1.11.2015

Interviews with Ilva Fabiani and Jean-Paul Didierlaurent

The Long Nights of Anna Alzutz

The Reading Committees of the "City of Cuneo Award for the Primo Romanzo" have selected The Long Nights of Anna Alrutz (Feltrinelli, 2014) as the winner of the 2014-2015 edition, the debut novel by Ilva Fabiani, professor of Italian at the University of Göttingen, Germany. This book deals with a little-known practice implemented by the Nazi regime: the sterilization of women considered impure because they suffered from various physical and psychiatric conditions. Ilva Fabiani has chosen to tell the story of a young nurse, Anna Alrutz, who is dedicated to carrying out this violent and barbaric practice. The portrait that emerges from this powerful debut work is that of a woman defeated by the tragic authoritarian excesses of the 1920s and 1930s, but also that of an entire population forced to confront a perverse perfectionist ideology that has left its mark irreversibly. Ilva Fabiani has written a novel that is a call to memory, to the moral obligation not to forget that men today have. And that they often forget they have.

Where did the idea for the character of Anna Alrutz come from?
The place where I work, the Institute of Romance Philology, was once the gynecological clinic of a large hospital complex where sterilizations were performed between 1934 and 1945. I was conducting historical research, but the topic quickly caught my eye: I was moved by reading the testimonies of sterilized women, the affront that was inflicted on their bodies. Thus a story was born, told not from the perspective of the victims, but from that of the perpetrators, the other women who participated as nurses in these operations. As mentioned in the footnote, the name Anna Alrutz comes from a telephone directory of the time: a woman with that name lived in the 1930s in the apartment where I live now. But I know nothing about her, except what I invented. Right at the beginning of the writing process, the phrase "My nights are long because I work" popped up. It's the opening line of the novel and has remained unchanged throughout the drafts. From there, a story I didn't know I wanted to write began.

Anna becomes a braune Schwester, a nurse whose job is to sterilize women suffering from physical and mental illnesses that could give birth to imperfect babies, thus going against the perfectionist wishes of the Führer. On page 181, we read that “the Führer’s dream was to make Germany a vigorous and weaknessless nation, the result of a careful selection of healthy individuals.” How did you learn about the work of these nurses?
During my research, I came across stories of doctors, later tried for the crimes they committed, but also of nurses. The concept of braune Schwester is historically quite broad: this term referred to both nurses who cared for wounded soldiers during clashes between opposing political factions, and those who attended the National Socialist nursing school, for example in Hanover and Dresden, and in general all those nurses who firmly adhered to Hitler’s ideology. I found several testimonies from nurses that piqued my interest because they were women who, either out of political conviction or professional duty, assisted in sterilization operations, "amputating" other women. The question I asked myself was how they managed to erase this bodily empathy we feel for another woman and violate her body. I then tried, through narrative, to analyze and reconcile this intimate conflict that, I'm sure, more than one woman has felt—at least judging by the testimonies. It goes without saying that the massive indoctrination in the new nursing school played a fundamental role.

Anna was born in 1907 to a wealthy family, whose sentiments were certainly not anti-Semitic or Nazi. Why does the protagonist decide, after the death of her sister Hedwin and her abandonment of academia, to embrace Hitler's ideas?
Understanding the profound reasons for Anna's embrace of National Socialism is a very difficult task. In my opinion, there are external factors, such as the economic crisis into which Germany had sunk in the 1920s, the political and social fractures that constantly led to clashes between workers and paramilitary forces, and the pervasive sense of having to resort to extreme measures to restore order to a society adrift. Anna certainly believes in this idea of ​​order, but there's more: the social order corresponds to an internal order that she, after the disappointment in love and the death of her sister, is desperately seeking. An intact world, made up of clear rules, of a deep-rooted social Manichaeism that conceived of an evil—the Jews, for example—as distinguishable and easily blamed. At one point in the book it is said that "National Socialism was a graft made onto a perfectly compatible shrub." She, Anna, was this shrub that welcomed the grafting of political ideas because she was profoundly akin to it.

