The Use of Principles: On Aleksandar Tišma’s Novi Sad Trilogy

Bleak is the most common word to describe the writings of Aleksandar Tišma. His Novi Sad trilogy – The Book of Blam (1972), The Use of Man (1980), Kapo (1987) – is considered, ‘hopeless’, ‘relentless’, ‘without respite’. It takes as its subject the Holocaust, and more importantly the afterlife of such an event. Tišma’s clever twist, what sets his novels apart, is his attempt to display multiple levels of guilt and suffering across his trilogy. Trilogy is some ways a misnomer. These novels really form more of a triptych, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment put into to prose, all images of salvation meticulously chipped off.

Each of the novels explores a particular level of guilt. The first, The Book of Blam, describes one Miroslav Blam, who is impossibly innocent. He has survived World War II without dobbing in his neighbours, betraying his people, or even killing a Nazi. He has been spared persecution because although he is ethnically Jewish, he has converted, quite circumstantially, to Christianity. In the second and best volume, The Use of Man, Tišma explores varying levels of guilt across several characters. These are characters who are victims of the war, but who have betrayed or abandoned others in the mess of conflict. Finally, in Kapo, Tišma singles out a source of guilt that is truly exceptional. You might think that the figure here would be a Nazi officer. Tišma’s insight and cruelty runs deeper than this.  Instead, he chooses a Kapo, a Jewish concentration camp guard, a figure of betrayal and self-loathing This is the source of his bleakness: suffering does not equate with righteousness, the just will not be vindicated. 

Guilt, then, is the watch word for these novels. And what they track is not just the horror of the camps. All the books occur, mostly, after the holocaust. Compare this with Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel, whose books are so often located within the camps. Tišma wants to track the effects of these horrors, of how a life is shattered and decomposed after the war. In this sense the horrors of the holocaust cannot be surmounted, to go on living would be to not going on living at all.

There is much in Tišma to recommend this reading. Vera Kroner, the protagonist (if there is one) of The Use of Man survives untold abuse in a concentration camp. She survives only because she is selected to become part of a haram, raped and abuse by the camp’s commanding officer. She lives on later, in a state of almost constant dissociation. She returns home and enters her house with the feeling she was “entering yet another cemetery.” She strikes up relationships with men, but they are all meaningless. She is empty. There is almost a moment of redemption when Sredoje Lazukić, –the “anti-hero” of the book and Vera’s childhood friend – returns to Novi Sad and Vera takes up with him, and for awhile they almost happy.

Tišma cannot be read in the same vein as writers like Wiesel. Innocent cannot be afforded to anyone, even the war’s heroes. For Tišma the rot is in all of humanity, his books plunge us into the murky moral and psychological depths of these years. This is the central reason his books are described as bleak. Take, for example,  Sredoje. He should, in theory, be a war hero. He was a member of the partisans and shot a prominent Nazi officer. However, Sredoje’s story begins with his trip from Novi Sad to Belgrade. There in occupied Belgrade and hiding from the horrors of the war he becomes a police officer – i.e. a Nazi collaborator - and uses his power to coerce prostitutes into sleeping with him. Tišma does not want his readers to miss the accusation here, and Sredoje is described at one point as a “rapist.”

Sredoje joins the partisans almost by chance, not principle. Friendly with the Nazis in Belgrade, he is taken by his commanding officer to a cabin. There the commanding officer tries to become intimate with Sredoje. Panicking, he shots the officer and must flee. In the wilderness he stumbles across the partisans, only joining the resistance when he can no longer take refugee with his conquerors.  The man of action is the man without principles.

Sredoje’s role is in part to complicated postwar understandings of guilt. Here is a man, committer of ordinary, horrible crimes, a traitor, but also someone who shots fascists and helps liberate Yugoslavia. Much ink has been split on the sudden emergence of resistors after the war. Everyone, it turns out, wasn’t really for the Nazis. Picking at the scabs of guilt, searching for the ultimate victim is unproductive in the extreme, as Hannah Arendt was keen to point in her 1945 essay Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility: “Where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged.” More important than who is guilty, Arendt argues, is the question of how such situations emerge. In staging the vicissitudes of guilt Tišma is making this category more ambivalent, making the depiction of the holocaust more complicated. For this to work one must be brought into the deep psychological life of those who commit acts of extermination, cowardice, and foolishness alike.

