A Nazi in North Africa

A review of Boualem Sansal's 'The German Mujahid'

Gerhard Richter, Fleugzeug II. 1966

The German Mujahid / Le village d'allemand

French Edition: Gallimard, 2008

English Edition: Europa Editions, 2009

Niveau de français: Medium

---

Rio, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Rome, Ohio—these are just a few of the places where former Nazis found refuge in the aftermath of WWII. Some fled, but many were smuggled out, aided by underground networks of sympathizers and fellow Nazis, who provided shelter, escape routes, money, and forged papers. When they reached their port of call, many were welcomed by an astonishingly diverse array of high-ranking religious and political officials, including Alois Hudal, a Vatican bishop, Francisco Franco, Juan Péron, and Colonel Gamel Abdel Nassar, the revolutionary leader of Egypt, who recruited Wehrmacht officers to train the newly formed Egyptian army that would later go on to fight Israel in the Six-Day War.

Stories of Nazi escape are often eerily similar to the stories of Jews who attempted to flee or hide during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Otto Wächter, for instance, was a high-ranking SS officer who, in his capacity as mayor of Krakòw in occupied Poland, was responsible for the deaths of over half a million Jews. Pursued for war crimes, in 1945 he took the infamous 'ratline' across the Alps and over the border into northern Italy. In a terrific review of a book on the subject, the historian David Motadel writes that, "Wächter escaped into the Austrian Alps, where he hid for almost four years in secluded mountain huts, barns, and farms, never staying in one place for more than a few days." It would have been an extraordinary tale of courage and survival—one worthy of a film, even—if Wächter had been a Jew.

But what if Wächter, or someone like him, had instead fled to North Africa and converted to Islam? This is the premise of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal's The German Mujahid, a novel based on the true story of a German 'sheikh' whom Sansal came across in the 1980s while working as an engineer for the Algerian government.¹ After WWII, the 'sheikh', who had in fact been an officer in the SS, fled to Egypt, where he was recruited by the army to train new officers. In the fifties, he was sent by Nasser's secret services to join the ALN, the guerrilla army in Algeria, which was then in the midst of a brutal war for independence with French colonial forces.

In The German Mujahid, the German sheikh is named Hans Schiller, and the story is told from the alternating perspectives of his two sons, Rachel and Malrich, who are fictional creations of the author. The story begins at the end, with the suicide of Rachel, whose life is destroyed by his meticulous unraveling of his father's crimes. It's an extremely disturbing scene, an awful doubling of the sort found everywhere in this story and its larger history. (See also: ratlines.) Here's how Malrich, the younger brother, describes it:

He was wearing a funny set of pajamas, striped pajamas that I didn't recognize and his head was shaven carelessly, like a prisoner's.

The expression of guilt could not be more literal; Rachel has made himself into an inmate of the death camps where his father worked as a chemical engineer, helping to determine the precise amount of poison gas necessary to kill large numbers of people in a chamber, given variables like volume, lung capacity, and ambient temperature.² In Rachel's diary, he describes his quest as an attempt to, "approach the reality of a deportee and see just how father my father went."

Following the trail of his father's life, Rachel travels first to his parent's village in rural Algeria, and then to Frankfurt, Turkey, Cairo, and, finally, to Auschwitz, where, armed with his terrible secret, he meets a Jewish Slovakian Holocaust survivor. It's a wonderfully dramatic scene—in his quest for the truth, Rachel has become a kind of secret agent, extracting intelligence from those who can provide a glimpse of the life his father led before Rachel's own life began. When Rachel asks if the old woman was interned at Birkenau, she blushes with embarrassment: It was her sister who was at Birkenau, while she herself was at Buchenwald, with her parents. I was very moved by this unconscious admission of shame, by the survivor's guilt that extended across half a century to bring the blood to this old woman's cheeks. What a contrast with the life of Hans Schiller.

And yet, not with his death. The German Mujahid follows three separate threads: The investigation of Rachel into the truth of his father's Nazi past, the investigation of Malrich, the younger brother, into the cause of Rachel's suicide, and the attempt by both brothers to determine who was responsible for the murder of their parents during a brutal massacre in Aïn Deb, the small Algerian village that gives the novel its French title.