What is the dividing line between medical research and totalitarian madness?
A dividing line must always be found within a general consensus that always allows for the individual's freedom of self-determination. Every society develops its own concept of health, illness, and therefore also of treatment. I recently read that some Dutch scholars traveled to Africa to study a tribe whose women appeared to have no menopausal symptoms. They quickly realized that their language did not contain a word for "menopause." There was no standardized concept for this stage of life, nor a symptomatology, and therefore not even any symptoms! For this reason, I firmly believe that we must be absolutely careful, with all stakeholders, about the concept of health and well-being that a society develops, because its conception of illness and medical treatment strongly depends on it. If a society has inhumane models—think of the concept of Aryanity, for which biology teachers measured their students' skulls—it will also have inhumane medicine.

“I no longer exist, I have to come to terms with it. I no longer have a burden or a body.” The narrative is carried forward by the spirit of Anna, who tragically passed away in 1935, eleven days before her twenty-eighth birthday. What motivated her to choose this particular point of view?
I imagined her this way because I wanted a retrospective perspective on her life. Her repentance, at once intense and belated, rewrites her entire life like a long illusion and makes the moment of death almost eternal: she didn't have enough time to repent and make amends for her mistakes, which is why her soul still wanders the corridors of the clinic, recounting its pain to anyone who will listen. Repentance explains the perspective from which she views the episodes of her life, asking herself each time how it was possible, little by little, that her soul was permeated by the idea of ​​destruction. I imagined a repentance so strong that it would perpetuate itself in the afterlife, an afterlife that, however, becomes a limbo, a sort of place of atonement. The loss of the body in the afterlife occurs almost symmetrically to the loss of the soul in this life.

The novel focuses heavily on youth. Adolescent impulses push Anna to venture into seemingly distant places: the university world, military circles, the home of a Protestant pastor... How much does irrationality affect the course of life?
I don't like to divide our choices into rational or irrational: an action can be both rational and irrational at the same time, depending on our point of view. Anna's example in this regard is clear: unfortunately, it was a rational choice for a young woman of that time to adhere to those ideas that today, with hindsight, we call pure madness. It was rational at the time to think that a mentally ill person cost the state as much as an entire genetically healthy family. Let's call it a perverted, inhuman, unacceptable rationality, but within the system that gave birth to it, it was coherent. It is not rationality that saves Anna Alrutz, in the end, but something deeper, more intimate, visceral. We can try calling it "pity" or "human solidarity," or even simply "empathy." The awakening begins when Anna feels a sort of nausea within her at what she's doing: her body rebels before her mind can. Rationality awakens later and organizes the sabotage.

The choices of Willi, Anna's younger brother, lead him to live a different life, characterized by a radical rejection of Nazism. Anna's spirit sees him fighting in Russia and building a peaceful future for himself in Holland. Does Willi represent what Anna could have been but didn't want to be?
In a certain sense, yes. Willi didn't lose his childhood by sacrificing it on the altar of ideology. Willi possessed, from a young age, a common sense that naturally pushes him toward independent thought, art, and play, and is therefore, in a certain sense, "immune" to dictatorship. Anna, on the other hand, does not: with her authoritarian temperament and also because of the disappointment she suffered with Heinrich, she violently distances herself from her childhood, from the altruistic and lively child she was, and hurls herself into an adult world dominated by political and social harshness. With his frankness, Willi reminds Anna that another way of thinking and feeling is always possible.

Anna, Frida, Hedwin, Elisa, Wilhelmine… Your novel is characterized by complex female figures who deal with totalitarianism in different ways. Are women the true protagonists of History?
Let's say that throughout History, we have given too little space to the women who could have told it to us. We have read and discussed almost exclusively the stories of men; only in recent centuries have we added the voices of women, their perspectives on things. Therefore, I believe that History does not have major or minor protagonists, but simply many voices, male, female, or otherwise undefinable, which must be integrated with each other to reach a more differentiated understanding of the past and of life. Let me give you an example: reading Wendy Lower's wonderful essay, The Furies of Hitler (Einaudi, 2013) on the behavior of Nazi women in occupied territories, one cannot help but be shocked by the violence and brutality of their actions. At the same time, if you read The Burning of Berlin (Adelphi, 1998), you will feel the pain of the German women locked up in bunkers during the war, women and girls who were themselves brutally raped by Red Army soldiers. This shift in perspective helps us understand the horror of war in all its nuances, even when it can be painful and uncomfortable.

