The Banality of Evil

On Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’ 'The Requisitions'

Coffeehouse With Swastikas, Vienna, Austria, 1938, Photograph, via Getty Images

All I knew about Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’ The Requisitions when I agreed to review it was its title. The discovery that it is a work of “historiographic metafiction” about life in the Łódź Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland prompted a small groan. In recent years, I’ve found solace in conventional novels about social and domestic life by authors like Anne Tyler and Jo Baker. Fiction that treats the uneventful lives of ordinary people, especially women, as worthy subjects has brought comfort in unsettled and unsettling times. I feared The Requisitions would be too abstruse — more concerned with the technical aspects of warfare and death camps than with human experiences. And given the murderous fascism that has always circumscribed the lives of certain people in certain places and is especially conspicuous today, I wasn’t eager to read more about Nazis.

There is nothing escapist about this book, but it’s vivid in a way that is almost tangible, and human nature is its primary subject. If the insights aren’t wholly original, they are expressed in prose that gleams like a bleached skull in the desert. Though keenly aware of the tendency to justify acts of war with “words transmogrified to mask the reality of death,” Lopez-Barrantes describes atrocities poetically. When a member of the Nazi paramilitary organization SS executes an elderly Pole in the street, red mist and brains “shimmer like sea spray in the truck beams.” A young man vomits at the sight. The violence is at once magnificent and repulsive, meaningless and horrific. Human beings have a unique capacity for cruelty and ruthlessness, as well as for compassion, heroism, and survival — qualities that can exist simultaneously and within the same person. As the novel’s narrator puts it, “I’m haunted by the undeniable truth that a human being tasked with shooting children on sight can also write sweet nothings to the mother of his children.”

The idea that human evil is routine and banal rather than extraordinary and alien is not new, but The Requisitions reinvigorates it through compelling and memorable characters. The frustrated academic Viktor Bauman — gentle, humorous, romantic, and heartbreakingly optimistic — is a loyal friend who loves books and life. Elsa Dietrich is the idealized object of Bauman and other male characters’ sexual and romantic fantasies, most notable for her red dress and her orange blossom perfume. But she’s also brave, decent, resourceful, and reminiscent of other notable heroines authored by men, from Cervantes’ Dulcinea to Shakespeare’s Beatrice to Styron’s Sophie.

The Requisitions asks what you and your friends and neighbors would do if the Nazis invaded. It answers with devastating candor, based on what did happen: Faced with the prospect of torture and death, many of us would work for and with Nazis, hand over our neighbors and even our children in a desperate bid to slake their bloodlust, or perish. Some of us would be killed even after becoming Nazis ourselves; others would die bravely. But many would die, spiritually or literally or both. According value and meaning only to some lives renders all life cheap.

Lopez-Barrantes’ characters believe, as many do and arguably must, in courageous resistance and dying with honor. But the novel, and history itself, calls this into question. As Philip Larkin wrote, “Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others. Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood.” Or as Viktor wonders in a fit of self-loathing, “What use is philosophy in the face of death squads? What can Voltaire or Mary Shelley say to explain the Luftwaffe strafing columns of refugees outside town?” It’s impossible to read these sentences without picturing Gazan academics witnessing their universities razed and their friends and family members killed.

In The Requisitions as in life, the Nazis are the bad guys. Lopez-Barrantes gives us chillingly sadistic characters like Major Ulrich Brandt, who gets a half-gratifying comeuppance in the end, and Carl Becker, who, having brutalized and estranged his fiancée Elsa, tells himself that he “isn’t a bad person, he just did a bad thing.” Carl believes in a happy post-war future with Elsa, one he is increasingly unlikely to experience as the novel progresses. He is not a pleasant character — addicted to vodka and amphetamines, he is violent, rageful, jealous, and self-justifying — but he is, in many ways, a pitiable character. No one’s motives are pure. It’s easy to imagine being victimized by a Nazi, but Lopez-Barrantes also forces us to imagine being a Nazi: the reluctance to do what you know is wrong, the moral and physical degradation, and the intoxicating pleasure of power, the once-in-a-lifetime freedom to indulge one’s basest impulses with impunity.

The novel confronts both the horrors of fascism and the sickening flexibility of the human mind. We all want to believe that what we are doing is, if not right, then at least necessary and unavoidable. “I might have blood on my hands, but history will forgive me,” says one young and morally compromised character. He is almost pleading. The Requisitions is unflinching about and yet understanding of the harm people are capable of when they are or feel threatened: the looting and shooting; the spying and lying; the rape and torture. The willingness to betray any person or principle to save one’s skin; the rebranding of cravenness as caution and sound judgment. This is who we humans are, Lopez-Barrantes seems to be saying, and yet, in the words of the novel’s narrator, “to explain is not to excuse and to understand is not to forgive.”

Even the gallant and sympathetic Viktor is horrified by the dormant impulses his antagonists awaken in him. When his neighbor, a frail older woman, barges into his apartment and threatens to report him for possessing banned books, he has “an urge to send her tumbling to the floor.” Eventually he grabs her by the waist, drags her to the door, and ejects her from his home. As she “writhes and meows in exaggerated pain,” trying to escape his grip, “something intoxicating and infectious” overcomes him — “a dreaded fury he’s only ever read about in books.” He longs to “wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze the life out of her.” The thought “terrifies” him. He pulls back his fist and “at the last moment, punches the wall instead of Mrs. Eberhardt’s horrified face.”

Mrs. Eberhardt is a vile enough character that some readers may find themselves wishing Viktor had shown less restraint. Our bifurcated nature is revealed in both these characters and our reactions to them. Are we the civilized, nonviolent, rational actors most of us believe we are or the savage brutes we must constantly seek to suppress?

In spite of its grim subject matter, The Requisitions is a strangely and luminously hopeful novel. It reminds us that we possess the will not merely to survive, but to experience anew the joy and pleasure and laughter and love that make life worthwhile, even after the worst atrocities imaginable. “Your youthful optimism will get us killed . . . . Nazis on our doorstep and you’re speaking like a theorist,” says Viktor’s friend Martin at the book’s beginning. Then he demands, “What does an optimist have to say about the SS and the Death’s Head?” Viktor urges his friend to have some faith. “We’re still drinking coffee, aren’t we?” he replies, adding, “And tomorrow we’ll drink again.” He is wrong — he should have fled Łódź when he had the chance — and also right: There is always a tomorrow for someone, somewhere. And most of us will drink again.

“We need reminders of what is beautiful, now more than ever,” Viktor’s friend Rachel says early in the novel, encouraging him to finish an essay he is struggling to write. By the book’s end, Viktor, Rachel, and everyone they know has suffered immensely. Some have been killed. Yet Viktor continues to draw comfort from books and dreams and memories. He lovingly recalls “literature’s promise of elsewhere, of somewhere far beyond the ghetto wall.” After three years of appalling conditions, Viktor expects, and may be planning for, his life to end. But he still feels “lucky to have once felt alive, to have been in love, to have understood the meaning of true friendship.

Preparing for what may be his final night, Viktor is visited by a reassuring thought:

. . . much like total happiness is unattainable, so too is its antithesis, for even here in the ghetto, some thing still inspires him to believe in the future of a possibility. And how trivial it all seems now, to be afraid of life and death — to worry — when even tonight, Viktor can close his eyes and experience the ocean and the sound of beach waves and a summer sun reflecting off the shore.

It’s impossible to know how common such sentiments were among those who starved to death in the Łódź Ghetto or suffocated under rubble in Gaza. But I hope it’s not as improbable as it seems.

Raina Lipsitz is the author of The Rise of a New Left. Her work has appeared in The Appeal, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic.