Knowing about my recurrent interest in the Holocaust, my family gave me as Sant Jordi presents two closely related books: Javier Cercas’ non-fiction novel El impostor (2014) and Carlos Hernández de Miguel non-fiction essay Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen (2015). I have read them back-to-back, half by chance and half on purpose and the result is that I have serious doubts right now about the function of the novel in contemporary culture.
Cercas became an instant celebrity back in 2001 with the publication of Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis) and remains today one of the few Spanish novelists with a truly high literary reputation. I enjoyed his Soldados though still today I find it an over-hyped novel, a phenomenon rather than a literary masterpiece capable of withstanding the test of time. The subject of El impostor, however, intrigued me, which is why I was glad to receive the book. In case you have not heard about it, Cercas deals with the extraordinary case of Enric Marco Batlle, a compulsive liar who ended up presiding the association ‘Amical Mauthausen’ falsely claiming he was one of the 9,000 Spanish Republican prisoners locked up in a Nazi concentration camp (in Flössenburg). This affable, talkative man became the main spokesperson for the Spanish victims of the Nazis and when historian Benito Bermejo exposed him, in 2005, public opinion was sharply divided between the urge to shame him and the impulse to defend him as one of the main Spanish disseminators of knowledge about the Holocaust, quite unknown in Spain (until Schindler’s List…).
Cercas seems fascinated by Truman Capote’s dubious position when writing his masterpiece In Cold Blood (1966), the book which the American writer devoted to the two murderers of a family of farmers in Kansas. This is the volume that originated the genre we know today as ‘non-fiction’, which uses a mixture of techniques borrowed from the journalistic report and from the novel, with the difference that, unlike the latter, non-fiction is supposed to narrate the ‘truth’ (or something that approximates it).
Cercas, very cleverly, calls El impostor a ‘non-fiction novel’ so that his reader never knows whether there is any truth in it or, the opposite, whether this is fiction disguised as something else. I was first taken over by Cercas’ post-postmodern approach to his elusive subject, his constant hesitation about whether Marco’s life had any truth in it, and his insightful suggestion that Marco’s pathological lying responds to a deeper pathology in the Spanish psyche, as so many Spaniards chose to re-invent themselves as victims after the Transition. My initial admiration, though, started paling when I realised that as the volume progressed the repetitions increased without Cercas’ scratching more than Enric Marco’s surface. Above all, I was quite annoyed by the constant authorial presence in the text, that of his friends, family and even his student son, whose banal problems seemed to worry Cercas on their trip to Flössenburg more than the truths (and lies) of History. In the end, Cercas delivers a trite message about the novel as a genre: just like Marco, novelists are unreliable manipulators who will do anything it takes to pass themselves off in public for what they are not… in Cercas’ world, real writers.
Next I read Carlos Hernández de Miguel’s non-fiction essay Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen, a thick book which presents itself as a work of clear didactic intent, aimed at teaching common readers the truth about the sad fate of the Spanish Republicans after 1939, when 500,000 Spaniards faced exile in France little imagining the horrors awaiting them. Hernández de Miguel, who started his own trip into Nazism chasing leads that would explain his own uncle’s experience, chose to let the few Spanish survivors speak. He disappears from the text, fusing in his portrait of these men and women his own interviews with them, testimonials kept by their families and frequent quotations from other sources, whether these are military and Government documents or well-known volumes like, for instance, Montserrat Roig’s Els catalans als camps nazis (1977). The result is extremely vivid, compelling and at the same time absolutely devastating. I have read quite a few volumes about the camps and knew about many of the atrocities I would find in Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen. Even so the immediacy of the Spanish voices–and Hernández de Miguel’s adamant denunciation of the complicity among Franco, Hitler, Pétain and even the allies to let the Republican exiles die–made reading this volume a very intense experience. A true History lesson.
As I read Los últimos españoles… I could not stop thinking, logically, of Cercas’ novel, for what Hernández de Miguel’s narrates is the truth that Enric Marco usurped for his own false biography. Being familiar with Marco’s very public downfall through the media before reading El impostor, I already knew that his lie was grotesque. Yet, when reading the disheartening memories of the real survivors, and understanding the depth of their still unacknowledged grief ad suffering, Marco’s lie appears to be hideous and unpardonable. I am now convinced that Cercas made a very serious mistake in choosing for his novel this monster and not one of the 9,000 lives that passed through Mauthausen and similar places.
Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen produces the same intense disgust with the human species that many other books on Nazism produce, for the facts narrated touch the very marrow of evil. No wonder many survivors decided to keep silent, seeing that family and friends would not believe them. If you are familiar with Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (1947), a volume absolutely fundamental to understand Nazism and the Holocaust, but also human nature, you’ll find that Hernández de Miguel’s survivors tread the same dark territory.
Cercas, who has quite a cavalier attitude towards the recent process in favour of recovering historical memory in Spain, may be regarded as a good literary writer but I find in the end his work quite trivial in comparison to what Hernández de Miguel provides the reader with in his volume. At one point in El impostor, Cercas (I’m not sure whether the man himself or a meta-fictional version) claims that Marco could fabricate his ersatz victim personality because of the rampant historical kitsch. He doesn’t explain himself clearly but he seems to mean that kind of superficial, sentimental (or morbid) fashion for Holocaust stories that has led to perversions such as best-selling novel The Book Thief. I hope he’s not thinking of Schindler’s List for we owe Thomas Keneally and Steven Spielberg much more than they’re credited for. I have no idea what Cercas thinks of Hernández de Miguel’s book but what worries me is that is can be mistaken for historical kitsch. It is not.
I express in my title doubts about the function of the novel today and perhaps I mean the novelist. Hernández de Miguel takes a back seat but even so he makes his indignation palpable all through his book. In contrast, Cercas’ literary vanity is all he thinks about. Novelists used to be good at writing well and spreading indignation (Charles Dickens…) but it seems that now these two aims are incompatible. If you ask me, in the end I even find much better Literature in Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen than in El impostor, in the essay than in the novel, non-fiction both. I have no doubt whatsoever about which is the truly good book.
Now, visit www.deportados.es and let’s continue thinking–for here’s the irony: as I read Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen, I wished Hernández de Miguel had made a documentary mini-series which millions would watch instead of a book which only a few thousand will read. So much for the power of the written word…
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