibi ufak tefek şeyler. Kırkların Almanya'sında sanki herkes hasta. Proglanmış bir donukluk var, robot gibiler... Bunu deli yaftası yapıştırılan esas kahramanımız Bachman'da söylüyor. En akıllıları olduğu için belki deli diyorlar. O da güvenilmez biri aslında; yalan söyleyebilir, işbirliği yapabilir, emir alırsa adam da öldürebilir... Tamamen duygu yitimi söz konusu, velhasılı insanlıklarını yitirmişler, üç bölümlük romanda son bölümleri saymazsak. Orada duyguları olan insanlar var ama onlar da Alman değil.

Sonuç olarak akıl tutulması sadece bireyde gerçekleşen bir durum olmayıp, toplumun geneline sirayet edebilir. Sistem, yapı ve devlet aklı bizleri tehlikeli bir makineye dönüştürebilir...

[Emre · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

"İnsan denen bir salgın hastalık var."

"Kendimi tekrardan insan gibi hissetmek istiyorum, bütün derdim bu, dışlanmak istemiyorum, bunu anlıyor musun?" Sf:17

"Teğmen. Eskiden de görevimi yapıyordum ve hiç şüphesiz şimdi de aynı şeyi yapabilecek durumdayım. Tanrı öyle istiyorsa hayatımı vermeye hazırım. Woroschenko'da ölmemiş olmam benim suçum değil ki! Cephe arkadaşlarımın hepsi öldü, ben hayatta kaldım. İnsan hayatta kaldığı için cezalandırılabilir mi ki? Hayır, ben hasta değilim, tıpkı şu anda görev başında olan milyonlarca arkdaşım gibi. Şayet ban hastaysam o zaman bütün Almanya, bütün Avrupa ve evet, bütün dünya hasta." Sf:67

"Savaşmak için insan iki şeye ihtiyaç duyar; Dostlar ve düşmanlar." Sf:74

"Benim yeteneğim ki bu konuda gerçekten çok iyiyim; kötülük." Sf:93

"Sadece ölüler masumdur ve sadece masumlar ölmeyi hak eder." Sf:97

"Cepheye, diyerek gülmeye başladı Halftan, mükemmel bir nişancısınız. Kusursuz bir iş çıkardınız. Bunu karşılayabilecek gücüm olsaydı sizi birkaç yıllığına kendim için tutardım. Fakat savaş bu kadar uzun sürmeyecek ve barış zamanında beş para etmezsiniz. O vakit herkes gibi olacaksınız. Saygıdeğer bir vatandaş." Sf:105

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 4 out of 5]

After you've lost your regiment and the better part of your sanity what is left but to try to reclaim the sense of order that enabled your previous success? Bachmann is described as a giant with deadly skill in his fists and his gun. He ultimately wants to be useful and clean but finds himself in his current condition as useful only to those that lack the skill and will to murder themselves, copulating with the mud that claimed his peers. Lind is an original and powerful writer that like Platonov, takes flight from the horrors that he seems compelled to pen to consider the relationship of nature to man. So instead of a Ledig-like thrash-metal paced gut-frolic there's more of a contemplative csardas whirl and collapse that makes for an engaging read. Not for the squeamish at all, Lind pulls no punches and his motivation seems to be catharsis instead of entertainment. Soul of Wood is a much better read because the pace and variation provides a more visceral experience with a larger range of tones - but Landscape in Concrete reveals Lind's ability to develop characters in greater detail which results in a more personal identification. I for one have a diminishing interest in spending much time with pervert and murderers and the horrors revealed by Lind will certainly make the more sensitive reader squirm and possibly flee. To do so would be to overlook an extremely skilled and vision-baring writer. Start with Soul of Wood - and then move onto Landscape in Concrete once you've recovered from your initial Lind experience. This book provides an invaluable resource to those that have somehow failed to grasp in detail the horrors of war and the limitless potential for human depravity.

