Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Death of the Adversary: A Novel
    The Death of the Adversary: A Novel
    The Death of the Adversary: A Novel
    Ebook275 pages4 hours

    The Death of the Adversary: A Novel

    By Hans Keilson

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Written while Hans Keilson was in hiding during World War II, The Death of the Adversary is the self-portrait of a young man helplessly fascinated by an unnamed "adversary" whom he watches rise to power in 1930s Germany. It is a tale of horror, not only in its evocation of Hitler's gathering menace but also in its hero's desperate attempt to discover logic where none exists. A psychological fable as wry and haunting as Badenheim 1939, The Death of the Adversary is a lost classic of modern fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 20, 2010
    ISBN9781429979948
    Author

    Hans Keilson

    Hans Keilson is the author of Comedy in a Minor Key and The Death of the Adversary. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel in 1933. During World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. Later, as a psychotherapist, he pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. He died in 2011 at the age of 101.

    Read more from Hans Keilson

    Related to The Death of the Adversary

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      'Killing Commendatore' Is The Latest Evasive, Magical, Utterly Unique Novel By Murakami

      Oct 9, 2018

      Haruki Murakami weaves an intriguing, time-challenging story around the life of a portrait painter who is changed forever by a work of art.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Get Into Bag Of Bones

      Apr 7, 2022

      Established in December 2021, Bag of Bones Press aims to ‘champion and publish budding writers of horror and dark fiction who may not have had a traditional or formal education in the literary arts’. Submission calls are open to anyone and everyone T

      1 min read

    • Article

      New York City Cabbie

      Aug 26, 2022

      New York City Cabbie
      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘The Orchard’: Featured Fiction from David Hopen

      Nov 19, 2020

      An excerpt from a book Booklist called "a brilliantly conceived and crafted coming-of-age novel of ideas, replete with literary and philosophical references." The post ‘The Orchard’: Featured Fiction from David Hopen appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Jenkins

      Feb 4, 2021

      Jenkins
      6 min read

    • Article

      ‘It Wasn’t Really About The Money’: The Shocking Story Of Hollywood’s Con Queen

      Jun 5, 2023

      In hindsight, of course it was a set-up. The messages that fell fairy dust-like into the inboxes of cinematographers and actors, makeup artists and security workers, came from the email addresses of top female Hollywood executives, women who probably

      4 min read

    • Article

      Amanda Lear: The Androgynous Muse To Dalí Who Made Disco Intellectual

      Jun 1, 2022

      At the peak of the disco era in the late 1970s, Amanda Lear, who had established herself as a singer after 15 years of being a Vogue model and muse to everyone from Salvador Dalí to Bryan Ferry, had a bone to pick. “Disco music is a fantastic medium,

      5 min read

    • Article

      I Want a Reckoning

      Oct 9, 2018

      I Want a Reckoning
      8 min read

    • Article

      Reading Vonnegut to Cope with Death

      Oct 15, 2018

      I received the call late on a Saturday night. I live in Europe, far from my home in the U.S., so receiving a call from my mother at 10 p.m. my time (1 p.m. her time) was never unusual. But when the tone of her voice on the other line was a distinct “

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Secret Life of Grief

      Dec 3, 2013

      The Secret Life of Grief
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Death

      Jun 14, 2017

      MORE and more of us are writing our own obituaries. Some of us meticulous planners write a few paragraphs that we hope will be printed in our local newspaper or on our funeral programs after we die. However, most of us are creating detailed digital n

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Death

      Jun 13, 2017

      MORE and more of us are writing our own obituaries. Some of us meticulous planners write a few paragraphs that we hope will be printed in our local newspaper or on our funeral programs after we die. However, most of us are creating detailed digital n

      12 min read

    • Article

      Living Greatly

      Oct 22, 2019

      Living Greatly
      10 min read

    • Article

      Reasons To Be Cheerful

      Sep 7, 2022

      I’M settling down to gather my thoughts when my husband sticks his head around the door. ‘Try and write something cheerful. Nobody needs reminding of all that is wrong with the world.’ He may as well ask me to have a go at glossolalia. I know he’s ri

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sabrina Cohen-Hatton

      Sep 20, 2021

      Sabrina Cohen-Hatton
      5 min read

    • Article

      How To Write A Swan Song

      Nov 26, 2022

      How To Write A Swan Song
      8 min read

    • Article

      This Feels Like Never-Ending

      May 9, 2018

      This Feels Like Never-Ending
      9 min read

    • Article

      Pozdnyshev’s Address

      Jun 8, 2021

      THE MURDER I COMMITTED—it wasn’t simply the strike of a dagger, at night, on the fifth of October, in a brightly lit living room. The murder I committed is a phenomenon of duration, akin more to slow poisoning than a flashing blade. I dare to hope th

