25 & Trying

The German Mujahid

The German Mujahid

My most recent read has been quite a roller coaster. I read the first 10 pages right off the bat, and then put it down. It was haunting me from inside my bag. It was telling me that I was slacking and that I wasn’t committing to it. But there was something about it that was slightly haunting.

Boualem Sansal is a famous French author, whose literature is well regarded and has won numerous awards. The English translation of The German Mujahid is the first work I have read by him, but his style and subject matter made me really intrigued – after I finally gave into the book.

It chronicles two diaries of brothers – Rachel and Malrich Schiller. They are Algerians that reside in Paris. Malrich is the screw-up, the main narrator, and a kind of a gangster with a moral compass. He lives in the slums of Paris, which he refers to as “the estate.” On the estate, trouble is happening. Islamic fundamentalists – who he used to respect and admire – have become too much for him. His community is changing. People are praying five times per day, and following an imam rather than the cops. “Jihad” is everywhere, he proclaims.

On the other hand, Rachel works for a multinational corporation. He has a wife, and lives a rather normal life compared to his younger brother. Both sons left Algeria to emigrate to France, while their parents remain.

Getting to the heart of the story is Malrich’s experience of reading Rachel’s diary. We learn early on that Rachel has left this diary behind for Malrich after committing suicide. Rachel’s diary was, for me, the more powerful of the side-by-side narratives.

He finds out that their father – widely proclaimed in Algeria to be a Mujahid war hero – was actually a former SS soldier. Not just an SS officer, but one that worked at many death camps during World War Two, including Auschwitz and Majdanek.

His diary chronicles his dissent into madness, as he tries to reconcile the fact that his father used Algeria to hide, rather than because he was really a devout Muslim. Ironically enough, his father and mother were both assassinated in the genocide that was occurring in Algeria in the 1990′s.

He tours Europe in an attempt to understand why it is that his father was capable of such atrocities. He finds little to no solace in the intellectual understanding of the Holocaust, and as Malrich reads the diary, he begins to compare it to the Islamic fundamentalism that he sees on an everyday basis.

This is where the meat of Sansal’s book is. This comparison may have been done before, but I hadn’t read about it until now. It is a really interesting analysis of the ways in which current events reflect history, and vice-versa.

In another review of the book found here, a major complaint was that we didn’t care enough about Malrich and Rachel to really feel for them in this situation. I have to respectfully disagree – because I believe they themselves are not really the point.

I will take one Rachel’s last diary entries as a case and point. He travels to Auschwitz, where I myself have been – and describes his experience there. He even runs into an elderly woman who is visiting, and mourning her lost sister. His description matches what I saw and felt with exact accuracy. It is because of this that I FINALLY found myself begging for a longer book.

The diaries are about what it means to observe these things as human beings, not as individual characters. We may not know about them, but we know these feelings of terror, genocide, deceit, and fear. We know about lying and mistrust, and someone pretending to be something they are not. This brought me back, not only to Poland and the cold winter day in February that I stood at the train station that was the sign of death for so many of my people – but to any of the emotions that Malrich and Rachel were having. They were feelings designed for all of us.