The Orphanage     by Hubert Fichte, Translated by M Chalmers Original title: Das Waisenhaus Original language: German Published by Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Paperback, 176 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.54 x 7.76 x 5.02 ISBN: 1852421614 List Price: $10.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.95 Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 161 pages List Price: £6.95 Not available for ordering

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Detlev is eight. Uprooted from the home of his Protestant grandparents in Hamburg, he has been surreptitiously deposited by his mother in a Catholic orphanage in Bavaria. As he waits for his mother to deliver him, he gets bird droppings on his hands. This provokes, at least in his mind, the derision of the orphans and the disapprobation of the nuns. And the accompanying feelings of terror, shame, and loneliness give rise to and connect the apparent jumble of memories which constitute the novel.

The year is 1942/3. Detlev is the object of the hostile gaze of two allegedly subordinate, but mutually supporting, hierarchies. He is the victim of a totalitarian microcosm headed by a certain Albert who shares an ‘A’ with Adolf. It feels as if the mother who should comfort and protect him has abandoned him, and would prefer him not to exist. The prayer promised to make him an unexceptionable Catholic has not yet been received, and may prove impossible to learn. Hence there is an ever-present danger of his going to a Hell that is structurally equivalent to Auschwitz.

When, towards the end of the novel, his mother explains that his father is a Jew, Detlev does not understand. He does not understand Catholicism either, with its insistence on martyrdom, pain and punishment. He is at once puzzled and fascinated by that process of dismemberment which puts dummies in coffins and relics behind altars. He is confused by the prurient sexual ethics inculcated in the orphanage. And because the explanations of the adults are all ideologically tainted, they only make matters worse. Detlev is eight. By writing as it were from his perspective, Fichte is able to present a dislocated and devastating view of the continuum of terror and torture which links the nuns and Albert with nativity plays and policeman Kriegel. In the process he presents Nazism not as something monstrous, not as something silly, not even as something shabbily opportunistic, but as something endemic to the structures of Western thought. It is a rare achievement, and the resulting novel, painful though it is, demands to be read.

‘In the Protestant Church near the town wall there was a painted Christ. The colours were pale. The paintwork showed up every irregularity of the plaster. The Christ there had no ribs under his skin. His toes weren’t spread apart like here. The blood there wasn’t black at the edge of the wounds. His mother looked at Christ too. She turned Detlev away from the wooden figure. Sister Silissa drew a sweet out of one of the many folds in her habit, held it in front of Detlev’s face by a corner of the red wrapping paper. Detlev looked up at the cross again. He felt a pain across his shoulders. His ribs pressed against his skin. He thought he would have to stretch out his arms, like the white-coated traffic police on Stephan’s Square — his grandfather had been a traffic policeman before the First World War.

Detlev shut his eyes tightly. He was afraid that the whole rose hedge would be pressed down on him. Detlev didn’t see his mother looking at Sister Silissa, Sister Silissa nodding slowly once, his mother quickly handing the brightly coloured Bavarian jacket to Sister Silissa, Sister Silissa quietly opening the dining room door for his mother.

When Detlev turned away from the green face again, his head came up against the black cloth of Sister Silissa’s habit. His mother had disappeared.’ p21