In October 2014, my wife Ferne Pearlstein and I interviewed Martin Amis for The Last Laugh, our 2016 feature documentary about humor and Holocaust. At the time, Amis had just published The Zone of Interest, a novel set in Auschwitz, which—surprise!—was generating a fair amount of controversy for its bold and iconoclastic treatment of the Final Solution. 

(It was actually his second Holocaust novel to do that, following 1998’s Time’s Arrow. You don’t get to be an enfant terrible without being terr-eeb once in a while.) 

As usual, Amis was ahead of the curve. Today, in the age of Jo Jo Rabbit, and an ousted American president who aspired to Reifenstahlian heights, sensibilities may have changed. A feature film adaptation of The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer—director of Sexy Beast, Birth, and Under the Skin— premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this past May and will soon be released theatrically by A24. 

The interview was filmed—on Kodak Super 16mm motion picture film—in the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where Mr. Amis lived. Contrary to his prickly reputation, he could not have been more gracious, or generous with his time, or given us an interview that was more thoughtful or incisive. Sadly, it did not make it into the film for reasons having nothing to do with its merits; as with all documentaries, lots of great material simply didn’t fit in the jigsaw puzzle. 

With the sad news of the great author’s passing in May at the age of only 73, we wanted to put excerpts of this interview—which has never been seen by the public in any form—online as a memorial to the man. 

RIP to a great literary lion.

THE MEANING OF ZERO TOLERANCE

FERNE: What is it that makes the subject of the Holocaust so off limits?

MARTIN: Well, some people claim that it’s off limits. I certainly subscribe to the exceptionalism of the Holocaust; I think it’s not quite like anything else. It’s sort of outside history—beyond history, as some people said. 

The most educated and cultured nation that there had ever been on Earth was Germany in 1933. Even the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen—the killing squads that operated behind the army going east, who killed perhaps a million and a half with bullets—half of them had doctorates, often two doctorates. So that is very striking. 

Another thing, as one writer, Michael Andre Bernstein put it, our understanding of that genocide is central to our self-understanding. I think everyone who studies the Holocaust finds out something about themselves. So it’s exceptional in that way. Some very respectable critics and writers say that it’s unvisitable by the imagination—George Steiner, Cynthia Ozick. But that makes no sense to me. It makes no philosophical sense and certainly no literary, critical sense. At what point does an event become so terrible that the novelists and poets are told they can’t go there? I don’t see how you can argue for that. 

I don’t believe that anything goes and that straightforward comedy has a place. Life Is Beautiful, I thought, was a shameful film. But this is something that writers face every ten minutes when they’re writing. It’s a question of decorum. In life, decorum means etiquette and politeness; in art, it means almost the opposite. You’re indifferent to those things. What you’re trying to do is to find the right tone, the right voice for the events you are describing and exploring. You do that all the time as a writer—that is what writing is. And the effort to find that tone is sharper—much sharper, perhaps as sharp as it can be—in fiction, but it’s the effort of all art. 

No poetry after Auschwitz? There was poetry during Auschwitz. Paul Celan—he was a little later, and not in Germany, in Romania—wrote unforgettable poetry about the German power, and the German divigation. So it just won’t work as a rule, and every case should be regarded on its merits, not in the light of some zero tolerance. Zero tolerance means zero thought. There’s also something sanctimonious about it. It’s a way of saying, “I care so much more than you that I forbid it.” It’s self-righteous and makes no sense.

FERNE: Why do you think Life Is Beautiful did not work and Maus did?

MARTIN: Just order of talent, I think. It’s almost akin to the underestimation of laughter. It’s not true that good art has the power to depress the spirits. It is incapable of doing that. If that were not so, then every performance of “King Lear” would end with a Jonestown of suicides. But that’s not what happens. When the art is of a certain quality, you don’t get depressed by it, you get purged by it. It’s called catharsis, where the emotions of pity and terror are taken from you and you feel invigorated and not crushed by these events.

FERNE: Does the art have to be good then?