It is 1994, and Algeria is in the midst of a terrible civil war between the Algerian army, which controls urban areas and the state apparatus, and an Islamic guerilla army that terrorizes the inhabitants of the maquis, or countryside, especially those who are not Muslim. Sansal himself is Berber, part of a large indigenous population in Algeria with its own language and culture, separate from the both the Arabophone and Francophone worlds that have dominated the country for the past two centuries.³ Much of his fiction is a concerted attack on the sclerotic, corrupt military officials who currently run the country in a kind of a devil's bargain with the same Islamic militants who murdered tens of thousands of civilians during what is known as la decennie noir, or 'the Black Decade'. In Algeria, there are Otto Wächters everywhere, only they have no need to flee.⁴

There is a danger here, admittedly. In staying faithful to the history behind the book, I think I've given the impression that it is unrelentingly serious, or that Sansal is a political writer, rather than someone concerned with creating imaginative work. But the novel is, by turns, funny, absurd, black, moving, and often heartwrenching. It's also very, very dark. Yet I think Sansal is interesting in part because he is a strong novelist, a brilliant stylist, and someone with a political axe to grind. Again and again, he makes explicit connections between Nazi barbarism and the totalitarian attitudes of what he calls the barbus, a very French insult that refers to the long beards that Muslim extremists are famous for.⁵ 2084: The End of the World, is a dystopian reimagining of Orwell's 1984, set in an Islamic totalitarian state. In interviews, Sansal frequently warns that France is 'heading the way' of Arab countries like Algeria and Egypt.

In November, Sansal was charged with spying and arrested in Algiers, where the 75-year-old is still being held. His arrest is part of a broader crackdown across Algeria on free expression. Ever since the intense but short-lived Hirak liberation movement in 2019—the protests were shut down by the government during COVID—the Algerian government, fearful of another popular uprising, has begun arresting journalists, writers, and activists.

In March of last year, the Algerian government passed a new law against films that, “are contrary to the Constitution, and to the laws of the Republic,” which is punishable by up to 3 years in prison. Éditions Frantz-Fanon, an Algerian publishing house, was shut down in January for publishing a book about the history of the Jewish people in Algeria. Last fall, Gallimard, the famous French publishing house, was banned from an international book festival in Algiers. Their crime? Publishing the Prix Goncourt-winning Houris, by the Algerian writer and journalist Kamel Daoud, a novel written from the perspective of a young woman whose family was slaughtered by Islamic militants during the Algerian civil war.

In Algeria, it is illegal to evoke the civil war, and the diverse anti-colonial roots of the Algerian independence movement, which encompassed communists and activists like Frantz Fanon, are being steadily effaced in favor of the contributions by what Sansal calls les islamistes. In Algeria, history is being rewritten while it’s being repressed; it’s important to remember that, under totalitarian regimes, these two processes operate simultaneously, and in concert with one another.

All of which is to say: Sansal has a point. Yet when The German Mujahid drags, it does so because of the limits of the comparison between the Nazis and the French barbus. The weakest sections of the novel takes place in the cité, a kind of ghetto in the Parisien suburbs, outside the péripherique. Malrich, who lives in a small apartment with his mother's brother and his wife, is outraged after Nadia, a local girl, is found dead:

We learned that the girl had been assaulted by a barbu, a youth from Building 11, a rising star, reputed for his travels in Kabul, London, and Algiers, which gave him the title of 'Allah's Eradicator'.

Along with a motley crew of his teenage friends, Malrich plots vengeance on Nadia's killer, and the corrupt system of lawyers, emirs, and imams who protect him, just like the sympathizers who provided safe haven for the Nazis. The comparison is not subtle:

Les barbus were in their mosque hatching plans and their kapos scanned the camp from east to west, observing people in the way that we would observe useless prisoners.

Malrich is still a very young man at the time of the murder, yet the obsessiveness and explicitness of the comparison feels more like it's coming from Sansal than Malrich. (Earlier in the novel, Malrich admits that he had not heard of the Holocaust until he read his brother's diary.) Sansal, however, doesn't seem to quite know what to do with this thread; Malrich is later convinced to back down by a local cop, and let justice take its course.

The issue is that the killing of Nadia feels a bit cheap in comparison to the book’s in-depth examination of the Holocaust, almost as if she was one of those disposable victims in an episode of Law and Order: SVU. Malrich is supposed to be the wayward younger brother, quick with a joke, a bit aimless in comparison to his high-flying older brother, who works at a large, soulless multinational. Yet Malrich takes the same things seriously that Sansal does. With Rachel, the overlap matters less because Rachel as a character is much more like Sansal—both Sansal, a former engineer, and Rachel, a corporate drone, have an intimate understanding of the ways in which rationality can be used to cover a vicious need to dominate and consume. The skills that they've developed can be used with equal efficacy for good or ill.

