Review/Reflection: Skybound by Aleksandr Voinov

Skybound by Aleksandr Voinov had its merits. It's a very short novella (only 44 pages), so the plot was a bit rushed, but the characterisation was solid and the relationship arc was reasonable. It's very lyrically written. However, I also have some reservations about Skybound, if my thoughts are concrete enough to be called that. Maybe a better way of phrasing it is that there are some things that sit uneasily together for me, and which people definitely need to consider when thinking if this book is right for them. 

This is largely because it's set in the last days of World War Two, and is the romance of a German Luftwaffe pilot, Baldur Vogt, and Felix, a mechanic who works on the planes. Felix has admired and loved the flying ace from afar, but after he pulls Vogt from the flaming wreck of his plane, the two develop a friendship with undercurrents of something more. Vogt and Felix escape the airfield for a weekend, only to return to to the realities of the Russian advance on Berlin. 

As much as the central romance itself was well constructed, I think I would have felt a lot easier about the characters and their setting if they had shown more emotional angst. There was some, but it was brief and low-key and I didn't feel it was in proportion with the fact that Felix and Baldur are two gay men (and, later, a gay couple) in Nazi Germany. While they had some concerns about being outed, these were less in, say, The Imitation Game, set in Britain during the same period. Even if the mechanisms of the state had broken down at this point and people were no longer being prosecuted for homosexuality, I feel like 10+ years of living in a toxic, openly homophobic environment would have had an effect on the characters, both in terms of paranoia about being outed and their own acceptance of their sexuality. There is brief mention of the latter with regards to Felix, but by and large, I didn't see this, and I feel a bit uncomfortable about that, like it's an erasure of the Nazi regime's genocidal homophobia. 

The lack of more than low-level fear or angst extends to more aspects of the book as well, particularly the Russians closing in. While this drives the plot in the final scenes of the book, it is very underdeveloped until then, appearing like a bolt out the blue. 

I respect that it's a novella, so it can't include masses of content or suspense-building, but I felt both these areas were pretty essential if you are going to have an M/M romance set in Nazi Germany that uses fear of the Red Army's brutality to move your plot along. 

Voinov puts a lot of effort into painting a picture of the airfield, with details of the Luftwaffe and planes, but there is none of the same effort put into recreating other parts of the society. On some level, I think this was a conscious decision, part of efforts to portray Felix, Baldur and their ilk as citizens and soldiers of Germany and distinguish them from the Nazi establishment. But part of what did make me uncomfortable with the story is that the airfield is presented as a bubble, with little external input or output, even from other military establishments. But focusing on the technical aspects of the planes and not mentioning where Baldur's orders were coming from doesn't change the realities of the situation. 

And this is where my mind gets stuck, because an idealistic part of me wants to believe multiple experiences of the war can exist side-by-side without impinging on each other, but another part also recognises that in order to focus on a story like Felix and Baldur's, a thousand others are pushed out of the frame. Reading Elie Wiesel's Night after I read Skybound, but before I wrote this review, I was reminded that, at the same time that Baldur and Felix took that weekend away with ample food and warmth and petrol, the survivors of concentration camps were being forced to make death marches through snow-covered Poland and Germany ahead of the liberating forces. 

These are all just jumbled thoughts, and I'm not the person to give them any weight or validity, if they're to have any at all. But I do think that maybe 44 pages are insufficient to tackle all the context that needs to be addressed in a romance with a Third Reich setting. I think that would be the case with a heterosexual romance, but it's doubly so with a gay romance.

In the end, I haven't rated Skybound, because I don't feel like my thoughts are enough of a cohesive critique to rate it negatively, but I would also feel uncomfortable giving it a rating that was divorced from them. 

Non-Fiction Review: The Rescuer by Dara Horn

Recommended

Dora Horn's The Rescuer is a short non-fiction piece about the efforts of an American, Varian Fry, to save cultural and intellectual luminaries at risk from the Nazis, either because they were Jewish, dissidents, or both.

Churchill once said that "great and good are seldom the same man", and Horn illustrates his meaning almost perfectly. Varian Fry was a great man, and he worked within a system governed by great people, all the way up to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The people he saved were also great people: Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Andre Breton and Claude Levi-Strauss, to name only a few. But Horn highlights that - no matter how history has recorded these people and their deeds - the term good is sometimes ill-fitting.

