We'll be sorry, I told my students, if we ever stop telling stories because if we do, there will be nothing to help us sustain pressure of reality, to ease the burden of life on our shoulders. Almost at the same moment, as if on command, all of them stopped writing and looked up at me. But, they asked, isn't life a story? No, I answered, and touched my earlobe, life is the absence of story.

Gotz and Meyer begins as a detective story and concludes as sort of a field trip. How else can one describe the mechanics of a process by which women and children were exterminated? How do we portray the stewards of this process? Is it wrong to muse on their hobbies. . .their laughter and their homesickness? Albahari doesn't use paragraph breaks, much less chapters. He wants the dear readers to push through to the terminus. The conclusion isn't happy. How could it be? The novel takes place largely in Belgrade, yet the landmarks are in the skull of its bewildered protagonist. Žižek implores us not to think of the Holocaust in tragic terms; such is a disservice to the memory of the lost. Tragedy was not at play as its victims were not extended choices. Gotz and Meyer is a damning novel, though no one is to blame.
( )

I know that there is a concern that as time passes, people will forget the horrors of the Holocaust. Just read this novel. It is horribly dark, deeply frightening, deeply moving, and is an incredible work of literature. A teacher, suffering from results of his research on family history during WWII in Serbia, crawls inside the psyches of two young German soldiers whose job is to kill truckloads of Jews. The result is powerful and almost overwhelming emotionally, for the teacher and the reader. Never forget! ( )

Tra la primavera del 1941 e quella del 1942, a Goetz e Meyer,
due sottoufficiali delle SS, fu affidato un incarico tutto speciale nella Jugoslavia occupata dalla Wehrmacht: con un autocarro dovevano percorrere una volta al giorno il tragitto di quindici chilometri che separava Belgrado da Jajinci. In entrambe le località c’era un campo di internamento per ebrei, zingari e altre «popolazioni inferiori». Goetz e Meyer caricavano un centinaio di persone, le chiudevano dentro e partivano. Strada facendo collegavano il tubo di scappamento a un foro posto sotto il cassone: con un minimo dispendio di energia e un massimo di economicità, grazie a questo sistema 5000 ebrei serbi morirono asfissiati dal monossido di carbonio.
Con questo romanzo di forte impatto emotivo e di evidente matrice autobiografica — anche 35 familiari dell’autore scomparvero nel nulla — David Albahari cerca di ricostruire un passato indicibile, di far fronte alla necessità di dare una figura, un corpo, agli esecutori del Male. ( )

David Albahari’s book, Götz and Meyer, which at first glance seemed like a book I wouldn’t even want to tackle, turned out to be one of the most fascinating, poetic reads of the year. Without paragraph or chapter divisions, the story tells of an aging literature teacher in Serbia remembering the methodical elimination of Jews from the city of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, by the Nazis in 1942. Götz and Meyer (or were they Meyer and Götz?) were the Nazi officers charged with transporting Jews from that city via truck to an undisclosed, but promising, destination. Their many truckloads of human cargo never reached their destination alive due to a clever Nazi plan to quickly and quietly eliminate Jews en mass.

During the story, the unnamed narrator becomes more and more depressed by contemplating and researching the missing leaves of his family tree. He thinks about the two Nazi officers who had no particular characteristics to distinguish one from the other and wonders how they could have so casually carried out their evil work. As a teacher, he is also charged with helping his present-day students understand this dark period of Serbian history.

This is fiction. It reads very quickly and easily despite its unusual written form. As a background for this story, David Albahari based what he wrote on historical facts gleaned from “archival material, encyclopedia entries, newspaper articles, books, and studies”. This book, with its vivid details, came so alive for me that I paused while reading it to dig through my family archives to see how the deaths of my own maternal grandparents, living in Yugoslavia in 1942, fit into the picture the author was presenting in this novel.

For those who are not put off by the despair of reading Holocaust literature, this is a must read. It humanizes one very geographically small area of death and destruction by the Nazis during World War II. I read these books in small doses. I do, however, have the need to continually explore fiction such as this mesmerizing novel from time to time as it puts human faces on a situation that can only be described as inhuman. ( )

During the Summer of 1942, the majority of Jews living in Serbia were executed in large trucks especially adapted to fill with carbon monoxide by order of the Nazi's. The narrator of this story is a descendent of that generation and most of his family were killed during that year, taken from a concentration camp in Belgrade in large trucks in the hope they were moving to a better place. All the narrator knows at the beginning of his journey is the names of the two German soldiers who drove the trucks, Gotz and Meyer.

This novel has a very strong narrative voice which alongside the absence of Chapters and paragraphs makes the book very difficult to put down; doing so feels like an interruption to the narrator who smoothly takes us from the past to the present, from inside the truck to his classroom, from the minds of Gotz and Meyer to his own.

Like all important novels dealing with the atrocities of War, Albahari meditates on the importance of not forgetting, the power of putting yourself in someone elses shoes, the weight of memories and the importance of language.

An excellent book everybody should read. ( )