THE RULES OF PERSPECTIVE
Adam Thorpe
Jonathan Cape £12.99, 320 pages

The Germans call opponents of Nazism who chose to remain in Germany during the Third Reich “internal emigrants”. The description seems to fit Heinrich Hoffer, a central character in Adam Thorpe’s magnificent new novel. Hoffer is “Acting Acting Director” of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Lohenfelde, one of the venues for the infamous Nazi-sponsored “Degenerate Art” exhibition that toured Germany in the spring of 1938. At one point, Hoffer recalls how the polished “abstractions” about the sublimity of great art that he delivered at the exhibition opening aroused the suspicions of a lumpen party official. “It was almost as if you were standing outside our collective indignation and smirking,” the official had said. “Like a Jew.”

Hoffer’s discreet genuflections towards the enduring strength of art and culture, which he thinks cannot be tainted by the “cretins” in the SS, suggest that Thorpe has inherited Thomas Mann’s preoccupation with the relationship between art and morality under Nazism. And, like Mann, Thorpe understands that that relationship was a deeply ambiguous one. The Acting Acting Director’s aestheticism, which takes the form of a belief that all that is good in human affairs flourishes in art (and in German art in particular), had in fact once made him receptive to the blandishments of the Fuhrer, in whom he saw Langbehn’s “artist hero” made flesh. Hitler was an “externalisation of his - Herr Hoffer’s - own inner spirit and deep will”.

All this is recollected by Hoffer, not in tranquility but rather as he and three colleagues take refuge in the vaults of the museum, from the American advance on Berlin. The novel opens, in April 1945, with the museum receiving a direct hit from an American phosphorous shell and unfolds in two nearly contiguous time schemes: during the bombardment and immediately afterwards. Thorpe, whose prose is a model of carefully rationed lyricism, handles the complexities of prolepsis and retrospection with astonishing dexterity. And the focus of his third-person narration shifts back and forth too - the scenes in the vaults are told from Hoffer’s point of view, those set in the aftermath of the bombardment from the perspective of Neal Parry, a corporal in the conquering US army, who abandons his platoon to explore the now ruined museum.

Thorpe makes Parry, like Hoffer, a frustrated artist. Cooped up in the vaults, and separated from his wife and children who have remained in the air-raid shelter beneath their apartment block, Hoffer regrets having prematurely curtailed the bohemian life of his youth. He will devote himself to painting when the war ends. Parry, an advertising copy-writer who had taken art classes back home in West Virginia, imagines quitting his job after the war in order to “aim for the purity of artistic inspiration”. He finds a painting in the rubble and is transfixed: “He knew more about paintings than he knew about science or monkeys or riding goddamn horses.” Meanwhile, his comrades are looking for women and booze outside.

Drawing a parallel in this way between Parry and Hoffer allows Thorpe to unravel the titular theme of “perspective”. He invites the reader to reflect on the precariousness of historical perspective and the partiality of something like “victor’s history” (deciphering the label on the painting, Parry wonders whether “people who don’t speak English picture the same life”).

Thorpe has evidently read widely in what is called, in German, Trummerliteratur, the “literature of the ruins”, and draws heavily on its resources in imagining the purgatory of the Luftschutzbunker (the bone-deep exhaustion, the rats) and the terrible fate met by thousands of civilians during the Allied bombing raids.

Finally, The Rules of Perspective is an argument about the perspective of fiction and the way in which novels can rewrite history by placing fictional characters and their delusions inside recorded events. Hoffer shelters in the museum vaults, as if he were “burying [himself] for safety in the distant German past”. But we come to see that his affirmation of the highest ideals of that culture was, in part, an expression of pride in the quality of German suffering. Hoffer’s mental emigration, it seems, had only ever been partial.