story by Isaac Bashevis Singer and a certain paragraph—a famous one—by Kurt Vonnegut. (I won’t list the authors of the medical textbooks I unenthusiastically pored over; but I am glad to thank Lawrence Shainberg for his entertaining and terrifying Brain Surgeon.) Then, too, one’s feelings about this subject—here I mean the Holocaust—emerge and develop through conversation, over many years. I am grateful to my interlocutors, among them my wife, Antonia Phillips; my father, Kingsley Amis; my stepfather-in-law, Xan Fielding; my brother- and sister-in-law, Chaim and Susannah Tannenbaum; my brother-in-law, Matthew Spender; and Tom Maschler, Peter Foges, Piers and Emily Read, John Gross, Christopher Hitchens, James Fox, Zachary Leader, Clive James, Joseph Boothby, Sholom Globerman, Ian McEwan, Saul and Janis Bellow, Edmund and Natalia Faw-cett, Jonathan Wilson, Michael Pietsch, and David Papineau. My alternative title was The Nature of the Offense—a phrase of Primo Levi’s. The offense was of such a nature that perhaps we can see Levi’s suicide as an act of ironic heroism, an act that asserts something like: My life is mine and mine alone to take. The offense was unique, not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, but in its style—in its combination of the atavistic and the modern. It was, at once, reptilian and “logistical.” And although the offense was not definingly German, its style was. The National Socialists found the core of the reptile brain, and built an autobahn that went there. Built for speed and safety, built to endure for a thousand years, the Reichsautobahnen, if you remember, were also designed to conform to the landscape, harmoniously, like a garden path.
M. A.
London
May 1991