The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal: Responsibility Wrought by The Past
From the first sentences of The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal, I was tightly wound within the grip of this novel, and it held me close through to the end. The narrative voices of the two brothers — one street smart, one book smart — are genuine and sincere, the personal and world history that they recount is heartbreakingly moving, and the parallels drawn between Nazism and Islamism (not the religion of Islam but the -ism of militant jihadists) are illuminating and compelling. Both brothers struggle against the evidence of evil in the world, with one of the brothers reaching a conclusion of despair against the inherent evil of mankind. I cannot deny the evidence offered in the novel of the atrocities of the holocaust and the killings, torture, and terror in countries over which the Taliban is waging war, and in the daily news of the world (for example, today’s horrific story of the killings, rapes, and beatings in Guinea), as proof that we are violent, cowardly, and cruel. And yet I believe that the answer lies in what we can do against evil, as stated by one of the characters in the novel, and repeated several times, that “memory and knowledge” are the most effective weapons against evil, and not in repaying death with death, even the deaths of the murders themselves. And certainly not with the deaths of the children of the murderers.
Sansal’s novel is set in the 1996 in the Muslim neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris where the brothers live, with scenes also set in Algeria, where the brothers were born to an Algerian mother and a German father, and in sites throughout Europe as Rachel, the older brother, tries to track down the history of his father. Sansal sets down firmly but without fanfare the current conditions of the outlying immigrant neighborhoods of Paris, the recent and bloody history of Algeria, and the context of World War II from which the present time cannot escape.
The German Mujahid is a novel about responsibility; on whose shoulders does responsibility lie for deaths due to an -ism of terror and brutality? Rachel, the older brother, believes that he is ultimately responsible for his father’s SS past and for his father’s compounding sin of running away from justice instead of admitting his crimes and paying the price. Rachel turns inward, taking punishment on himself. Malrich, the younger brother, turns outward as his reaction against what he learns about the holocaust (all new to him) and his own personal experience with how the jihadists have turned his Muslim neighborhood into a scary and dangerous compound rules by the local Iman. He wants to fight Jihadism not as payment for his father’s sins but because he believes it is the right thing to do; he sees the parallel between the rise of Hitler and the rise of the Jihad, the way in which rules and labels are enforced through a brutal ruthlessness and supported by rhetoric of cleansing, greatness, and triumph.
The poetry of Primo Levi is read by Rachel to be a call for punishment, and an invitation to his own suicide. I read the poetry of Levi in the opposite way, as a reminder of the necessity of living on in the face of evil, in living with full memory and acknowledgment of the horror that has occurred in the past: living as a testament to the horror. Atonement is called for and the action it demands is life itself, a life lived in testament to those who died. “Memory and knowledge”, one of the characters counsels Malrich: “Read if you want, campaign if you want, make a difference however you can.” Never forget, and dying is a way to forget, so suicide is not a solution: only by living can we ensure that memory will not fade. Rachel himself says that “Silence perpetuates a crime, gives it new life, closes the door on justice and truth and throws open the door to forgetfulness, to the possibility that it might happen again.” And yet Rachel chooses the greatest silence, death; Malrich will choose life, and follow the path of “memory and knowledge”.
Rachel says that “the only person who truly understands horror is the victim” and that is true but through knowledge we can all bear witness to horror and we can commit ourselves to doing what we can to prevent horrors in the future. That is the only answer we can bring to evil: to live on in goodness, and to never forget, or lose vigilance, against the potential of evil within ourselves and the reality of evil without in the world. It is not a conclusion of despair, but of hope, a hope built on looking forward with full knowledge of the past.
The power of The German Mujahid is that it is an enthralling novel, written not a tract of castigation but as a beautiful and truthful evocation of the foundation of human experience. the search for self-definition, “who am I?”. The brothers each must define who they are within the confines of both the past and the present, both personally and in the world as a whole. That they both understand the power of history, acknowledge their own role in the world, and struggle to take on full responsibility for their existence makes them good men, and makes their story a great book.
The German Mujahid was translated by Frank Wynne.
