Over the weekend I read another of the books which my sister had bought me for Christmas: ‘Sanisbar, oder der letzte Grund’ by Alfred Andersch. I was initially a little sceptical about the novel as I had never heard of the author before and the cover looked somewhat uninspiring, but by the time I had read the opening chapters I was completely hooked and couldn’t bear the thought of coming away to London for a fortnight without first getting to the end of it.

Published in the late 1950s, the book tells the story of a random group of people who all find themselves in the small German harbour town of Rerik in Autumn 1937. They each come from quite different walks of life, but are brought together by the one thing they have in common: a desire to leave Nazi Germany. From Rerik it is theoretically possible to escape to Scandanavia by boat, and thus the action focusses around one character, the unimaginative fisherman, Knudsen. Knudsen, who owns a boat, is the only member of the cast with the ability to attempt such an escape, but paradoxically the only person who has a good reason to stay where he is. His mentally disturbed wife would certainly be taken away to a concentration camp if he were to leave her unattended for too long.

Knudsen is a (somewhat unenthusiastic) member of the communist party, and one of the party faithful, a young man called Gregor, has been sent to Rerik to give him a bit of a talking to an inspire him to under some propaganda action in the area. Gregor does his best, but he himself has already become disillusioned with communism and before he even arrives in the town, he has decided that he is going to flee from his responsibilities. Whilst holding a secret meeting with Knudsen in a local church, they meet the local vicar Helander, a nice elderly gentleman who lost a leg during the Great War and appears not to have long left to live. Anyone as squeamish as me will feel an urge to be sick when there are detailed descriptions of his wound and his false leg! He himself is clearly too frail to flee anywhere, but inside his church there is a magical piece of sculpture which he calls “Der lesende Klosterschueler”. The powers-that-be have decided that this is so-called ‘entartete Kunst’ (sorry, I don’t know how to translate that… degenerate art perhaps?) and therefore they are sending officials to come and take it away in the morning. The sculpture, which portrays a boy utterly absorbed in a book, is presumably considered dangerous because those in control do not wish to encourage the population to read. As soon as Gregor sets eyes on the figure he becomes strangely haunted by it, and together he and Helander convince Knudsen to help them rescue it.

Things are complicated further by the arrival of Judith, a Jewish girl from a wealthy family who is on the run from the Nazis. Her mother committed suicide a few days previously, and her last wish was that Judith should attempt to escape to Sweden via Rerik. Arriving in Rerik, Judith quickly becomes disillusioned when she realises there are virtually no international boats in the harbour, and she immediately runs into difficulties when the owner of the hotel she is staying in asks to see her passport. She can’t show it to him because that would immediately betray her as a Jew, so she is fast losing all hope when suddenly Gregor takes pity on her and decides to rescue her.

Together the unlikely bunch set off on a perilous adventure which involves rowing a small boat across the harbour in the dead of night, trying to avoid the searchlights of the police boats which patrol the waters looking for those trying to escape. It’s a wonderfully tense book which brings to life the fear and hopelessness of the era in a highly readable way. Somewhat unexpectedly, it more or less ends happily with Judith and the statue making it to Sweden and Gregor cycling off into the distance. Poor old Helander ends up with a back full of bullets, but his days were numbered anyway and he manages to shoot down a Nazi first!

It’s impossible to do the atmosphere of the book justice in such a short review, but I thoroughly recommend it and I’ve categorised it in my list of books which I most definitely want to read a second time

Tags: alfred andersch, Books, sansibar oder der letzte grund

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