Fascists lie dreaming: Exploring two fictional takes on one of the 20th century's great evils

I was going to start this post by discussing how much my joy of travel is bound up with discovering new books. But a more honest approach might be to ask why so many middle aged men ease into being so interested in military history, particularly WWII.

There is no judgement here, it’s just an observation, and one that I would not say directly applies to me. I am more of a general history buff. That said, I am very partial to a good war movie (always have been) and have come to enjoy perceptive, well written books about WWII, both history (Antony Beevor I am looking at you), and fiction (I am three books off from having read all of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series). And, well… I recognise it’s a slippery slope.

I have thought about this a bit and come to the conclusion that my interest here is the result of two factors. The first is the by no means original observation about the parallels between the history leading up to the WWII and the global situation we find ourselves in today, particularly the nature of far right movements and their seemingly unstoppable growth in influence. The second is bound up in what is, I admit, a rather fruitless attempt to try and connect with the memory of my late father, a WWII veteran, who I never talked very much to while he was alive.

Anyway, I recently spent five weeks in Europe, one of the highlights of which was a couple of weeks in Germany. Coming from Australia, a country where, on the whole, we don’t even like to acknowledge our racist history, I was deeply impressed by how hard Germany has worked to publicly face up to its past (notwithstanding the fact that they also have an increasingly vocal far right movement, which is a whole other matter). Amongst many other things, I also had the chance to learn much more about the country’s history, including in the 1930s and 1940s. As part of this, I also read two excellent books that dealt with the nature and rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the war, and the conflict’s prolonged, complicated aftermath.

The first was The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by French journalist and essayist Olivier Guez, published by Verso in 2022 (and translated from the French by Georgia de Chamberet)

A German SS officer and physician, Mengele was nicknamed ‘the Angel of Death’. He performed a series of truly horrific experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II- Birkenau concentration camp, activities which by all accounts he conducted with nightmarish relish and a sort of good humoured whistle while you work ethic. He was one of the doctors responsible for administrating Zyklon B cyanide gas to the camp’s Jewish inmates. He was also particularly fond of conducting medical experiments on twins.

Assisted by a network of Nazi sympathisers and former SS members, Mengele managed to flee to Argentina in July 1949. He lived in Buenos Aires, then Paraguay and Brazil, each move undertaken to evade those who had started to search for him: Mossad, which had him lined up as their next big scalp after Adolf Eichmann, who they snatched in Argentina in 1960; the West German authorities; the media - Mengele’s fugitive status was something of a tabloid fascination from the 1960s onwards, as awareness of what had occurred during the Holocaust spread beyond Europe; the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and the various freelance bounty hunters who thought they could make a quid by capturing the old fascist. He remained at large and eventually drowned in 1979 while suffering a stroke off the coast of Bertioga in the state of São Paulo in Brazil.

You can get all that from Wikipedia. Despite his extensive research, as Guez says in his short afterward to the book: ‘Certain shadowy areas will probably never be illuminated. Only the genre of narrative nonfiction has allowed me to get close to the macabre journey of the Nazi doctor.’

Guez’s tries and piece together Mengele’s life from the point at which he landed in Argentina onwards, in the process also illuminating a pretty nasty slice of post war politics. It is not so much the character of Mengele that makes this book interesting. He starts and finishes the story as a vicious, self-entitled, arrogant, absolutely unrepentant Nazi fanatic, never reconciled with Germany’s defeat or his own declining circumstances.

What’s fascinating are the forces that enabled Mengele to remain free until his death. These include an extensive network of sympathises in the Catholic church, the large network of Nazi fugitives already in Latin America, and the covert assistance of his family in Germany, who ran a very successful farm equipment business. He was also helped by authoritarian regimes in Latin America, including that of Juan Perón.

The 35th President of Argentina from 1946 to his overthrow in 1955 (and again as the 45th President from October 1973 to his death in July 1974), Perón was revered by many as a moderniser and friend of Argentina’s working class. But he was also a ruthless autocrat and an anti-semite, who believed that atomic war between the Soviet Union and the United States was only a matter of time and that with careful planning Argentina could replace them as a world superpower. That careful planning included offering safe haven for Nazis, in return for ransacking their technological and economic prowess in everything from hydropower to rocket technology and even nuclear power, so Argentina could leap frog several decades of development.

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is a beautifully written book that illuminates some very dark and under examined corners of post-WWII history.

The second book I wanted to pull on your coats about was the 2014 speculative noir A Man Lies Dreaming, by Lavie Tidhar.

