The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Götz and Meyer, by David Albahari
reviewed by Mark Axelrod

Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac´. Harcourt, 2005. 168 pp. $23.00.

Götz and Meyer is, as the press release states, “the extraordinary story of the mass murder of Serbia’s Jews in 1942 as told by a teacher whose relatives were among the victims.” But the storyline is only one of several rather compelling things about the novel. The novel begins with the lines “Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them.” As we soon discover, Götz and Meyer are two noncommissioned SS officers whose main job was to transport prisoners from one place to another in a truck, the Belgrade Saurer, ingeniously designed to gas the “passengers” during transport. The narrator, a fictional archeologist of memory, comments on the rather pedestrian lives of Götz and Meyer as they go about their daily task of transporting live bodies from the Belgrade fairgrounds to their ultimate destination: a mass grave somewhere across the Sava River. But what makes the novel compelling isn’t just the storyline, which is told in a wellcontrolled lyricism (with kudos to Ellen Elias-Bursac´), but the fabric of the fiction reads in a manner not unlike a mixture of Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald. Like Bernhard’s structures, Albahari’s structure is seamless. No paragraphs. Sentences that move freely from third person to first and back again with the constant repetition that the narrator can only “imagine” Götz and Meyer or Meyer or Götz. As the narrator states, he knows “the real purpose of the Saurer, and the real meaning of the words transport and load, and the story about the fabled camp in Romania, or Poland. Although when Götz and Meyer are at issue, I must admit I do not know who is who, which makes me, in a sense, more ignorant than those who knew nothing of their names.” The brevity of Götz and Meyer should not belie the lyrical and dynamic prose of the piece or the impact of its content.