What is the difference between the Nazis and the barbus? I think it is mostly a matter of power and class. In David Motadel's article, which I mentioned earlier, he has a very interesting passage about the men who would go on to become high-ranking Nazi officials:

Born around the turn of the century, these men were too young to fight in World War I, which made them feel they had been denied the opportunity to prove themselves. They were highly educated (many were lawyers, historians, or philologists), ambitious, elitist, and ideologically radical, sharing a profoundly racist, antidemocratic, anti-Semitic worldview. This picture breaks with both the image of the Nazi perpetrators as primitive, poorly educated, proletarian thugs, as promoted in the early postwar years by conservative writers who wished to distance themselves from their crimes, and that of detached, unpolitical technocrats who, trapped in the structures of a criminal bureaucracy, carried out orders with no feelings of responsibility, as popularized by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

Sansal seems to have been partly seduced by the myth of the proletarian thugs, but the real architects of the Nazi state were ambitious social climbers like Otto Wächter. They were cultured, wealthy, and perfectly secure in their national identity. The same cannot be said for the Muslim minority in France. As portrayed in The German Mujahid, the barbus are much more like an organized crime syndicate, who may be sheiks within the confines of the cité but are far from the real levels of power here.⁶ Nevertheless, the work of Algerian novelists like Boualem Sansal, Kamel Daoud, Tahar Djaout, and Yasmine Khadra has forced me to look at the ways in which Islam contains many stories of conquest, domination, and colonization; is, at heart, a story of the conquests of Mohamed, which was of land and peoples just as much as hearts and minds. Much of this work contains a kind of historical warning to Western readers. As Sansal once pointed out: "We reproach France for having occupied our territory. But have you ever heard Arabs repent for having, in centuries past, occupied Europe?"

His question reminds me of a beautiful passage near the beginning of the novel, when Rachel travels to Aïn Deb to visit the graves of his parents and to see what has become of their home:

The village is nestled in a narrow valley wedged between four bare hills. The first people who settled here clearly had the desire to stay out of sight. This goes back to the beginning of history, of tribes that exhausted themselves fighting ancestral wars. The weak hid themselves away and kept themselves poor to ward off attacks. Or maybe the region prospered and was welcoming for all, only to empty suddenly because of an immense misfortune, a curse, a strange illness, an unnameable mystery. The drought would have followed like a bitter wind, sweeping away any remaining illusions....For those who flee, the idea of refuge is a danger, they see a trap in which it will finish its course.

For Rachel, the land is mystical and ancient, suffused with the memories of his childhood and what he calls le besoin d'éternité, “the desire for eternity”. He feels at once aged and distant, like an old man looking back on his life, and yet it is his childhood friends, still in their 30s, who have changed the most:

They had aged in giant leaps, they were more miserable than it was possible to accept, they were not far from being those bedridden ancestors that we take for a walk in the sun every morning and who come home trembling at nightfall.

Yet those who have survived accept Rachel with real warmth, as well as a fascination with his existence, which must seem as remote and incredible to them as theirs is to him. Wrenched from his previous life by the death of his parents and the discovery of his father's Nazi past, he makes a pilgrimage home, in order to come face to face with his true past and the thin sliver of existence he is still not sure whether to call his own. By confronting death, he is able, at least temporarily, to return to life. "Very quickly," he writes, "I felt peace return to my heart":

My breath slowed, it was a series of inhalations full of courage and of exhalations full of noble renunciation. Each man, each woman that I met had words that put me at ease...'to God we belong, and to God we shall return'...'no one knows when death will come'...'believe in God, he is the life and the resurrection...'Allah will never abandon his own'. In this pious atmosphere, in this place where death had passed through like the wind of the apocalypse, these proverbs resonated strangely within me.

I believe that this is the moment when Rachel decides to pursue his quest to the end, even at the risk of losing himself in a maelstrom of past suffering to which he cannot even directly bear witness. At the heart of this project of memorial reparations, there is a strange kind of envy at work, one that I catch myself harboring from time to time. It is the desire on the part of the rememberer to suffer, because suffering puts one in touch with the 'real', renders one’s identity and life authentic and beyond reproach. When faced with the demands of the present and the uncertainties of the future, suffering is a shelter to which the sufferer can always return. This is why nationalist projects are always built on the memorial of collective suffering, and it is also why they so frequently become a trap. As Kamel Daoud recently wrote, in an editorial for Le Point:

Secretly, we never really want to leave, because it would require us to put behind us the happy times when 'we' suffered together.

