Comedy in a Minor Key

Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson, translated by Damion Searls, Hesperus Press 107 pages, RRP£9.99

Hans Keilson, who turns 101 on December 12, is the last surviving author of German exile literature. He wanted to be a musician, qualified as a doctor, and published his first novel in March 1933, just in time for it to be banned. He then fled Hitler’s anti-Semitism to the Netherlands, where he still lives today. During the war Keilson hid, but also counselled hidden Jewish children for the Dutch resistance.

He published Comedy in a Minor Key in German in 1947. His last novel followed in 1959. Until his late nineties, Keilson was known chiefly as a psychiatrist. When my mother interviewed him in 1979, it was about his professional specialism: the postwar traumas of Jews who had hidden as children.

The first time Comedy appeared, it attracted little notice. Few Germans in 1947 were ready to read about Jewish suffering. But extremely late in life Keilson was rediscovered, after the translator Damion Searls chanced on a German edition of Comedy in the bargain bin of a Yugoslavian-speciality bookshop in Austria. When Searls’ translation appeared in the US this summer, the New York Times placed the “genius” Keilson on the list “of the world’s very greatest writers”. Keilson shrugged it all off, responding that “genius” is just what Americans call you when they like your work. Certainly we need to try to step back and separate the author’s achievement from his immense age.

The British edition of Comedy, to its credit, doesn’t even mention his date of birth. And yet this 107-page novella may actually deserve the praise. After thousands of works about the Holocaust, this one – one of the very first – adds to our understanding.

The wartime setting is specifically Dutch. In an overcrowded country without mountains or large forests, the only places to hide were other people’s terraced houses. Nico, a Jew, is taken in by the ordinary Dutch couple Wim and Marie. He escapes the ovens, only to die in hiding of an ordinary illness. Marie reflects: “It was like a comedy where you expect the hero to emerge onstage, bringing resolution, from the right. And out he comes from the left.”

Almost everything in Comedy is ordinary, “in a minor key”: the characters, their words, thoughts and meals. When a friend in the resistance asks Wim to do his “patriotic duty” by sheltering Nico, and Wim repeats the phrase to Marie, she laughs. She is sad when Nico dies but also feels cheated of the all-too-human triumph of showing him off to the neighbours after Liberation.

None of Keilson’s characters is capable of great abstractions. None, in fact, is able to grasp the madness of their time. They scarcely mention the Holocaust, the Germans or the war. Wim thinks: “With all the excitement, worries and day-to-day trivialities, you could almost forget there was still a war going on.”

Keilson wrote the text almost before public discussion of the Holocaust began. Only in the 1960s would Dutch historians Louis de Jong and Jacques Presser talk most of their countrymen through the horrors. Comedy in a Minor Key appeared in the same year that Anne Frank’s diary and Primo Levi’s If This is a Man finally found publishers. Keilson’s book doesn’t even try to make sense of what had happened. Probably nobody could then.

What he does know is that meaningless suffering is not something that only afflicts Jews. All Keilson’s novels feature Jews but he is always determined to write not only about Jews. For most of Comedy, Nico is the classic Jewish pitied victim. Then, in a brilliant twist at the end, Keilson suddenly shows us that what happened to him could happen to anyone. Humans are poor, bare, forked animals. Life is what happens to them, and they can grasp only its most banal details.

This novella, with its evocation of a random universe and its surprising humour, anticipates Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd of the 1950s. And so a man who lost his parents to Auschwitz has written a “comedy” about the Holocaust.

Simon Kuper is an FT columnist