Hélène Cixous, 1938, nuits
I have been sent a lot of Hélène Cixous’s novels, if that’s the right term for the autofictional narratives she has produced at a staggering clip since the late 1960s. I have met her, I love her as a person, and many years ago, I even translated one of her books from French into German. But I must confess that I find many of her works, perhaps most of them, difficult to get into; her French is difficult in the way French prose of the 1970s is difficult—full of self-references, puns, allusions, repetitions, to say nothing of the absence of characterizations, exposition, even punctuation. I love looking at and handling the small Galilée books with their French flap, their serif typeface, and that strangest and most French of all printing conventions, the “prière d’insérer,” an inserted abstract that does more to mystify than spark a reader’s interest. Typically, when I receive a book, I look at it, leaf through it, and then lay it aside for a later time that rarely comes. I did the same with 1938, nuits (2019), but was suddenly captivated by the reproduction of two pages of a typescript in German. What was it?
Cixous’s fiction has always circled around her family’s history, which is full of events that are all the more extraordinary because they have at their center a protagonist who is resolutely, stubbornly ordinary: her mother Eva Klein, who died at the age of 103 in 2013. Born into a well-established Ashkenazi Jewish family in Osnabrück, she left Germany for France even before the rise of the Nazis, married the Sephardic radiologist Georges Cixous, and moved with him to Oran in Algeria. Since his death in 1948 she has fended for herself and for her children first in Algeria and then, after Algerian independence, in Paris. She did not return to Osnabrück until the city invited her in the 1990s.
1938, nuits is about the pogroms against German Jews after the staged burning of the German parliament. Her mother’s family in Osnabrück had been dismissive of the Nazi threat until the chaotic night of November 9, 1938, when the local synagogue burned down and the Jews of the town were rounded up, beaten, and taken to Buchenwald, the camp established just outside of Weimar, the city of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Liszt, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The historical core of that story is documented by a young doctor called Siegfried (Fred)—a childhood friend of Eva’s—who had come back to Osnabrück from his medical training in Basel and was swept up in the arrests and deported to Buchenwald; he was then released and emigrated to the United States where he wrote down his experiences and sent the manuscript, many years later, to Cixous’s mother.
What had caught my eye were the two pages of Fred’s typescript that are reproduced in the book. A doctor’s clinical eye here records in German the humiliations to which the prisoners are subjected. Are there national differences in brutality? The petty rules, the emphasis on performative discipline, the hierarchy among the soldiers and guards feel terrifyingly familiar to me (I have served in the German Bundeswehr). Prisoners die, but the camps are not yet calibrated for the task of extermination, which gives the entire scenario the eerie and revolting feel of a dress rehearsal. I read every account of the Holocaust and the preparations for it with a mixture of trepidation, lurid eagerness, and a sensation of horror that comes from the deeply felt possibility of having been involved in it and not knowing on which side.
The peculiarities of Cixous’s writing style that so often have irritated me—the difficulty of telling where and when an event takes place, who is speaking, her stopping to let a word roll off her writerly tongue or to focus on a minute detail as if it contained the key to all questions: suddenly they seem the only way to let the reader experience the chaos and the peculiar violence of this night. The most unsettling scenes in the novel are those that show how former friends, classmates, or customers turn away from their Jewish neighbors once the mass frenzy of the night of the ninth has given everyone license to let go of their Anstand, the decency Germans—until today!—claim is part of their national character. The incredulousness of the members of Eva’s family is as shocking as the sudden turn to cruelty and coldness of their neighbors.
Once the frightened Jews are rounded up and held in enclosures for all to see, the word that dominates the texts for me is “deportation,” present here in all the details that come with the forcible removal of thousands of human bodies through a country ostensibly not at war. The denunciations, the collaboration between police and railway administration, the passivity, or taunting aggression, of the bystanders, the frantic cruelty of the guards—Cixous makes these experiences unbearably vivid by putting her narrating voice in the holding cell, on the seat in the bus, on the ramp at Buchenwald, in the barracks. It is devastating to experience these scenes in the reading and having to imagine them as playing out in the past, in the present, and in the future, here and elsewhere.
The full horror of Fred’s experiences thus becomes readable to me not in the sober descriptions of the document he himself wrote and sent to Cixous’s mother (who promptly forgot about it) but in the contrastive embedding in Cixous’s extravagant stylings. Either I have done her an injustice with my impatience with her previous work or this novel is the one in which her writing comes fully into its own.
I realize now what others have figured out long before me: that the reality of this experience reaches me and touches me because it is written as fiction, because this mode allows Cixous to break down the overwhelming solidity of historical facts into the hypergranularity of sensations—the smell of a newspaper, the furtive glance of a friend who has just betrayed us, the light in the barracks—that I recognize as a reaction to trauma. Fred’s document, even though more “realistic,” did not and could not have this effect.
And then there it is, one of these small miracles that can happen when the experience of the reader suddenly touches the experiences in the book: Fred, in search of a place to finish his medical studies, goes to Paris and is there, through acquaintances of acquaintances, introduced to another exiled German Jew with whom he has a long discussion about—experience (highlighted by Cixous through the German “Erfahrung”). The conversation was memorable enough for Fred to remember and recount it even late in his life. The interlocutor was Walter Benjamin.