THE DEATH OF THE ADVERSARY (208 pp.)—Hans Keilson—Orion ($3.95).
Since Adolf Hitler, an outpouring of writing has tried to explain the violence that human beings do to one another. Nagging questions persist: Why did so many acquiesce in Hitler's evil? Why did so many Jews go quietly to their deaths when they had a good chance of resisting? Fiction, rather than scholarship, has supplied the shrewder answers. Perhaps the profoundest explanation to date comes from the pen of a Jewish writer driven from Germany in 1936 and now living in Holland. Hans Keilson's novel subtly and eloquently probes the ambivalent relation of victim with aggressor.
Keilson traces the growth of hatred in his leading character as other writers trace love or self-knowledge. When a small child, the nameless hero gets his first inkling that he has an enemy. In hushed voices, his parents discuss a party leader called B., a thinly disguised Hitler who is rising to power by attacking a minority.
The boy, a member of the minority, feels the force of his enemy at school when his classmates shun him. His mother's love is powerless to help, his father is resigned. But a fable he is told gives him insight into his enemy. It tells of Germany's Kaiser, who was presented with some elks by the Czar of Russia and tried to duplicate their natural habitat. But they all died, because they missed the stimulation of the wolves who had preyed on them.
Initial Obsession. Keilson's hero comes to believe that he, like the elks, must have an adversary for his own good. When he first hears one of B.'s fanatical speeches, he is enthralled by the depth of his hatred: "No lover can talk more possessively of the object of his love than he did of me, even though he was cursing me. Surely, he was obsessed by me." The hero is convinced that B. needs him as much as he needs B.: "He was as uncertain and wavering as myself. Gripped by the fear of being a stranger to himself, he has raised up an adversary, me, and has painted my image on the wall, as the old painters painted their icons with sweating hands when their demon took possession of them."
With such sympathy for his adversary, the hero is powerless to act against him. Though accused of cowardice, he refuses to join his fellow victims in resistance. He dreams of eventual reconciliation with his adversary: "Jubilation, all, all, without distinction, friends and enemies." But when B. seizes power, such illusions are shattered. B.'s hatred turns out to be barren and implacable, his cruelty an end in itself. "Even hatred cannot exist without a drop of love," the hero muses, "or it is no longer hatred but a cold devastation, a heavy mist across the fields that blots out every path: unachieved creation." Now that the bond of enmity has snapped, he is at last willing to fight.