Nazi SS

The Nazi SS is the coercive Nazi institution through which the novel evokes the machinery of wartime persecution and the postwar effort to identify prominent perpetrators. Its appearances are brief but consequential: in a story about a civil administrator confronted with a deportation train, in a prisoner-of-war camp interrogation, and in the critics’ speculation about a famous writer’s past. The novel sets these references beside later state violence and institutional indifference without claiming that the historical situations are identical.

Wartime Administration and Persecution

In a wartime account, a narrator describes receiving an order to take charge of a trainload of five hundred Jews. He says he ran a civil operation, not a military or SS one, and had no experience managing such a group; he nevertheless signs the delivery papers and seeks advice from a camp administrator near Chelmno. The episode establishes that the SS is part of the surrounding administrative landscape, while the narrator’s uncertainty and self-description do not remove his involvement in the events unfolding around the transport.

The bureaucracy’s jurisdictional boundaries become another obstacle in the account. After a call to Chelmno fails, an official in Greek Affairs in Berlin recommends contacting General Government SS headquarters. The narrator dismisses that suggestion as misguided because his town belongs administratively to a German gau, although it lies only a few miles beyond the General Government boundary. The reference presents Nazi authority as divided among offices and territories, even as the people caught within that system face immediate danger.

Postwar Identification and Accountability

In a prisoner-of-war camp, Hans Reiter tells Ingeborg Bauer that he had killed Leo Sammer, whom he describes as a killer of Jews. Reiter recounts that American police questioned him about Sammer and about his own possible membership in the National Socialist Party. He says the investigators were looking for high-profile war criminals, including SS officials and figures from the death camps, whereas Sammer was a minor civil servant. The distinction conveys the limits of the postwar search as Reiter understands it: the investigators’ attention is directed toward perpetrators of particular prominence, while Sammer’s status makes him less likely to attract it.

Reiter says he answered the questions honestly, gave the investigators his name, and asked for help finding his parents. Although they questioned him again and recorded his details, he remained in the camp. When it began to empty during prisoner transfers, he escaped. His account links the SS not only to wartime crimes but also to the postwar problem of how responsibility is classified, pursued, and left unresolved.

Echoes, Memory, and Comparison

The novel also invokes the SS through an image rather than an account of its actions. At a literary reading in a Frisian town, the young Benno von Archimboldi wears a loose black leather jacket with a high collar, four buttons, and horizontal pockets. The Swabian cultural promoter recalls that its appearance brought Gestapo officers to mind, while noting that black leather jackets were then fashionable. The qualification matters: the association registers the persistence of historical memory, but the jacket alone does not establish a political identity or affiliation.

Years later, critics discussing Archimboldi’s possible Nobel Prize speculate about his wartime past, imagining that he might be a World War II deserter still on the run. Their discussion reflects the uncertainty surrounding the writer’s history and the symbolic weight his generation carries for Europe; it does not confirm that he served in the SS. Elsewhere, Oscar Amalfitano explains that the 1973 coup in Chile forced him into exile, and he describes exile as a movement that can unsettle what is usually called fate. His account brings a later political rupture into the novel’s wider field of historical memory without equating it with Nazi rule.

Institutions and the Legibility of Violence

A lecture within the novel considers how societies make some deaths visible and leave others outside public attention. Its examples include the mass deaths of enslaved people transported by ship and the thousands killed during the Paris Commune, set against murders that became widely reported stories. The speaker argues that words can make a death socially legible while also serving avoidance. This reflection provides a frame for reading the novel’s institutional references: official labels, jurisdictions, investigations, and public narratives determine which people and crimes receive sustained attention.

The SS references therefore work through both direct historical material and echoes across the book’s other settings. The wartime transport and the postwar questioning concern persecution and accountability; the jacket and the critics’ conjectures show how memory attaches itself to objects and reputations; Amalfitano’s exile and the lecture’s account of socially legible death extend the inquiry to other political and institutional contexts. These connections invite comparison while preserving the differences between the histories the novel places alongside one another.