[Matthew Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sargent Gauthier Bachmann is a gold medal marksman and natural born soldier, an accomplished gold-and silver smith and unglued Nazi sadist. In Landscape in Concrete, he simply wants to get back to fighting. Or so he thinks. A brutal satire of war and violence and general human awfulness. Like reading Catch-22 while watching Apocalypse Now.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though his name may mean nothing to you, dear reader of this downward dowager’s dig, the legendary Ralph Manheim will always be a very big deal to myself, your humble ‘tripple-d' field agent. You see, Manheim was the translator of, among other books dear to me as a teenager, two by Louis-Ferdinand Céline that were among the most dear, these being the two most folks know (about), the positively Casbah-rocking JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT of 1932 and the nattily be-nam’d DEATH ON THE INSTALMENT PLAN of 1936. The landscape of which we speak, an oft frigid/forbidding topography, is effectively Calgary, Alberta, Canada and disparate haphazard ports, the decade the 1990s, this happening to be the one—decade, that is—along with which my teen years terminated, my having turned twenty in November of 1999. (A roving set of eyes would also occasionally, if relatively rarely, happen upon 1944’s GUIGNOL’S BAND.) I had one friend back then with whom I could properly stoke enthusiasms of as rarified a nature as those we’ve addressed; if a small handful of translators counted among the heroes my pal and myself enjoyed lionizing in our wide-eyed Japanime style, Manheim unquestionably stood at the head of the pack. It was crazy to me as a fifteen-year-old that, overlooking the small matter of a disproportionate number of n’s, the guy who translated Céline shared a surname in common with the German town where Charles Bukowski spent a small part of his early childhood. It makes solid sense then that we find LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE presented to us by Open Letter, a press I revere highly and which specializes in the discerning curation of underrepresented international literature, efforts often focused toward the placement of a spotlight on the work of translators. Characteristic precisely because decidedly idiosyncratic, a preeminent example: their edition of MA BO’LE’S SECOND LIFE, an incomplete novel by the Chinese writer Xiao Hong originally intended as a trilogy only two thirds of which were written before the author’s death in 1942, the final third completed by Howard Goldblatt, translator of the preceding two, the comprehensive package something like the pretty-as-a-picture culmination of a (translator’s) life’s work. LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE represents a variant. Ralph Manheim died in 1992, a little before I was to read any of his literary anglo-renderings. His translation of LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE is attended to by its copy-write-in-waiting, marked 1966, three years hot on the heels of the original Jakov Lind German. Were you to ask the kinds of boys who lionize or once lionized Manheim for his translations of machete-wielding pathbreakers like Céline, Hermann Hesse, and Günter Grass—the last of whom boys really like for some reason, heh heh—why they thought Ralphy might have chosen Jakov Lind’s second novel for a metalinguistic sieve op, expect credible and enthusiastic answers. In his Introduction to the Open Letter, Jewish American boy genius Joshua Cohen, basically my age so basically forty, remarks upon Lind’s one-time Soho-bohemian celebrity and the commercial/critical success of the early novels, the first three of which in particular, each a product of the 1960s, seized their piece of international attention. Lind was effectively a Holocaust survivor. He spent part of the Second World War in Holland, successfully suppressing his true identity and disguising his Jewishness under the assumed name of Jan Gerrit Overbeek, bargehand. “He could never settle down,” writes Joshua Cohen in some of the highlighted bits we can be certain have been forwarded to the public relations flacks, “he abandoned women, divorced wives. He scraped by, drank, smoked cigarettes, marijuana. Psychological treatment intended to exorcize wartime memory included LSD treatments intravenously perpetrated by a certain Dr. Ling.” Cohen follows up shortly with two rhetoricals followed by a parenthetical: “How many survivors were also hippies? How do you say ‘hippie’ in German? […] (Though ‘flowerchildren’ sounds more menacing, archaic: Blumenkinder.)” Cordoned off or not, I would contend that that final dangling bit, the aforementioned parenthetical, a touch too affably goofball or not, is telling us a good deal indeed, this good deal something to do with both fiendish distortions and a strain of German humour grounded in severity, which would be the same kind of humour it always was gonna be whichever side of the Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Delightful Ordeals political divide it's to find itself on—the vile pageantry of desecration, the ruinous collective hallucination we would seem to have produced in order to meticulously gas ourselves. So then, heck, what are we to make of this spectre, this quite spectacularly confrontational writer, however many names he may be into a small collection of names, standing in as this collection does for the alert scramble of survival itself. We are talking about an official public survivor here, postwar resident of London, haunting the background of Antonioni’s BLOW UP, we might imagine, like Kafka’s K on a real questionable treatment regimen, maybe even muttering audibly too, like Beckett’s Molloy. Jakov Lind works in a spirit of malevolent jape, like something especially heinous from Georges Bataille except with commedia dell’arte figures all made-up and carrying on. Dark humour is severe, in its way, sure, even if conciliatory—and even if folks as unworldly as viewers of television situation comedies know gags and quips are part of the anesthetist’s cocktail at any mobile army surgical hospital. Halfway thorough students of German literature already know this species of humour, if only because the stuff is liberally applied like thick foundation to the art and culture of the interwar Weimar Republic, and thus to Alfred Döblin’s BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, the period’s requisite “encyclopedic novel,” much of it like mutilation as baroque slapstick, straight-up. The painters of the Weimar also come to mind. George Grosz, surely, and Christian Schad, too, of course, but Otto Dix most especially, and along with him the whole idea of “New Objectivity,” a nice way of saying ‘come in here and let me tell you how ugly you REALLY are.’ Along with his portraits of some of its permanently decommissioned living veterans, Dix’s art of the 1920s often directly engages the First World War combat experience, rendered as monstrous lampoon so disarmingly cartoonish as to have the capability of the knocking the wind out of a person a little, and we can understand this rendering is some kind of diabolically filtered truth because the artist is a combat veteran who walked through a collective trauma defiant of all relevant scale. I cannot speak with any authority whatsoever on Judaism or the lore of anybody’s authoritative version of any Hebraic peoples, but one wonders if LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE is thinking about or encouraging us to think about the mythological golem, just as one might flash on same when considering the bent and spectral Frank Kafka scarecrow Jakov Lind stealing through the background of Antonioni’s BLOW-UP. Is Jakov Lind a golem? Surely that’s a bit much. But what about the giant, Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann? Two inches over six feet and right about smack on three-hundred pounds, a misshapen Bavarian astonishment of a thing, the coarsest of natures, especially when agreeable, officially mad but raring to get back with a regiment, any regiment, and show everybody of what this daunting mass of dutiful man is made. Or maybe just fuck it, whatever. You looking for a congenial lifestyle philosophy for the inferno life? How’s this? “The decline of the West has already begun. Anyway, I’ve got to get up at five.” That’s toward the end of the first of LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE’s three galavanting sections. If this is indeed our Golem of Blow-Up speaking, does not his act vox vaguely vaudeville? Well, of course. It’s what Céline was doing, largely, no? It is exactly what the nom de plume Curzio Malaparte brags to you that it is doing! Otto Dix was discharged from the military in 1919, the year our giant, Sergeant Bachmann, is to have been born, lamb to the slaughter of War the Next, a fate he likes well enough, Bachmann, thank you very much, except when he doesn’t, mind. “I’m a sick animal by the name of Gauthier Bachmann, absolutely unfit. Women are swamps you sink into, men are stones you break against.” Gauthier Bachmann is not “speaking” in this citation. Nobody is speaking other than the novel itself, LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE, the book itself the unsettling stranger assuming the station of enunciating subject, all this largely a matter of style and intent, Lind providing no quotation marks for assigned speech, never letting the language get wrapped around lethargic concretions, interiorities and exteriorities never properly assigned their individual lots or blocks because that's not how "The Monster Mash" works. It is severe, it is black comedy black forest fairy tale, it is unmistakable provocation. Gauthier Bachmann, the French given name denoting Flemish extraction, the family a dynasty of tradespersons, loos'd in the Ardennes at novel’s outset, the asylum having evidently shown him the door, encounters the deserter Xaver Schnotz. Some of that antic black forest-type business follows thereafter. “Schnotz ran ahead or in back like a dog, he kept pointing his ears and making faces. Bachmann had cut himself a new stick. With Schnotz cutting capers around him, he strove deeper and deeper into the woods like a Goethe on his Easter promenade.” It’s a kind of Nazi Calvin and Hobbes cartoon! Schnotz has secrets to reveal that explain his current deserter predicament, fall-out from his having attempted to poison the openly and entreatingly gay former hotel manager Major von Göritz, who presides over the geopolitical biome of the novel’s first section, at times often resembling a parody of the queer martial arrangements in Denis Diderot’s MEMOIRS OF A NUN (1796). Bachmann will not only deliver Schnotz bumblingly to von Göritz and summary execution; he will be backed unknowingly into service as executioner by a jealous Iago. “Bachmann stood there a while, dazed at the sacrilege, then he picked up the knife, wiped it in the grass, and followed Schnotz. Dead things didn’t bother him. Dead things were like stone or glass, they didn’t remind him of anything living. If you could only get through the couple of minutes between life and death. Only a few seconds, that’s all. But how?” Like stone or glass. Recall Joshua Cohen’s parenthetical musing with regard to “Blumenkinder.” Maybe the living creature made of nothing more than dumb inert stuff, stone and earthy things, is of the pattern of distortion increasingly to be found where an instrumental and corrupted language winds everybody and everything together and where, found together, everything is found to be so out of joint as to weaken physically…maybe even to weaken the physical itself. LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE is a garrulous and righteously obscene comic novel of roiling metaphysical distress, and Bachmann the Giant keeps coming home to war as the species would appear to be disposed to do. The war show is the whole show and the show must go on. Von Göritz: “Of all things in life this war was the most repugnant to him. Its motives were idealistic, that is, irrational, unrelated to victory or defeat. He saw war as full employment with disastrous consequences. A kind of schoolboy roughhouse, culminating in nothing but bloody noses and torn clothing. He favored no ideology or philosophy and was opposed to all religions and mass movements. Stupidity offended his esthetic sensibilities. He looked on the whole world around him with the same ironic smile as he now wore in examining Bachmann’s papers.” That’s the aristocratic temperament; Bachmann’s is more that of the schoolboy roughhouser on payroll, naturally. Deformations are of and retreat back into the landscape, plural and dynamic but seen so as an odious and perfidious unity of heterogeneous debasement. The one voice is the one hideous face transmitting the grotesque beyond consideration of reasonable measure. Sent to Norway, Sergeant Bachmann ends up in the hands of a scheming ex-teacher and power broker, immediately thereafter becoming accessory to a Grand Guignol home invasion complete with disembowelment and imminent teen rape victim eager to commence negotiations. The malefic handler and transvaluation mouthpiece basks in having used Bachmann as no more than a dumb weapon under purely manufactured pretexts, and this becomes emblematic of how there is this ubiquitous populist-fascist plasticity that exploits and is exploitable on account of the tethering of the fiercest doctrines and prejudices to the most intemperate caprice, especially when it comes to the sort of eager-to-please lummox who is afraid he won’t be able to escape the trap of a lie by unbuilding it and replacing it is with some other kind of alternative, the most perfunctory mental work arduous heavy lifting from the standpoint of such a creature. Bachmann is distortion and misshapenness (or overshapeness) in a novel where the landscape has a problem with language and therefore flora is made of concrete, here and there, as the case may be, as this or that case ‘flares up.’ There is also the matter of Helga, Bachmann’s girlfriend, nearly as Rabelaisian as he, introduced hilariously by way of a photograph shown by her beau to von Göritz at a moment most absurd. “She’s a wonderful girl all right. Unfortunately she has a canine missing.” LANDSCAPE IN CONCRETE is kaleidoscope turned hideous slurry, and Helga’s status as object of extraordinary erotic interest is inseparable from her status as dissimulating freak, a reality which provides her no end of grief but which she knows, not being a dummy, is the hand hers to play. Aberrant fusion is the only game in town. “There are many different kinds of plants and flowers, each one has to have its name if they are not to be confused. The names aren’t picked at random, they are part of an old tradition. Like the tradition of the Bachmanns. Even if they fade and die in the fall, they keep their names and dignity. Just like us. We’re an old family too, but this phlox is still older. They’ve outlived Rome and the Romans and yet they’ve died each year. The eternal return, you can call it. The sentry was asleep. The gate stood wide open. Once outside, he began to run, he ran faster and faster and suddenly stopped to sniff at the air or listen to silent voices—as Schnotz had done. As if the dead man’s soul had gone into him and taken its place with everything that had already died inside him.”