      9 min read

    • Article

      Final Determination

      May 10, 2023

      Living people get a lot wrong about the After Life. It isn’t binary Heaven or Hell but a spectrum where most people end up somewhere better than their Earthly life. There’s also a state of Abeyance where you stay if you have unfinished business. For

      12 min read

    • Article

      A Conversation

      Sep 1, 2021

      I’ve known Melissa Broder for almost a decade. I invited her to my first book party because I was a big admirer of her writing and I wanted to meet her. She was smart and funny and I could tell she wanted to know something about what any of us are do

      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Death of the Adversary

    4/5

    4 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This may be the most enjoyable experience reading fiction that I have had in the last year - and also one of the most profound and unexpected. My attention was piqued in June when I heard of Keilson's death at the age of 101; I knew he was considered to be a good author, yet I never read him. Having long had a penchant for the bleak, searching quality of twentieth-century Dutch fiction, particularly Willem Frederik Hermans, Harry Mulisch, and Gerard Reve, I decided to read this.However stunning Keilson's novels are - and I hope to communicate that momentarily - he is even better known for other work. For many decades, he worked in child psychology and psychiatry, with an especial focus on children severely traumatized by World War II. His keen insight into human nature, thought processes, and motivation is on par with the world's greatest novelists, and that is no hyperbole. As if his psychological and psychiatric training were not inducements enough to read his work, the horrors of the War were not pure theory for him. Both of his parents perished in Auschwitz.The novel's setting is 1930s Germany. We follow an unnamed narrator in childhood; we get hints of his precociousness and impishness through learning of both his penchant for forging stamps, and also through a sustained theory of the history of struggle that he presents and continuously develops throughout the novel. As a boy, he acquires a lifelong fascination with an adversary who is almost always unnamed, but sometimes goes by simply "B." Some reviews have been only too eager to guess at the existence of "B," seeing as how we are in 1930s Germany. However, I personally think Keilson might have a good reason for keeping the adversary anonymous; using one name would collapse the entire structure of the novel into a kind of singularity; keeping the adversary nameless (even though we still may continue to guess, and guess accurately), Keilson keeps the narrative at a level of constant psychological, humanistic portraiture, instead of the story of a single couple locked in interminable battle.As the novel progresses and the narrator grows into manhood, we learn that he has a friend who is utterly taken with "B" and his ideas; another time, we see him spending an afternoon with a girl that he knows and fancies from his workplace whose friends turn out to be sympathetic to fascism, too. Instead of simplistic moralism, Keilson intelligently and deftly engages with the adversary on a human level, at one point realizing the nihilism inherent in the logic of "I want to kill him just as badly as he wants to kill me."Narratively speaking, Keilson's biggest gift is to mix tone and message in such unique and telling ways. On hearing that a novel is set during World War II, one is almost preconditioned to expect the trials and tribulations of the oppressor against the oppressed and hiding in safe houses; it is assumed that we will root for the good, the just, the persecuted, and that evil, in the end, will be vanquished. Keilson presented us with nothing so sugar-coated. His efforts at characterization drive toward showing the similarities between himself and B, not the vast differences. He is not interested in showing you how morally superior he is (we already know that), but instead wants to show how existentially, a word applied perhaps too liberally to this novel, he and "B" are similarly situated.Keilson's search feels so liberating, instead of the moral burden that seem to come with reading so many novels of the Holocaust. As much as I have read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, I found Keilson to be better than both of them. Unfortunately, he is not well known in the United States, but he should be. I should also add here that Ivo Jarosy's translation from the German is luminous, especially in its ability to capture dialogue. I would recommend "The Death of the Adversary" for anyone in search of a great novel that, like all great novels, is more eager to share questions than answers.
    • 3/5