Rachel's quest to trace his father's life is driven by more than curiosity about his father's deed; it is also to enter into a time and place when he was not yet his father's son. When he might have instead been someone, anyone else—a Jew, perhaps, in striped pajamas—who might be in a position to absolve him of his father's sin. What Rachel cannot see is that he himself is capable of granting this forgiveness, not on behalf of those his father murdered, but rather on his own behalf. Life is not possible without death, nor forgetting. To forgive is to begin the process of moving on, to prepare oneself for what it is yet to come.

I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe that Boualem Sansal, this gentle yet unapologetically critical 75-year-old, is in a jail cell right now,⁷ a little outside Algiers, for breaking a law that says you cannot criticize the state. He's one of the great stylists of the French language; every book of his that I read is both a workout and a marvel. I haven't seen anyone, at least not among his contemporaries, who writes with such elegance and precision. Even after writing this review, however, I wonder if he will forgive me for my inability to entirely heed his warning, to comprehend the worst of society and of men, for the simple reason that I have not yet been directly faced with it.

In France, Sansal's imprisonment has been met with a troubling silence, and even attacks, from many politicians on the left, who are critical of his views on Islam and his ties to elements of the far-right, as if having different political beliefs should be a punishable offense. Given Sansal’s work on the experience of living in a country where having the wrong political beliefs is, in fact, a punishable offense, it’s a devastating, if predictable, irony. As in the US, in France it is the right that has taken up the cause of free expression,⁸ pairing it with a hostility toward the Arab world and immigrants. I wonder sometimes if Sansal sees himself as a pawn in this game, or if he has simply chosen to side with those are most likely to negotiate his release, or even to smuggle him over his own ratline, if he was given the chance to flee. I often wonder what I would do, if given the same choice. If I learned anything from The German Mujahid, it's that you can never be sure.

1. In Europe, stories like this are everywhere. Just this morning, I came across an article in Le Monde about three men whose fathers were members of the Waffen-SS, part of an astonishing 10,000 Frenchmen and 8,500 Walloons who volunteered to fight for the Germans during WWII. Phillippe Douroux, one of the three men interviewed by Le Monde, is publishing a book about his father’s past, titled Un père ordinaire.

2. There is a terrible but very compelling passage that describes how German engineers struggled with this problem, which often caused costly delays in the killing apparatus. It was more difficult, for instance, to kill people during the long Polish winter, when the cold kept the gas from rising. In an attempt to save their children, Jews trapped in the chamber would often put their children on their shoulders, so that they might avoid breathing in the gas.

3. About one-third of the Algerian population is Berber.

4. Here's an example: Hadj Lakhdar, who was responsible for the killing of 400 children and adults during the civil war, and who lives openly in Western Algeria. According to the well-known Algerian journalist and novelist Kamel Daoud, the political elite, "don't dare to interrogate him in his fiefdom...he benefits from immunity, while being protected by the aura granted him by the Islamic movement in Algeria. Who has the courage to treat him as a criminal? No one. He killed, and it is not a crime. The crime is to speak out about his case."

5. If you’ve been paying attention to the news in Syria, you’ll notice that its new leader, Mohamed al-Joulani, currently sports a clipped beard and a Stetson hat, in the manner of Fidel Castro. But during his days fighting alongside ISIS, he wore a turban and had the long, straggly beard of a classic mujahid—what you might call the Bin Laden model. You can generally guess the editorial line of a publication by which image they choose to include.

6. Although Muslims constitute about 10% of the French population, only 19 of the 577 members of the National Assembly are Muslim. Of those, 12 are women, which leaves just 7 men—hardly a promising start for a French califate.

7. The comments that seem to have landed Sansal in prison were made in an interview with Frontières, a sort of house organ for the far-right Rassemblement National, though I found the interview itself even-handed and enlightening. In the interview, Sansal asserted that Morocco has a valid historical claim to the Western Sahara, which Algeria vigorously disputes. Last year, President Macron also came out in favor of Morocco's claim, and this seems to have been a major cause in the decline of diplomatic relations between France and Algeria. Interestingly, there may be some connection between Macron’s endorsement and the release last month of four French secret agents of the DGSE (the French CIA), who had been held prisoner in Burkina Faso for over a year. The king of Morocco was key to negotiating the deal between the French government and the government of Burkina Faso, and it seems likely that one of Morocco’s conditions was an official decree by President Macron of Morocco’s right to the Western Sahara. Spies are very valuable, but when they are captured in the field, their value is precisely the problem.

8. Just so long, of course, as you don’t criticize Israel.