Set in 1939, A Man Lies Dreaming takes as its starting point that Germany’s communist party won 1933 election, after which the Nazis were crushed. War is brewing between the newly enlarged Soviet Bloc and the West, and the surviving Nazi leadership have been scattered, many of them finding their way to the United Kingdom, where Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists is on the cusp of seizing electoral power.

Among these Nazi fugitives is Hitler, or Wolf, as he is referred to in the book (one of his real life pseudonyms in the 1920s). Barely making a living as a down at heel private detective, working out of a dingy office in Soho, Wolf is forced to take a case for Isabella Rubinstein, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. The family have paid to have Rubinstein’s younger sister smuggled out of communist Germany, but she has gone missing. Given ex-Nazis run Europe’s people smuggling racket, she figures that Wolf will have an inside track on finding out what happened to her.

The investigation sees Wolf rub shoulders with various members of the former Nazi movement, encounters laced with grim black humour: his former deputy, Rudolf Hess, now working as a functionary for Moseley, Klaus Barbie, a corrupt people smuggler, and Triumph of the Will director, Leni Riefenstahl, who has gone on to make it big in Hollywood. Tidhar also throws various other historical figures into the mix: Ian Fleming, Israeli pulp writer Ka Tzetnik, whose salacious 1955 pseudo memoir House of Dolls arguably kick started Nazisploitation, and IIse Koch, aka the ‘Beast of Buchenwald’, a real life sadistic female concentration camp warder and the inspiration for the 1967 exploitation film, Ilse She Wolf of the SS, among many others.

Tidhar paints Wolf as an unrepentant Nazi, haunted by past glories and angry at having to deal with people as equals who he would must rather be dispatching to a death camp. He is also a dogged investigator, good with his fists and has a penchant for sado masochistic sex (which, by all accounts Hitler exhibited in real life).

As befits the mould of classic hard boiled PI fiction from which the plot is drawn, the case sees Wolf getting deeper and deeper into events beyond his control. At the same time as working for Rubinstein he takes a job for Mosely to try and find out who is behind assassination attempts on the fascist leader. Someone is also murdering Soho prostitutes, carving swastikas on them, crimes which the police are trying to pin on Wolf.

Intertwined with Wolf’s activities is a parallel plot line about a Jewish pulp writer Shomer, languishing in the hell of a Nazi concentration camp. It would be spoiling things to say too much more, save for the fact that the two strands merge in a intriguing way and innovative way.

Tidhar was born in Israel and currently lives in London, but has also spent time in South Africa, Laos and Vanuatu. He has published over a dozen books, across various genres, and edited various anthologies, but I had not even heard of him until he was recommended by my friend and one of the editors of the editors at the wonderful online German magazine, Culturmag, Alf Mayer.

Its early days in my encounter with Tidhar’s work so I cannot speak with too much authority, but the themes in A Man Lies Dreaming, the blending of speculative fiction and real historical facts to examine Israeli identity and critique the country’s politics and its position in the Middle East, appears to run through much of his work. Unholy Land (2018), which I also ready while I was in Europe, see an unsuccessful pulp crime writer, Tiroshi (Tidhar seems somewhat obsessed pulp culture, another reason to like his work), leaves his home in Berlin to visit his sick father in Palestinia, the Jewish state nestled between Uganda and Kenya (East African was floated as early as 1900 as a possible location for a Jewish state).

No sooner has he arrived in Palestinia, in this alternative world the product of an international movement of Jews before the rise of the Nazis, than he becomes bound up in the search for his niece, an anti-government activist, fiercely opposed to the construction of a giant wall to keep the Africans masses at bay. The story also takes in time travel, the unreliability of memory, and the problems when different people trying to share the same land, as well as numerous parallels to what is going on in real life Israel and a critique of that state’s dominant politics vis-à-vis the Arab world and particularly the Palestinians.

Suffice to say, I will be seeking out a lot more of Tidhar’s work.

A note about paying for this Substack

As I foreshadowed in my last post, I have turned on the option to pay for my Substack. But I want reiterate that the option to get Pulp Curry for free will ALWAYS continue.

I have made this decision only because several people have offered to pay, which I very deeply appreciate. But - and I mean this very seriously - it is not the point of what I am doing here. I started this newsletter because I want to write about stuff I am interested in and I want you to read it and engage with me. I also want to sell my books and those of people I support. If I can make a few bucks on the side through paying readers, that’s a bonus, but it is not the main game.

Catch you next time.