Her studies led her to work and live in Germany. What is the German people's relationship with the recent Nazi past?
In my opinion, it's very complex: a huge amount of work has been done to revise and rework the past, and it continues to be done almost daily. However, much remains to be done, especially in the former GDR, where the resurgence of neo-Nazi and xenophobic movements is worrying. The economic crisis only exacerbates insecurity and isolation. I personally sense a great deal of shame among Germans, a great deal of fear of the past, and an almost exhausting desire to demonstrate to the world that Germany doesn't just mean Hitler and Nazism, but also the entire literary, musical, and philosophical heritage this nation has given to the world. It's as if Hitler had appropriated everything: its thoughts, its words, its colors. Even today, everything must reckon with that past before it can exist.

The Long Nights of Anna Alrutz originally appeared on ilmiolibro.it, a website dedicated to self-publishing. What emotions does a debut author feel when he receives a publication offer from a major publishing group like Feltrinelli?
Disbelief, euphoria, and certainly a great deal of anxiety! Dealing with such a renowned publishing house for a debut author can be overwhelming, something you're never prepared for, not at twenty or forty. Then the euphoria turns into a desire to do a good job, and you realize how much concentration and professionalism it takes to transform a story into a book: the transition from reader to author is both exciting and demanding.

Do you already have any literary projects in mind for your future?
Yes, I'm writing a novel in two voices, set in two different eras and countries. A sort of dialogue with an ending open to different interpretations. But for good luck, I won't say more.

(interview by Jacopo Giraudo)

A paper love

The 6:27 Light, published in Italian with the less effective title Un amore di carta (Rizzoli, 2015), is the debut novel by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, an established French short story author. This debut work is a small masterpiece, a slim volume capable of providing both pleasant and profound reading. The novel's protagonist is Guylain Vignolles, a man with a humiliating and arduous job, a simple worker with a quiet daily habit: reading aloud a passage from a book on the 6:27 train that takes him to the factory. It's impossible not to be moved by the literary charm of this ordinary hero, a character with countless nuances that harks back to the highest literary traditions. Once you've closed Un amore di carta, you'll remember that Guylain is not just another inhabitant of the vast ocean of novels, but a real friend you can turn to in times of need. All you need to do is pick up this book and linger over a few lines. The effect you will experience will be extraordinarily therapeutic.

Where did the character of Guylain Vignolles originate?
Guylain Vignolles, the reader, was born a little over twelve years ago, when I entered a short story competition on the theme of books. I had then imagined this character, a worker at a book-shredding machine who, to endure the destructive work he perpetrated, saved a book from the slaughter every day and then read a passage aloud to the commuters on the train that took him from the suburbs to the factory. From that moment on, this character never left me and continued to torment me for many years, demanding a life a little longer than the span of a single story. Oddly enough, I think I almost immediately had the certainty that, one day or another, he and I would experience a truly wonderful adventure.

Guylain works as a laborer at a book shredding company. He operates the Zerstor 500, "The Thing," a gigantic machine that shreds unsold volumes. What was your inspiration for "The Thing"?
I had a lot of fun mentally constructing this terrifying "Thing," and I was determined to make it a fully-fledged character. The shredding machine is the monster of the story—an ugly, reprehensible, smelly, greedy monster with a warlike color and name, and one that also has its own intelligence. In the novel, it's not the machine that serves humanity, but rather humanity that serves this capricious and insatiable metal monster that is never satisfied with paper. In this "Thing," we can see both Zola's The Human Beast and Stephen King's Christine  . The sources of inspiration are diverse and often unconscious.

Guylain has a subordinate and humiliating job. He therefore lies to his mother about his occupation. Does he believe that feeling ashamed of one's work could be a symbol of human alienation?
If Guylain lies to his mother, he does so primarily out of a desire not to disappoint her and to let her live in the illusion of social and professional fulfillment. This lie is the only way he has found to protect her, keeping silent about all the suffering she experiences daily so that it doesn't fall entirely on her. What is unknown does not harm. As for shame, however, it often comes from the way others look. And in a society where everything is nothing but appearance, where one is judged by one's clothes, car, or home, work occupies a prominent place in this social recognition and can be the source of numerous prejudices.

