Bücher
Krystyna
Krystyna. Und die Liebe? frag ich sie
© Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 192 pages
A biographical novel by Liane Dirks
Translation © Laura Radosh
Exposé
He’s 27, she’s in her early 40s.
He is German, she is Polish.
His name is Thomas Harlan (alias Andreas Herking), her name is Krystyna Zywulska. It’s her second name, the one that saved her life, her first name was Sophie.
He grew up among top Nazis. She was a Jew.
While she was smuggling children out of the Warsaw ghetto, his father was making the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß.
She was deported to Auschwitz, he was given a train set by Goebbels.
She was in the resistance and wrote the very first book about Auschwitz, published in English under the titles I Survived Auschwitz and I Came Back.
They fall in love in the late 1950s.
... read on
This love story, and the tragedy it reveals and hides remains untold until Krystyna Zywulska meets the young author Liane Dirks in the 1980s. In Dirks, Zywulska sees the daughter she always wanted and confides her story to her. Suffering from leukemia, Krystyna Zywulska spends months of long nights speaking into the young author’s dictaphone. Passing on her story is an act of closure for the older woman. This survivor’s story, as told by the young German Liane Dirks, is not about guilt or revenge or reconciliation. Mostly, it’s about love. An audacious, tragic, doomed, once-in-a-lifetime love that dances breathlessly on the stage of European history.
Is there love after Auschwitz? the author asks the survivor. This book is the answer.
Change is in the air in Poland when the two meet for the first time in the Warsaw winter of 1956/57. She is Poland’s most renowned satirical writer and needs to catch up on living. He wants to write political plays.
A very unusual love story begins, as if two comets had collided. An obsessive and also political story; together, the two lovers hunt down Nazis.
Unbelievable as their story sometimes is, all of it is true.
A love affair that defies all reason, a project that’s too big for the two of them, a survivor and the child of a Nazi trying to reconcile with the past – bringing them both to their physical and mental limits.
Thomas Harlan is trying to atone for the guilt he feels he has inherited. Krystyna Zywulska wants to see justice done, but more than anything she wants to experience what was taken from her in the ghetto and concentration camp: life. And love. She was enthralled by the young, charismatic man.
Together they planned a book entitled The Fourth Reich.
Their research led them throughout Europe. But the task became larger and ever less manageable. And dangerous, because it was anything but politically expedient.
In the end, all copies of the manuscript will disappear and only some of their research will lead to sentences, many many years later. The young man will choose someone else, Krystyna Zywulska’s marriage will fall apart completely and in the summer of 1968 she will be forced to leave her country. This is the first of the book’s three endings.
The second ending is a recounting of a love scene in Auschwitz. Unlikely, but true, like the entire novel.
The third ending is the author’s almost mundane leavetaking from Krystyna on her deathbed.
Painstakingly researched, this biographical and highly literary novel is based on the recordings of Krystyna’s story made by the author, augmented by letters and independent research. The narration has two strands, the 1980s present of the young German author’s relationship with the older woman and the historical love relationship between the latter and Thomas Harlan.
Review Excerpts
Krystyna. Und die Liebe? frag ich sie was very well received and was on the Südwest-Rundfunk Critics Choice Top Ten list for many months.
Excerpts from only a few 1998 reviews:
Whoever is brave enough to take on such a task must have the precision of a Prussian governess, the discipline of a medieval monk and their lips must be sealed completely, so as not to comment by so much as a whisper.
Liane Dirks [..] might not follow all these rules exactly in her newest work – but she has certainly taken this general direction. (…)
This book comes dangerously close to pathetic melodrama on almost every page, for who can imagine a more foolish infatuation that that of a middle-aged Jew for a crazy young German.
But Dirks is like a tightrope walker. Every time it looks as if she’s sure to fall into the depths of kitsch, she regains her balance at the last second, stays on the rope and turns to run in another direction – gracefully and despite multiple snares. (…)
Liane Dirks is a good story-teller. (…) …You could make a movie out of it, a French nouvelle vague. A film of silences, of reverence and held breath, but without tears.
Andrzej Sczcypiorski, Der Spiegel
[Liane Dirks’] unique telling of this story of impossible love moves us and allows us to understand it. She has thus created a literary monument to Krystyna Zywulska that is without a trace of pathos and nevertheless passionate.
Marta Kijowska, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Liane Dirks’ slim masterwork is more than anything a book about ignoring history. She has captured the 1950s and ‘60s in Germany as precisely as the historical developments in Poland from the Polish October to General Moczar’s anti-Semitic campaign. The play of European history within this book is nothing less than gripping.
Stefan Tolksdorf, Badische Zeitung
If you ask a German author the most difficult scene they could possibly write, it would surely be this one, the love scene in a concentration camp. (…) What’s wonderful about this book is that by the time the reader has reached this point, the scene has lost its pain, its discomfort. It can be told. You might say the whole novel works towards telling this story, a true story, without awkwardness or embarrassment. Liane Dirks has accomplished this and that’s about the highest praise there is.
Hubert Winkels , Kulturzeit 3Sat