Saying Alas · To less and less

“Saying Alas / To less and less” is the name Paul Doll gives to his practiced withdrawal from feeling: each successive horror is acknowledged, then waived, until almost nothing remains to trouble him. The phrase, borrowed from Auden, condenses the moral habit that allows Doll to call himself normal while serving a system of persecution and mass killing; later, his own questions about the camp’s filth and death expose what that habit has cost.

The Habit of Letting Go

Doll traces this emotional retreat to the political order established when a “known political killer” was elevated to the Chancellery. In its aftermath, he says, emotion, sensibility, and delicacy retreated from him. He describes an almost daily inner exchange in which he tells himself to let something go, then asks whether even that can be relinquished, and answers yes. The repetition is the point: moral surrender is represented not as a single decision but as a steadily widening practice.

Doll calls Auden’s eight syllables an unusually exact account of this process. The poem’s two lines, “Saying Alas” and “To less and less,” turn his habit into a compressed formula. “Alas” still registers a response to suffering, but the movement toward “less and less” describes its erosion. The phrase is therefore both a label for Doll’s self-narrated adaptation and an indictment of how he has made adaptation possible.

Public Rationalizations and Private Doubt

Doll’s conduct shows what his inward formula permits. In a discussion of prisoners’ treatment, he declares agreement with the Reichsführer-SS and rejects pampering, casting the camp as no rest home. His language converts harshness into a policy choice and loyalty into justification, while the people subjected to that policy disappear behind the vocabulary of discipline.

His account of the banned antisemitic publication Der Stürmer offers a more elaborate example of the same distancing. Doll claims that its lurid images of Jewish men harm antisemitism by making it look hysterical; he prefers charts, statistics, and what he calls scientific evidence, and says this approach is championed by the Reich Security Main Office. He recounts that, in Dachau, a display of the paper in the prisoners’ canteen provoked violence, then attributes Jewish prisoners’ escape from that violence to bribery and claims that they were mainly persecuted by other Jews. His supposedly pragmatic criticism of crude propaganda does not challenge persecution: it presents a more calculated means of sustaining it.

At Spring Meadow, Doll insists that he is a normal man with normal feelings, yet explains that he suppresses human weakness by thinking of Germany and the trust placed in him by its “Deliverer.” He says that kindness to Jews would be cruelty to Germans and replaces moral distinctions with a calculus of positive and negative outcomes. The assertion of normality sits directly beside the scene of mass death, making his self-description evidence of the very evasion the phrase names.

A different kind of doubt appears in Boris Eltz’s account of his “anti-eureka” at Goleschau. Boris says he heard that psychiatric patients were being killed in Königsberg to free beds for men who had broken down after killing women and children in Poland and Russia. That knowledge led him to think that all was not as it should be in the state of Germany. The episode gives the larger political violence a recursive shape: people damaged by killing are themselves treated as disposable. Against that recognition, Doll’s habitual letting-go appears not inevitable but chosen.

The Return of What Was Suppressed

The phrase’s emotional logic changes in the pavilion scene. After watching someone sleep for an hour or so, Doll says that everything he had waived and ceded made itself known to him. He sees, with self-detestation, how soiled and shrunken he has allowed his heart to become; when the sleeper opens their eyes, he experiences something like hope. The reversal does not erase his earlier choices. Instead, the return of feeling makes the accumulated cost of those choices newly visible.

The Camp as a Moral Reckoning

Elsewhere, Doll’s questions about the camp turn the language of lessening into a series of sensory and moral accusations. He asks why, if their work is good, it smells so bad; why people on the ramp drink so brutally; why the meadow churns and spits; and why conception and gestation promise death rather than new life. He also asks why the snow is made brown. The questions refuse the abstraction of his earlier positive-and-negative calculus: smell, flies, vermin, hunger, disease, and death return as concrete consequences that cannot be made clean by political terminology.

Doll connects that corruption to obedience. Looking at the placard that declares loyalty and honour inseparable, he reflects on Kadavergehorsam, a word that contains a corpse, and on the dead in the crematoria and pits. His final comparison extends the image to those who obey: the dead are not only the murdered but, in a different sense, the compliant living. Read beside Auden’s two lines, the passage makes “less and less” more than a private symptom. It describes a political and moral diminishment, while Doll’s belated questions show the suppressed recognition struggling back into speech.