(2 of 2)
Need for Cleanliness. Cohn is not quite satisfied with this. He broods about it, and some years after his death comes upon a newspaper report of atrocities committed by the savage Simbas in the Congo. "The civilized world was indignant. So let me put it this way. The Germans had Schiller, Goethe, Holderlin, and the Simbas of the Congo had nothing. The difference between the Germans, heirs to an immense culture, and the savage Simbas is that the Simbas ate their victims, whereas the Germans turned theirs into soap. This need for cleanliness, that is culture."
Gary, who is part Jewish himself, ends his novel with his Jew falling victim to the very fanaticism he mocks. As a Christlike apparition, Cohn starts hounding Lily. The message is that both Jew and German, Schatz and Cohn, victim and killer, are contained in each other and subject to the same aberrations. But ultimately, Gary seems to conclude, no reminder of man's fallibility has ever deterred anybody who is sure he is right. As Florian says to Lily at one late encounter: "It's only your Jew, peach. Never mind Him—nobody does. He's never been in anybody's way."