Literature is perverse. To portray evil well is to portray an evil that is complex, compelling, and human. Vladmir Nabokov and J.M. Coetzee are two masters of such perverse literature. Reading Lolita is horrifying, horrifying because you are compelled. Coetzee takes a more metafictional approach to this issue in Elizabeth Costello. In one scene, the titular protagonist discusses the ethical limits of writing. She is repulsed by a book, Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. This book tells the story of Hitler and the July plot, Claus Stauffenberg’s infamous attempt to assassinate Hitler. Costello objects to the depiction of the execution of the plotters, presented in detail: “in representing the workings of evil, the writer may unwittingly make evil seems attractive and thereby do more harm than good.” As Jacqueline Rose points out in her essay “The Body of Evil”, this argument of Elizabeth Costello the character is undermined by Elizabeth Costello the book, which itself describes horrific scenes of animal slaughter, sexual violence and the holocaust.  Any book concerned with atrocity is a double-edged sword, necessary to imagine the worst, but erasing our innocence and potentially corrupting us.  A compelling portrait of the awful brings us closer to the awful. What shocks us about Tišma is that he takes this principle to its limit.

There is, however, a crucial question in the background. This question concerns the very crafting of the text itself. To begin such explorations already entails a well-drawn moral line. Underpinning the muddy picture of morality and its vicissitudes such authors present is a clear sense of moral clarity. Evil is a problem precisely because we can tell right from wrong; the problem then becomes why do we not exercise this clarity more often.

Yet Tišma’s novels also appear to wage war on principles themselves. We have seen this in the trajectory of Sredoje. It is important to note that what makes Tišma bleak is not just the depiction of horrible things – plenty of writers are bleak, depict bleak things – but his relentless undermining of principles. The Book of Blam, for example, relentlessly undermines the possibility of innocence. To be innocent after the Shoah is untenable.

The Book of Blam might be taken as a word against passive resistance, a suggestion that Tišma is straight forwardly pro-partisan. Yet the character of Sredoje already explodes this myth. So too does Gerhard Kroner, Vera Kroner’s brother. He joins the resistance, but this cannot be separated from his desire to kill. The return of Sep Lenhart to Novi Sad, who has been fighting for the Nazis in Russia, offers Gerhard the chance to assassinate a war criminal. But Gerhard’s desire to kill his enemy is also, in part, driven by his envy of Sep’s bloodlust. Everyone is compromised.

Robert Kroner the father of Vera and Gerhard, is trying to keep his head down. In arguments with Gerhard he insists that he is just a civilian. Kroner is a well-educated, enlightened figure. He speaks of Sigmund Freud, of Goethe, Schiller, reads Arthur Schnitzler and Lion Feuchtwanger. Yet all his education offers him nothing, he is incapable of action. He might not be able to fight – not everyone can join the resistance – but is also unwilling to flee. Just as his son Gerhard urges him to fight, Vera urges him to flee. She is shocked to discover he knows which countries his family might have the best chance to succeed in, but refuses to truly consider the idea, revealing that “what lay behind the appearance of reasoned argument [was] the dispiritedness of old age.”

Then there is Milinko Božić. In the beginning of the novel Vera and Milinko are lovers. Bookish and noble, spirited and confident, Milinko is the character with the most heroic qualities. Tišma is somewhat mocking of him, describing him as having “become convinced that diligence and honesty made one worthy of everything.” He joins the partisans enthusiastically, not reluctantly like Sredoje. His fate for his heroism is to die. His limbs are rendered from him by a mine, and he is put down by hospital staff.

There is one objection to all the unrelenting misery in Tišma’s Novi Sad trilogy. This is that in the act of writing the book himself he is offering some kind of restitution. It is true that this is a performative contradiction if and only if it is correct to say that Tišma is a pessimist who truly believes his own disparaging of the bookish figures of Robert and Milinko. Yet in Tišma there is a belief in something like justice, in the value of all these things. This becomes clear in Kapo, which ends on a small but significant act of mercy and literary justice.

