The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat by Grete WeilD. Quentin Miller
Grete Weil. Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat. Trans. John Barret T. Godine, 1997. 160 pp. $22.95.
This troubled and affecting novel examines the psychological damage suffered by a German correspondent who lives in Amsterdam during the Nazi regime. Although Andreas’s journey to Amsterdam is an attempt to escape the horrors of his country, he ends up confronting his identity there more profoundly than he might have done at home. Caught between his belief “in the necessity of bearing witness” to the fate of concentration camp victims and his difficult status as a citizen of the Third Reich, Andreas feels increasingly lost and confused amidst Amsterdam’s canals. Without thinking through the consequences of his actions, he risks his life to take up the cause of the Jews, harboring some so that they can avoid the Beethoven Straat Trolley which transports them eastward, in the direction of death.
Weil’s ability to disorient the reader to reflect Andreas’s state of mind is masterful. Like him, we are caught in a Kafkaesque maze, and we share his very real sense of lurking danger coupled with the desire to do what little good he can. His dilemma is at once moral and practical: “Doing nothing can be more evil than doing something, but what should he have done?” His need to do what is right leads him on a quest to rescue an imprisoned Jew named Daniel, a boy who seems his double. This search for a missing part of himself reinforces his state of fragmentation “into seeing eyes, hearing ears, a beating heart, twitching nerves, and blood that was running out drop by drop.” In spare, poignant vignettes, the author enables us to inhabit Andreas’s world, appealing to our historical conscience and to our shared sense of the pain of the Holocaust with the emotional force of a visit to a concentration camp. [D. Quentin Miller]