MARTIN: Yes, it has to be good, and Life Is Beautiful was crap, and frivolous crap too. You should read Ron Rosenbaum who wrote Explaining Hitler, describing the director getting his Oscar or whatever it was, capering about in Los Angeles, and how blasphemous that seemed to him. Whereas Art Spiegelman has always been very dignified and straight about his approach to it.

We are in a transitional stage with the Holocaust in that it’s absenting itself from living memory. And as that happens, the accepted, stock images of the Holocaust—the rail tracks, the smoke stacks—begin to lose their grip. I think it’s a very natural evolution that writers should cast about trying to find a different perspective. 

I wrote Time’s Arrow, which is a novel that works backwards in time, in ‘91. This time, when I got going with this novel (The Zone of Interest), I knew that I wouldn’t distance myself, that it would be social realism not in this sepulchral atmosphere that certain people think is necessary for treating the Holocaust. Everything I could bring to it, I wanted to bring to it. So, contempt, mockery, et cetera. But no straying from absolute realism, partly because the events themselves are so fantastic that it seems otiose to write about it in a fantastic way.

A RALLYING CRY FOR SADISTS

MARTIN: On the larger scale, it really is an astounding fact that all historians confess that they don’t understand Hitler and what happened in Nazi Germany. No one talks that way about Stalin or even Mao. It’s like saying we don’t understand Napoleon. Yes we do. There are no great questions about Napoleon’s motives. But no one is close to understanding what the Third Reich’s leadership thought it was doing. It’s very, very tempting to say that something metaphysical happened in Germany, that something really sulfurous got out of the earth there.

I talked to Anthony Burgess about this, and he said, rather beautifully, “I do believe in evil, and there’s no AJP Taylor type explanation for what happened in Eastern Europe in 1941 to 1945.”

I think a personified evil is too supernatural, but I do think that death takes over. It’s commonplace to say that in after the revolution in Russia, the value of human life collapsed. Now, the value of human life collapsed for the German Reich—no question about that. But it went sort of one further, where it became like an Aztec cult of death. The appetite for death was really, truly astounding. 

It’s been argued that there was no ideology really. There was this thing about the Jews and the thing about land empire and all this racial rubbish. But it wasn’t really an ideology that attracted people. It was a rallying cry for sadists. All you were doing was attracting a certain sort of man to this flag. And this is what’s happening in Iraq and Syria at the moment. Killing people is a great pleasure. This is a secret that is no longer well kept, and for certain people, there is no great hurdle to get into this death-dealing atmosphere. For most of us, the line between life and death is guarded very heavily, but for others it’s porous. And they can enter that world of death.

Exposure to ridicule is something deeply feared by all of us. There comes a moment in Shakespeare and tragedy when the hero has fallen, and Coriolanus, I think it is, says, “Get your staring done with, get your laughing done with.” It’s almost the most painful stage in his collapse and disgrace. Nabokov said, if you want to write about a gangster, then don’t have some tiptoeing conspirator come up behind him and shoot him in the head. No. Have him picking his nose and exploring with his profitable nostril—that’s how you pay them. Not by having them, as in Dickens, cornily punished or tritely converted. You mock them. It is what is most deeply feared.

You say one can’t mock the victims. I don’t see how you would ever persuade yourself that that was a decorous thing to do. 

VIOLENCE REDUCTION IS OUR BUSINESS

MARTIN: There is a mysterious concept that I more and more find myself thinking about. In all writing, you have to earn what you are writing about, and you can only do that internally. You have to suffer internally, until you reach a stage of impotent despair where you think, “I can’t do this, I can’t write this,” and only when you’re at that low ebb are you in fact ready to proceed. 

I felt this most intensely when I was writing a novel about the gulag, funny enough. I was living in Uruguay with my beautiful wife and beautiful daughters, surrounded by oceans and lagoons. In Uruguay, gentlest nation on earth, nothing is illegal, and I was writing about the gulag.