Kapo is the final volume in the Novi Sad trilogy and was sold to me as “the bleakest volume of them all.” It is the inverse of The Book of Blam. Blam is totally innocent, but the protagonist of Kapo, Lamian, has betrayed his own people. He has gone from persecuted to persecutor. Kapo is his story, and we spend a lot of time in Lamian’s mind. With are there with his guilt, his memories, his reminiscences. He tries to kill himself multiple times, but mostly he fantasizes about it. He is another survivor, one who did anything to survive. And he is a self-hating Jew, whose inner psyche has been corrupted by antisemitism.

The plot of Kapo is not gruesome, but perverse. Tišma knows this. When Lamian was a Kapo, he used his powers to coerce female inmates to sleep with him. The whole spectacle is not one of pure force; it would almost be better if it was. He tells these girls, naked and crying: “if you want to eat, you have to come here and sit with me on the bench and kiss me. For every kiss you get a bite of bread and butter with ham on it, and a sip of warm milk. Want some?” This coy, clownish behaviour makes him, in a single moment, both pathetic and sinister. A heightening effect mere brutality cannot emulate.

Lamian focuses in on one particular girl from his days as a Kapo: Helena Lifka. He discovers one day, reading the paper long after the war, that Lifka is alive. He wants to see her. He has been living in his head for decades and cannot forgive himself. Only another can forgive him. The perversity of the plotline is that we know such an encounter would be horrific for Lifka. And we know that Lamian cannot be forgiven, not really. His seeking forgiveness is evidence that he is not worthy of it.

The novels then oscillates between the darkest possible will they won’t they plotline – it is well known romance sheered of mutual interest is criminal – and Lamian’s memories of his own antisemitism, betrayal and self-abuse. This is bleak, indeed. Our interest in seeing if Lamian will achieve his goal pulls the reader through Lamian’s reminisces of the Balkans right before World War II, of increasingly extreme antisemitism; street thugs and bullies evolve into murders while we wait to see how Lamian’s perverse plot unfolds.

Lamian goes to Zagreb, where he believes Lifka lives. He equivocates. Makes passes at the house. Again, this is romance from the abyss; who amongst hasn’t agonised over a call to a crush or a lover, spent too long on the perfect message, got cold feet the first, even the second time? Lamian summons his courage, rings the doorbell. Helena Lifka does not answer. Bewilderment ensues. The woman at the door patiently explains that Helena has recently died. Lamian refuses to believe her at first.  The host is Julia Milćec, Helena’s cousin. She informs Lamian that Helena died of cancer, that “she suffered terribly.” Julia has survived the war in ignorance, Lamian’s announcement that he was a Kapo is wasted on her. The confession has failed and Lamian finds himself weak, unable to stand. Julia offers him to stay awhile as she heads out to do some shopping.  He wishes to sit in the chair forever, to shield himself from the outside world, “only here was he safe, hidden, even if only for a short time, until the next moment, just as he had been safe in the toolshed at Auschwitz.” The book ends with a great nothing, an anticlimax. Lamian is the same, and he has not found his redemption. The final moments of the book do not give up all the perversity and bleakness that has lead us to this point.

There is, however, a justice to this closing scene. The fact that Helena Lifka has died means she passes without enduring a final torment. It is a small mercy, and although Tišma makes it clear that Helena has not survived unscathed – how could she have – this small mercy makes all the difference. It would have been infinitely more cruel to these characters to stage this confrontation and infinitely more cruel to us readers to end such a novel with an impossible and undeserved redemption.

There is, throughout Tišma’s novels, an instability to his pessimism. Robert from the Use of Man believes in the arc of justice. He dies at the start of the war. Yet he is right, the Nazis will be defeated, the camps liberated. As any theorist of moral progress will tell you, moments of regression are not enough to displace progress in general. Or consider Milinko. His moral certitude leads to a horrific death. Yet there can be no end to the war without the sacrifices of those like Milinko.

The very ground upon which Tišma’s novels take place is one in which things can and do get better, in which justice and goodness are possible. Just as, in Nabokov or Coetzee the moral confusion in their characters and novels is dependent itself on a moral clarity – of the author, of the audience – or at the very least a hope of obtaining one, so too Tišma’s unrelenting bleakness betrays a principle, a faith in justice. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Tišma would have written these novels at all if this were not the case. For they go out in the world to tell us of guilt and catastrophe, and in doing so they guard against its return. That a levee breaks does not mean one should not build them. Principles might not be enough to save you, but they might just be enough to save us.