Unlike the more familiar story of Oskar Schindler, who, throughout the 1960s, was propped up financially by donations from the people he had saved, those rescued by Fry did not wish to maintain contact with him after the war. Nor did many demonstrate any gratefulness for the immense risk he had undertaken; several even put his operations in danger with their vanity and self-absorption.

And, even though Fry was doing good work and ultimately saved over 2000 people, he was a troubled man, so much so that one of his children still refuses to discuss him. Another ascribes his erratic behaviour to bipolar disorder. As Horn also points out, there is also a certain irony in his position as a Righteous Gentile. He helped people to escape the Nazis' brutal eugenics programmes, but, in order to do so, subjected these people to another form of eugenics; only people making the most important contributions to the "culture of Europe" would be considered. 

As for the statesmen of the American government, they tried to have Fry recalled when his work was no longer in line with their politics (i.e. when they realised they were actually going to have to take in all these people Fry was saving!). When Fry refused to cease and desist, the State Department tipped off the Vichy regime about Fry and his team, leading to their arrests. 

Going in, I thought Fry's story would be presented in a self-congratulatory American-saves-the-world manner, but I couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, for Horn and other who have studied Fry, this is why is story has received so little attention, comparative to those like Oskar Schindler. It blurs the black-and-white binaries through which we see the Second World War. Whereas normally we have the good, heroic Americans (and other Allies) as the counterpoint to the evil Nazis, here the Americans do not come out smelling so fresh. Not only did they dob Fry in to the Nazis' puppet government in France, their actions make a mockery of our two core narratives when it comes to the Holocaust: that we didn't know a genocide was occurring, and, that, even if we had known, we would have been powerless to stop it. This second assumption rests on the fallacy that people would want to do anything, which then, as now, is not necessarily true. 

We like the story of the Righteous Gentile, but the truth is that most Gentiles were decidedly unrighteous, even when they had a level of awareness of what was happening to the Jews across Europe. And, make no mistake, Fry's experience demonstrates that the implementation of the Final Solution was an open secret.

In 1935, Fry witnessed a pogrom along the Kurfuerstendamm in Berlin, which, according to one of his co-rescuers, contributed to his decision to go to France years later. At the time though, Fry reported on the violence for The New York Times. In 1942, he wrote another piece, this time for The New Republic, in which he chronicled a 1935 meeting with Ernst Hanfstaengl, the Nazis' chief foreign press officer. Hanfstaengl told Fry, quite plainly, that he and the 'moderate' Nazis wanted to expel the Jews, while Hitler's 'radical' wing had their hearts set on mass murder. Neither was Fry was not the only person reporting these developments to the American newspapers. 

As for the American government, they agreed to Fry's presence in France, if only tacitly, because they knew that the alternative was losing these great brains to extermination camps. But, even so, they took almost few actions to offer refuge to other European Jews because both the government and the general population were scared of opening the door to 'floods' of Jewish refugees, as the case of the SS St. Louis shows. 

The great strength of Horn's writing lies in her ability to make the reader examine these things in a new light, and she does so by conveying her own conflicted feelings. In one instance, she writes: 

The inevitability of murder...is the premise of all narratives of Holocaust rescue - and part of what makes me so uncomfortable with them. The assumption in such stories is that the open maw of death for Europe's Jews and dissidents was something like a natural disaster. These stories, in some sense, force us - people removed from that time by generations - to ask the wrong questions, the kind of questions we might ask about a tsunami or an epidemic. Someone has to die, the thinking goes, and the only remaining dilemma is who will get the last seat on the lifeboat or the last vaccine. But these questions fall short by assuming that the perpetrators were irrelevant. As long as we are questioning the choices that are made, shouldn't we be considering the possibility of the Holocaust not happening at all? If someone was in the position to choose whether to save person A or person B, shouldn't whole societies have been in the position to reject the notion of genocide altogether? Why didn't everyone become Denmark? (Loc. 387-396)

I read The Rescuer in the first days of the new year, but Horn's rendering of Fry's story and the Holocaust in general have stuck with me these past months, invoked by things I come across in my everyday life. First of all, there are the people Fry saved, who have been popping up everywhere, even though Levi-Strauss was the only one I had any awareness of before starting this book.

But then, there is also something greater, something I sometimes wonder when I open the newspaper and read about Europe's current refugee crisis, Australia's despicable treatment of asylum seekers or Trump and the rise of the far right in the United States. If we tell ourselves these comforting fictions that we didn't know, that we were powerless, are we more likely to ignore the cries for help that are occurring now, or in the future? After all, as George Santayana said, "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.".