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Landscape in Concrete, Lind's famous tale of tragedy and absurdity, concerns one Gauthier Bachman, a giant oaf of a German soldier who is also the sole survivor of a regiment that got drowned in mud. He is subsequently declared mentally unfit to serve. But Bachman's ardent determination to support the Fatherland's war effort is undiminished and, having been released/escaped from a Polish sanitarium, he has now begun a quest to locate and join any regiment willing to take him. Along the way, however, instead of an idealized mission of duty and purpose, he is repeatedly abused, manipulated, and humiliated into acting in ways contrary to both his nature and (supposedly) that of civilized society. From Peter von Göritz, the stylish homosexual sergeant, to murderous psychopath Hjalmar Halftan and lecherous police chief Heinz-Otto Muschel, a dominant running theme is the corruption of power and the frightening ways in which authority figures can use it to influence their subordinates. "[A]fter all," says Cohen, "the Holocaust was legal, as are most wars." In other words, as Landscape in Concrete also makes quite clear, the definition of sanity and criminal behavior depends purely on context.

The perversion of language and distortion of meaning in Landscape in Concrete is also reminiscent of Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 (also about World War II). Both books explore the illogical madness of war and the cognitive dissonance inherent to its various acts of institutionalized horror. Heller's hero Yossarian is told that, in order to be discharged from duty he must be proven mentally unfit (like Bachman). Unfortunately, the very act of trying to be discharged is indicative of a sound mind, as no normal human being would ever want to go into combat. Likewise, when Bachman begs to be reinstated despite his many issues, he is told that, "A war can only be fought with sound men. The highest demands are made on every individual, it takes nerves of steel. We have to do things that may not be to our liking. Yes, sometimes we have to do violence to our own nature. Most of the duties a war imposes on us, Sergeant Bachman, are revolting, let's face it, insane, and yet the soldier who performs them has to fully responsible."

