Extracts:-
...Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand (The Village of the German) [is] a plainspoken masterpiece that boldly uncovers the affinities between Nazism and Islamism...The German of the title is a former SS officer who serves in a number of extermination camps during World War II. After the war, he is smuggled out of Germany to Istanbul and then Cairo. From there, the Egyptian government dispatches him to Algeria during its war of independence in the 1950s. His job: to support the insurrection by training Front de Libération Nationale fighters. He subsequently settles down in a remote village, where he soon becomes the highly respected sheikh.
...Clues among the dead sheikh’s possessions lead Rachel on an increasingly agonizing search to reconstruct his father’s life in places like Auschwitz. Devastated by what he learns about the Holocaust, the son commits suicide to atone for his father’s sins.
The second son, Malrich (from “Malek” and “Ulrich”), is a creature of the banlieues, French suburbs that have become violent Muslim ghettos. His common sense has already helped him reject an attempt by the local Islamist imam to recruit him, but he continues to drift along with little hope for the future, among friends with similarly bleak prospects. Malrich learns about his father by reading the diary that Rachel has left behind. His reaction is to fight back—not against the Nazis, who are in any case long dead, but against the Islamists, whom he sees as essentially of the same ilk.
Malrich realizes that the Islamists are immeasurably more determined, stronger, and better organized than he and his little band of friends...
...The novel is rooted in reality. During his travels in Algeria, Sansal came across an actual village de l’allemand by accident. He then researched the headman’s story, learning along the way that it wasn’t unusual. An estimated 2,000 former Nazis settled in Egypt after World War II. They included Johannes von Leers, formerly Goebbels’s favorite propagandist of annihilation, who under Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was responsible for anti-Jewish propaganda. Other former Nazis organized police forces or, like Sansal’s headman, served as military trainers.
The sons’ ignorance of the Holocaust is similarly based on sad truths of history. Sansal, in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, stresses that the Holocaust is never mentioned in Algeria: “The fact is that never, until today, has Algerian television shown a film or a documentary on the subject, never has an official breathed a word about it nor, as far as I know, has an intellectual written on the theme.”...
...The intertwining of the hatred that once led to extermination of the Jews and the potential of radical Islam is the book’s deliberate theme. According to Sansal, “the border between Islamism and Nazism is very slim.” Or as Malrich comments: “When I see what the Islamists do here and elsewhere, I tell myself that they will exceed the Nazis if one day they come to power.”...The Islamic governments in power in Algeria and elsewhere, Sansal suggests, have much in common with Nazism, starting with the police states they operate. In his magazine interview, Sansal says that Algeria’s own children consider it an “open-air prison” or a “concentration camp.” Algerian youth, he says, have a slogan: “Mourir ailleurs plutôt que vivre ici” (“Die elsewhere rather than live here”). In his view, Islam has already suffered heavy blows from both Islamism and Arab nationalism, blows from which it will be extremely difficult to recover.
, a former career foreign service officer with the Department of State, is principal of Lebl Associates and a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council of the United States. She is the author of the monograph Advancing U.S. Interests with the European Union. The translations are hers.
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