A Nazi Lost in the 'Concrete'

While mental trauma and war often go hand in hand, no one has ever quite approached the subject as Jakov Lind does in his novel, “Landscape in Concrete.” The surprisingly entrancing and fantastical story follows shellshocked ex-Nazi sergeant Gauthier Bachman as he tries to find a battalion after his own is decimated at Voroshenko. On his way, Bachmann meets an array of fairytale-like characters stuffed into military uniforms, and he embarks on a series of strange, allegorical adventures. He is, for the most part, unaware of his mental illness, but Lind’s deft portrayals of both Bachmann’s condition and his defiant denial in the face of it constitute a disturbing and poignant undercurrent to the events of the novel.

The dreamlike quality of the novel emanates from Lind’s ability to create sparse but symbolic landscapes and to fill them with characters whose simple exteriors incapsulate deeper historical echoes. Of course, the enchanting essence of the story is much more akin to that of the original Grimm stories than their doe-eyed Disney counterparts (it revolves around shocking wartime occurrences) but Lind’s gift for eccentric descriptions of characters and events transforms the more gruesome and explicit scenes into something strangely pallatable. Lind’s descriptions endow the starved, inhuman, and ruthless characters of the war with unreal qualities that make the whole narrative easier to digest.

Ironically, this seemingly simplistic, almost whimsical lens allows Lind to humanize the effect of the war on people. For instance, Bachmann meets a deserter named Schnotz, who has become so much like a woodland creature as a result of his time away from human company that Bachmann initially doesn’t even recognize him physically as a human: “[Bachmann] hauled off and poked his stick into the ghost’s side. It writhed with pain and made faces. You’ve hurt my kidney, the critter whimpered.” Though the reader and Bachmann eventually learn that Schnotz was once just as inhuman a soldier as he is now a woodland critter, Schnotz’s Gollum-like wildness emphasizes his pathetic fall from the military, society, and humanity.

In addition, Lind captures his subjects with kind of dual childishness and precision; in sketching the form of Bachmann’s girlfriend Helga, he writes, “Before their eyes stood a Valkyrie in a short blue dress, disclosing stout calves and powerful knees that gave promise of heavenly thighs… Her breasts were bigger than the legendary blue mountains and just as unlikely, her bottom was as round as a terrestrial globe.” In doing so, Lind persuades the reader to see the world more and more through Bachmann’s eyes as he stumbles about in a mental haze, taking in objects and people like a perverted man-child.

This fantastical, enchanted narrative, however, proves difficult to sustain. Lind begins to lose a little of his earlier momentum in the second half of the novel, particularly as Bachmann encounters even more cruel people and more frightening situations. Bachmann’s dogged persistence in finding a battalion is also aimless and repetitive, and while this is undoubtedly a result of his mental trauma, Lind could have given Bachmann’s earlier history or perhaps more details about the onset of his condition in order to help the reader appreciate his current state. Towards the end of the novel, the otherworldly charm of the opening chapters gives way to a metallic surrealism, interspersed with forced philosophical conversations about the existence of God and what it means to be man.

In some rare moments, Lind weaves a new kind of poetry, one blended with religion, philosophy, and Bachmann’s own sensitivity. After being picked up by a peacetime school teacher who hires Bachmann as an assassin, Bachmann pauses to urinate by the side of the road: “With birdie in hand, he looked up at the stars. Eternity, eternity, said a Nietzschean murmur within him, how big you are! O starlight that floods the cosmos (his arc grew shorter and shorter)! Heaven and earth, clouds and space! said Bachmann aloud. Not so loud! Halftan called.” These are the moments when Bachmann’s personal experiences of the war and his mental trauma become beautiful and disturbing without dwelling on the historical, social, or political context.

While the latter half of the novel lacks the imagination of the former, it is rich in historical anecdotes, not only about the Germans and Nazis, but also the foreigners who worked alongside them, and what they thought about the war. As Bachmann’s mental state deteriorates, so does the language of novel, and by the end, Lind mires his characters in a bog of metaphors and fleshy images. It is ultimately Lind’s subtle touch that renders this kind of stagnant illness and sparse landscape unique and full, and his grace as a writer that transforms the atrocities of war into poignant and stirring depictions of human nature pushed to its limit.

—Staff writer Jenny J. Lee can be reached at jhlee@fas.harvard.edu.