I had to do an awful lot of suffering in my study. And what that means is you come in in the morning, and you start to write a scene, and it’s dead. Your subconscious has not done the spade work that would prepare the scene to be written. You’ve come to write it, and the subconscious has switched off, and to get past that you have to almost wallow in despair about your own abilities, and you think, “Not only is this novel that I’m writing no good, but all my novels are no good.” And at that point, you belatedly realize that you’re ready to go on. 

I used to think that the point of writing, or what writers were doing, was playing a role in the education business—not transmitting knowledge to their readers, but responsiveness, so that the world looks richer and your perceptions are enriched. But I’ve since read Stephen Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and counterintuitively, it has declined dramatically. Even with the 20th century behind us, it is still declining. The reasons he gives are, number one, at the beginning of 19th century nation-states disarmed their people and claimed the monopoly of violence. Funnily enough, America neglected to do this—could have done it, but didn’t—and that is why it’s such a violent society. 

Other reasons. The invention of printing made a huge difference. The rise of women made a huge difference. But the other reason he gives, and he makes it fairly central, is that the rise of the novel meant that people were forced to imagine they were someone else. Suddenly you are Clarissa, or you are Emma, you know? 

I felt actually quite pleased with myself when I read that. I didn’t realize I had such important work to do, because what novelists are doing is making people less violent. I don’t see why anyone would want that not to happen. 

Really everyone who looks at the Holocaust is like an inspector after an air crash. You’re going to examine this particular crash very closely and find out what caused it. After you’ve done that, there are going to be more air crashes, but they’re not going to crash for that reason. We cannot be too alert to the things that precede something like the Third Reich, the conditions that proceeded. We cannot be too vigilant when it comes to that. Why anyone should object to having another inspector come and confirming, or pushing our understanding of these events just a millimeter forward, is still objectively, clearly very well worth doing.

THE CRY OF ENRAGED MEDIOCRITY

BOB: We were talking about how you were the victim of this ad hominem attack when Time’s Arrow came out. The other night (at a reading at Community Bookstore in Park Slope) you said something interesting about anti-Semitism being this mysterious thing, and that the Jews weren’t particularly impressed with Jesus. 

MARTIN: Anti-Semitism is a prejudice unlike any other. People who hate Black people don’t claim that Black people are running the world, or that there’s a conspiracy among Black people to run the world. Only the Jews are considered subhuman and superhuman at the same time. 

BOB: As someone who isn’t Jewish, I found that very interesting when I heard you say it the other night, but Ferne was a bit nervous about it. 

MARTIN: Anti-Semitism has been called a socialism of fools. It’s a sort of hatred of excellence and of exceptional talents and intellects. It’s a squeal of neglect from those who can’t stand to have level goalposts. It’s not too difficult to see why, given the history of the Jewish people. If you look at the list of Nobel Prize winners, hugely disproportionate number of them are Jews, and a certain sort of resentful dimness looks at that and feels that the goalposts are somehow not level. The only trouble is that they are level and so they want to shift them, or diminish them. It’s the cry of enraged mediocrity. 

Christopher Hitchens used to call it a neurosis, Saul Bellow used to call it a psychosis, but it’s also a component of schizophrenia. So it’s a sort of pathological area of the mind that gets awakened. The feeling of being yourself persecuted for being too stupid and mediocre, and you look around for something to blame. It’s pathetic, but it has been with us for 4000 years, and usually bubbles up in hard times. When times are good it tends to go underground, and in some countries it’s almost disappeared. But it can be awakened with alarming ease by events.

It was Christopher Hitchens’ theory that the reason that both Christians hate Jews is because the Jews were shown Jesus, and said, “No thanks, not interested.” And if you read the Old Testament, the gravest sin you can commit is not harking to the prophet. In addition, they were said to have killed Christ, but that prejudice, two millennia later, around the end of the 19th century, it was said by a German journalist, Wilhelm Mahr who said we should stop hating the Jews for religious reasons, and start hating them for racial and economic reasons. And that is how modern anti-Semitism was born.

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Watch this space for the disposition of the full interview.

Photo: Martin Amis, interviewed in the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, October 2014. Credit: Ferne Pearlstein/Anne Etheridge.