Julie, the woman who wrote the texts on the USB stick Guylain found on the train, is the only completely positive character in the novel, as well as one of the few female appearances. Why did you decide to give Julie the role of the protagonist's redeemer?
What I like about Julie is her inaccessible side. She spends her days in a tiled universe, far from the world above, a immobile high priestess. She is, in a way, a Sleeping Beauty who doesn't consider herself. I love her freshness, her positive attitude, her innocence, elements that bring her closer to Cécile de France, bubbly and natural. I love the perspective she casts on the female gender, both tender and cynical. She is the one who, without knowing it, manages to bring Guylain out of his lethargy and finally lead him to live. And what is more beautiful than a loving quest to breathe life into an existence that until that point had been one of the saddest?

The monotony of life is the hallmark of Guylain Vignolles's existence. At the beginning of the novel, we observe him performing mechanical, repetitive, and obsessive actions; by the end of the narrative, he is a different man, finally ready to be drawn into events. Do you think your Guylain and Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira could make excellent literary brothers?
I want to be honest with you: I've never had the opportunity to read Antonio Tabucchi's novel. Guylain's journey goes from shadow to light. In his case, it's possible to speak of a true birth, rather than a resurrection. Little by little, he takes shape as the pages turn, moving from the invisible to the visible. At the beginning, Guylain only truly exists for twenty minutes a day, those twenty minutes spent on the train during which he becomes the "reader." This exercise of forced reading that he practices for his redemption remains, nevertheless, a solitary act. Everything will change the moment he finds himself invited to read at Les Glycines. Guylain is longed for, loved. This is the beginning of his coming into the world. And then the USB flash drive appears, opening the doors to happiness, with this senseless quest that will finally allow him to fully exist.

Do you think the train is the ideal means of transport for reading?
Having taken it many times recently, I must admit it's very pleasant to read on the train. It's truly a great privilege to be able to travel, both physically and mentally. There's something wonderful about traveling at over three hundred kilometers an hour aboard a TGV, your body comfortably relaxed while your mind wanders, immersed in a book, ready for another journey. For this reason, I feel confident in saying that the train is one of those ideal places for reading.

Why did the author of the French national anthem, Guylain, decide to call his goldfish "Rouget de Lisle"?
The idea of ​​naming Guylain's goldfish "Rouget de Lisle" simply comes from a play on words between rouget, the common name for fish, and the creator of the Marseillaise, Rouget de Lisle, a name that thus blends the ordinary with the ancestral.

You are a prestigious short story writer. What is the ideal place for the short story within contemporary literature?
In my opinion, the art of the short story is too often under-recognized. The short story suffers from a clear lack of consideration, even though it is commonly said to be a complicated art. The first question a successful short story writer is asked is "When will the novel be published?", with the implication that, since one can write short stories, one can dedicate oneself to the novel. It's like asking a sprinter to switch to running the marathon every time he wins the 100 meters. I dream of a world in which the author of a debut novel is asked "How much will the short stories cost?" The exercise in conciseness that writing a short story represents is fascinating. It is nothing more and nothing less than craftsmanship. You have to create a story where every word truly counts. "Suggesting a lot with a limited number of words" could be an excellent advertising slogan for short stories.

You participated in the latest edition of the Festival du Premier Novel de Chambéry, an event which, like the Premio Città di Cuneo per il Primo Romanzo, aims to introduce new authors to a wide audience. Which novels by emerging authors would you recommend reading?
It's a great thing that literary festivals like those of Chambéry and Cuneo exist, as debut novels sometimes lack visibility. At these events, they are in the spotlight for a few days. Furthermore, these events offer privileged opportunities to meet often promising authors. Among Chambéry's first novels, I made a wonderful discovery in the form of Gautier Battistella and his book Un jeune homme promessaur (Grasset, 2014). I'm currently discovering an author with an interesting literary style, Carole Martinez, who won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2011 for her novel Du domaine des Murmures (Gallimard, 2011). Personally, I am a devoted reader of Grégoire Delacourt's books: his La première chose qu'on regarde (Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 2013) really impressed me.

What are your future literary projects?
My present is divided into two. After the release of my novel in paperback by Folio at the end of August, Éditions du Diable Vauvert published a collection of my short stories in early September. Maccadam is a diverse collection of eleven stories, a compilation of carefully chosen novellas to offer readers diverse visions, eleven carriages to take a seat in, heading towards unknown destinations. I'm currently working on a second novel, but I won't say anything more for now, as one should never reveal the pages of a manuscript before it's written!

(interview by Jacopo Giraudo)