Though I say I don’t read contemporary fiction much, it’s just that I have trouble finding anything I want to read. I’m always looking, always hoping to find a new writer. It doesn’t happen often, but it did when I encountered the novel Heidegger’s Glasses.
The author,Thaisa Frank, has an interesting background With a father who taught medieval literature and a mother who was a theater director, according to her online bio, she grew up spending 2/3 of each year in an Illinois suburb and 1/3 in the Bronx, New York. She has a degree in the Philosophy of Science and Logic, has studied linguistics, has practiced as a psychotherapist, and teaches writing at Berkeley, CA.
Heidegger’s Glasses is a historical novel founded on the fact that, according to Zoe-Eleanor Englehardt, curator at the Museum of Tolerance in New York City, whose introduction to the novel starts the book, the Nazis “placed astounding reliance on the supernatural for strategies about the war and the Final Solution.”
Heinrich Himmler, Interior Minister, and in charge of both the Gestapo and the the military wing of the SS, and said to be the chief administrator of the killing of 6 million Jewish people, and many others in the holocaust, was also a leader of the Thule Society, a group of “mystics, psychics, members of the Reich, and select SS men,” who “met regularly to channel advice from the astral plane.”
Apparently this activity included a program called Briefaktion, or ‘Operation Mail’. This was an underground facility in a retired a mine shaft (there are drawings completed by the architect) where Jewish prisoners who could speak multiple languages, were spared the gas chambers in return for writing letters to the families of people who had entered the death camps, when in fact they were already dead.
The reason for that was partly that the Nazis were trying hard to keep the truth of the death camps a secret, and partly that this was supposed to in some way either placate the dead, or impede them from contacting their families from the after-life.
Each chapter begins with a haunting copy of one of the actual letters produced, with a few unusual exceptions.
That, at least, is how I understand what is going on. You have to pay attention when reading this book if you want to know what’s going on. But don’t blame Thaisa Frank for that. Blame Henirich Himmler.
If you were entering one of the camps and you could speak more than one language, you might be offered the chance to go to Briefaktion to work as a writer.
But I’m not going to try describing the plot. Normally I back off altogether when I see a story with many characters – I can’t keep track of them, something I attribute to autism – but in this case I had to go on. The plot is complicated by the many characters.
Suffice it to say that two of them – Gerhard Lodenstein, the German officer in charge of the Briefaktion facility, and Elie Shacten, a woman responsible for contact between Briefaktion and the outside world – purchasing food, etc – collaborate with each other to secretly rescue Jewish people who are in hiding, and fall in love with each other in the process. Elie worksi under an assumed name, disguising the fact that she is Polish, something she can’t risk telling Gerhard, and which proves critical to their future.
Because of their efforts, there are people in Briefaktion who would be shot immediately, or sent to the gas chambers, if they were discovered. One of them is a young boy who shows up in the middle of the book, the unexpected son of a man Elie was rescuing, who Elie couldn’t refuse, so he has to be constantly hidden, since children weren’t allowed there.
A major character in the story is the famous German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who was criticized for joining the Nazi party and insisting that he didn’t know about the death camps.
All of this is happening in the last year of the war, with everyone knowing that the Russian army is likely to over-run Auschwitz and Briefaktion.
Heidegger has lost his eye glasses, made especially for him by a Jewish optician, Asher Englehart, who he is trying to find so he can get another pair. Someone tells him Englehart is in Auschwitz. The scene where Heidegger comes to Auschwitz and has a meeting with Goebbels (who is now involved – I won’t try to explain), as well as the commandant of Auschwitz, plus an armed guard (who has interesting things to say), and Lodenstein, ranks, in my opinion, as one of the greatest conversation scenes in literature.
Yes, I’m setting Thaisa Frank up against Dickens and Balzac, Tolstoy and George Eliot, Hemingway and Virginia Wolf – she’s in their league. It’s true that dialogue is easier to write than prose generally, probably the reason why current fiction is so full of it, but Thaisa Frank’s dialogue is at a level few are able to reach. Her book has many examples of that.
The way she enables Heidegger to come into Auschwitz and go out again without suspecting what is going on, is alone a work of art, and loaded with irony, but there are many sides to the acutely tense discussion. The scene cries out for a film to be made of this book.
I still maintain that contemporary fiction is weak, compared with what has been done in the past, but Heidegger’s Glasses is an astonishng exception to the rule.
Someone has said that the stories arising from World War II are almost infinite in number. Thaisa Frank’s book is more evidence for that. Even the epilogue to the story, in which Elie and Gerhard, separated in their last-minute escape, search for years for evidence of each other’s survival, is deeply moving.
PS – April 5/2025 – With good actors and a good director, that scene could be one of the greatest scenes ever produced in film. The story cries out to be a film
Alan Conrad 