Martin Pollack's The Dead Man in the Bunker
Reviewed by Simona Sivkoff
Martin Pollack worked for many years as a foreign correspondent for Der Spiegel in Warsaw before becoming a writer and translator in the late 1990s. Since then, he has come to be regarded as one of Austria’s most significant contemporary authors and one of its most outspoken critics. In his book The Dead Man in the Bunker (2004), Pollack turns his critical gaze to his own family. In the center of the book is Pollack’s father, Dr. Gerhard Best – skiing enthusiast, consummate dandy, and, as it happens, a one-time officer in the SS and commander of the Gestapo in Linz. It is not a fictional work but the true story of an Austrian Nazi family in which the missing knowledge is supplanted by the sparse archival documents that have committed to memory the violence of the perpetrators and only few of the faces of the victims – the victims of Pollack’s father.
Martin Pollack goes back to his grandfather’s life, colored as it was by the multicultural complexity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the discord between the Slavic and German populations attending the same schools and sharing the same cities. The feelings of superiority and entitlement underlined with threat and anti-Semitism fused the German-speaking population together and drove them to rabid nationalism. Pollack didactically insists on writing out the German and the Slavic names of the cities, mountains, and persons in the former Dual Empire underscoring the centuries’ long intertwinement of the cultures. But the collapse of Austro-Hungary forced both Slavic and German populations to immediately identify with the one side or the other. With the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany, the Germanic population engages enthusiastically in expelling their former Slavic neighbors and friends from their home. Pollack’s grandfather and father, both lawyers, members of the same fraternity called Germania, and staunch supporters of Hitler, take on an active role in implementing the National Socialist credo.
The rise and fall of his father would have perhaps never come to interest him as his mother remarried and his stepfather treated him as his own son until his love for Slavic literature led him to spend time in Poland. Pollack’s choice to study Slavic literature caused a permanent rift between him and his paternal grandmother, who was petrified by the thought that the beloved grandson might not only closely interact but end up bringing home a Slavic or Jewish woman. With great sensitivity towards the unspoken and the silenced, Pollack proceeds to examine and reconstruct the story of his family, an assemblage of staunch and unrepentant Nazis. He painstakingly documents the numbers of expelled and murdered Slavs, Jews, and political dissidents under the direct orders of his SS officer father. Pollack never fails to describe himself as the son of a war criminal, thus taking direct responsibility for the crimes of the father he barely remembers.
Pollack does not attempt to lend a voice to the victims, but makes the guilt clearer by posing plain questions that ordinary Austrians failed to ask during the war. He explores the direct and indirect involvement of his family members in the atrocities of the Nazi regime without vilifying them. The questions that his mother, an ordinary housewife from Linz and a halfhearted nationalist, fails to ask herself and her lover attest to the general frailty of morality under the duress of war. She deliberately chooses not to get involved with politics or to inquire about the duties of Pollack’s father – the head of the Nazi secret police in Linz and a highly decorated SS officer. For Pollack, her position is the result of personal weakness and a symbol for the failure of the Austrian population to act ethically towards others. Most importantly, Martin Pollack’s book offers a radically new perspective showing the difficulty of accepting moral guilt and the inability of postwar Austrian society to disengage itself from the myth of self-vicitimization and address its complicity with the National Socialist regime. The Dead Man in the Bunker is a welcome contribution to a growing body of literature that helps contemporary readers make sense of the history of Central Europe by showing us National Socialism from an unusual angle. But most of all, the book is a vivid portrayal of what Hannah Arendt described as the Banality of Evil: the capacity of monstrosity in ordinary people.
Martin Pollack, The Dead Man in the Bunker, London: FABER & FABER, 2008.
Martin Pollack, Der Tote im Bunker: Bericht über meinen Vater, Vienna: Zsolnay Verlag, 2004.
