Ordinary fascism in ordinary people: what is said in the novel "Castelau"

And not because the action of its historical part takes place in Germany in the last months of the war.

ANNA BERSENEVA, writer

This time, of course, is terrible and bloody, but after all, there is a triumph of justice ahead... All heroes cherish it, and in everything that a person instills in himself regarding the structure of the world, it must triumph.

This does not happen in the life of the German writer Werner Wagenknecht, who hates fascism, was erased by the Nazis from literature and knows that he will write a large, absolutely honest novel, his main novel about the time he has lived through. After all, “what will not be written down will be forgotten. There will come a time - and such a time will inevitably come - when no one will believe that such a thing could happen at all. " When, at the end of the twentieth century, American graduate student Samuel Saunders travels to Germany and scrupulously restores the history of Wagenknecht's life - his personal opposition to the colossus of state terror, his creative and human honesty, his almost frenzied desire to keep his living soul in the dead space of evil, - the reader sighs with relief. Yes, the past cannot be corrected, but justice will prevail, at least in a temporary perspective! But when disappointment in the possibility of such a celebration overtakes already in the present...

This disappointment comes with a murderous gradualness, which is generally inherent in the everyday course of life. First, a university professor offers Saunders a topic for a dissertation: films shot at the German studio UFA in the last months of the war, but never released on screens. An inspired graduate student goes to Germany, his research fervor leads him to the old woman Titiana Adam, who during the war years was a young actress Titi, ready for anything for the sake of cinematic fame. And from this old woman he learns about her then lover Werner Wagenknecht, who wrote for the sake of survival scripts under an assumed name and suffered from the fact that these texts poison him, "oozing from his head like pus from an inflamed wound", and about the life of those , who in the 30-40s released hundreds of films at UFA, one of the best European film studios, a strategic facility of the Third Reich. These are the same films that, after the war, the entire USSR watched as trophies. That is, among them there were many of those in which it was not at all about Nazism and the Fuhrer, but about passionate love, funny tricks, kind, understandable feelings ... In such films, very professionally made, nothing indicated that all these wonderful stories were filmed under a totalitarian regime; one did not even have to make a special effort to get rid of it. Maybe there is something in the very nature of cinema that allows you to ignore reality. The cinematic world is becoming self-sufficient for people “who have worked in the cinema for too long and have acquired professional blindness from this business. Cinema - I don’t remember who expressed this idea - is the only product of culture where lies have been elevated to the rank of high art, ”Werner Wagenknecht and Samuel Saunders argue with each other. They both consider it their duty to tell the truth about how ordinary people lived under fascism. That is, those who considered themselves as such ...

One, the director of the film studio, who secretly gives work to Wagenknecht, “lives and acts on the basis of the principle that everything in the world can be “organized”, “cranked”. For him, war, as he himself once put it, is just an annoying hindrance to a normally organized filmmaking". Another, who became the leader of a remote Bavarian village under Hitler, according to his son, “was, of course, a Nazi. He himself never denied it. He was for order, that is how he was brought up, and that was the time. Do not forget: after all, he survived the First World War, and all the subsequent turmoil - inflation and the Great Depression, this economic crisis. And he, of course, liked that firm rules were introduced again. "The third, the informer, “turned out to be not an evil person at all. It's just that for such people, the world is arranged once and for all only in this way and in no other way... As it is in the village almost always. Not only in that, but in general in all”.

In general, people are like people. That is, each individually - a person as a person, has his own convincing life motivation and does not even commit any personal meanness. Only now, all together, these people somehow imperceptibly became part of the force that, having absorbed their latent desires, allowed fascism to come true. It was precisely such people that the American military forced in 1945 with their bare hands to dig up and bury the remains of Jews who were shot and buried in the forest near their patriarchal town, whose inhabitants "knew nothing" because "that was the time then".

In the village of Kastelau, members of the film crew managed to come from Berlin six months before the end of the war. The director of the film studio miraculously managed to implement a universal and for the absolute majority of Germans an unattainable dream: to escape from the bombed-out capital and wait in the safe Alpine wilderness for the Americans, who, unlike the Russians, will not shoot members of the film group on the spot. And here, in Kastelau, Wagenknecht sees the existence of fascism not in a bohemian Berlin environment, for which the 1920s were primarily a time of creative freedom, but in a “deep people” who perceived Hitler as a long-awaited bearer of order. Precious material for a novel! That will never be written...

The indescribable bitterness of Levinsky's Kastelau is that a book about Werner Wagenknecht, for which Samuel Saunders collected materials with the help of Titi, will never be written. The truth about the past is either unpleasant, because people do not want to know that their idol, the Hollywood star, is in fact a scoundrel and criminal who played a fatal role in the fate of the writer Wagenknecht, or they are simply indifferent when the glory of this star is extinguished for natural reasons.

Another life, now of Samuel Saunders, is ruining. Justice is unattainable. I would like to refer to the highest court, which... But Charles Levinsky does not write advances for which he cannot pay off himself, his novel is clear and honest. The Russian reader, who sees many familiar iconic signs in the novel "Castelau", can only turn to the sky in diamonds, which he feels inside his consciousness. If he feels...