The collapse of solid meaning in language is visualized through Bachman's distaste for the chaos of trees, rocks, and mountains, as well as his desire for the natural landscape to be transformed into one of concrete: flattened, paved-over, bombed to oblivion. All he wants to do is serve his nation and obey his orders, but it is this naive yearning that is gradually transforming him into a monster at the hands of others.

Though undeniably thought-provoking, Landscape in Concrete is also a very intense tale that can be difficult to read. I was even forced to skip a couple of pages during the scene in which Halftan has Bachman murder a family simply because it got so gruesome. Overall, Lind is certainly a talented writer whose narrative shifts smoothly between horror and pitch black humor. A common literary criticism is that a particular book could have been shorter; here, however, I feel that Landscape in Concrete probably should have been longer, especially given the comparatively weak third act where I felt the storyline became rather confused. (What was the deal with the lesbian-landlord-gynecologist? That weird little subplot just had me going, "WTF?") Landscape in Concrete is nevertheless an important literary addition to library of World War II and Holocaust writings, as it forces the reader to both sympathize with and revile a hapless protagonist-turned-"criminal" and demands that we examine within ourselves that same capacity for mindless, befuddled obedience.

Review Copy

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tragic/comedic tale of the absurdity of war told from the prospective of Bachmann, a WW2 German soldier, the survivor of a devastating battle where almost his entire regiment was lost in the mud of the Eastern Front. He is declared mentally incompetent and is set for discharge. He runs away and tries to find his regiment. Strange adventures ensue with an assortment of odd characters: a poisoner/deserter, a homosexual officer, a deranged former schoolteacher turned double agent, Bachmann's large girlfreind, an odd judge, Gypsy musicians....
The introduction by Joshua Cohen is also a good read. Jakov lind's life is almost stranger than his fiction.

[Mina Bahadori · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ending felt rushed but still an interesting read

[Dakota Blackledge · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the line between reality and imagination blurs, this novel provokes deeper thought on the concepts of culpability, impulse, free will, and how much our own memories and thoughts reflect reality.

[Chad Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the English, but it's simply amazing . . .

[Cooper Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange, violent, funny. The "adventures" of a young German soldier after his regiment is virtually destroyed on the Eastern front in 1943. A must.