      So utterly German and psychoanalytic that it was almost unreadable BUT was reading it for class so pushed thru. A portrait of the internal vacillations of a German Jew during the rise of Hitler, the narrator manages to delude himself for most of the book. He finally realizes however that it's not an academic exercise that Hitler accuses the Jews of this, that and everything. They're not merely friendly adversaries, they're enemies. Perhaps many people felt, like this writer, that it couldn't be happening. A very grim read.
    • 4/5
      This is a haunting philosophical tale of a Jewish child growing up in the 1920s and 1930s of Hitler's Germany. His adversary, whom he calls B, is clearly Hitler. It is because of B that he is teased and tormented at school and his personal chronicles reflect the growing menace of Nazism in Germany. This is clearly a book that deserved to be republished.
    • 3/5
      Translated from the German by Iva Jarosy “One cannot cut the lines of experience out of one’s face, like the rotten bits in an apple; one has to carry them about in one’s face and know that one carries them; one sees them, as in a mirror, every day when one washes oneself, and one cannot cut them out, they belong there.”“He had swore to her…that this was how it had all happened, as though he had first to mist the mirror slightly with his breath before he could dare to look into it. […] What can a man do but breathe at the mirror and look gently at his misted image?”Mirrors are a repeating motif in Hans Keilson’s novel, The Death of the Adversary. Written during WWII, this novel has been republished this year. The Los Angeles Times wrote enthusiastically “It's as if, one morning, we were to learn that not only had Anne Frank survived the secret annex but was also still among us.” (Sept 26, 2010*) Mirrors generally symbolize self-reflection and contemplation, and are fittingly used to describe the inner questions that plague a young man as he realizes that Hitler’s influence was inevitably going to change his life. First, he hears his parents whisper and worry, and tries to decipher the codes they seemed to be speaking in. Next he finds himself an outcast in the neighborhood as the other children begin to avoid him. His mother takes the well-intentioned step of intervening on his behalf, trying to convince the children that they are all alike and should play together. His humiliation is complete, and never fully leaves him. Thus, he begins focusing on his “adversary”.“…enemies will never die out in this world. They are recruited from former friends.”The next salvo comes from a close friend who reveals he supports Hitler’s agenda. He explains to the unnamed protagonist that it is simply a matter of balance: just as elks need wolves to control their species and balance their habitat, so too, Germany is balancing itself. For the greater good, he implies. Their friendship quickly dissolves. The young man now explains the details of his experience, from strained friendships to watching his parents change to going into hiding. Certainly, this novel has a more mature voice than Anne Frank’s diary. The protagonist is more somber and definitely more pessimistic. I didn’t find that the story gave any exceptionally new revelations about the time period, but it does provide a new perspective to describe the experience. One brief passage about the change in his parent’s attitude reveals a surprising aspect of human nature under trial: his father who bitterly lamented the rise of Hitler’s power becomes almost giddy with excitement when the horror begins, while his religious mother, who started out optimistic, begins to withdraw into depression and anxiety.One thing that is especially fascinating is that Keilson never actually defines his adversary as Hitler. He uses the term “B” to represent him, although it’s clear of whom he speaks: a man with an evil plan and the power to implement it. Yet, at times “B” is also portrayed as an intangible force, a concept of evil bigger than the Holocaust. The ambiguity gives the reader pause to consider what defines evil and apply the revelations experienced to virtually anyone suffering oppression. Incidently, I was curious if by using the initial rather than the name, Keilson is attempting to lessen the power of Hitler’s name, giving it less fame. For example, notorious killers today are well known by name: Ted Bundy, Lee Harvey Oswald, or John Wayne Gacey. After a period of time when their horrific deeds are forgotten, they become simply a pop culture reference. By not using Hitler’s name, it could be that in some small way, Keilson doesn’t want to give him any further notoriety.

    Book preview

    The Death of the Adversary - Hans Keilson

     2abook_preview_excerpt.html\˒ƑH=մ{6\-6E8f4*$5œ>B d="!ff Gd#˿X}7\-Ua8VR5걺X-q=_j<^ry>[<z|=nUjnSjf||q8&:TMzMN]{ZP1cs }SRaO1v&[58e1*[um䪏2a/fV:ơ:[KG{]3y\m.U=c #U*#;P~ĤzGt OX)q!TU;,#wSۡ:>jL<#=頝ڮKxαaK&[ak{|X~Wiا=c&fRӎk <`/S>x,[ zO 9SU}Gua80z*7A8c6Wh 2Va[/A^Qo`8Afh 4OPqS435 炰f0Nww\4_Na*C<ޖq|T!:x.cF*Pu<2u^0#Qj=q=UMQyө|4Zަ8>6ޏ!J{N Q1Ɔ4V.`3ǔc۸򿙻;ؘ6ܪ #X,_²z_Uﵖ*" )XHĝialpL $ cxQ6&$i}aU,c@=7uׇ"S ]Hh=TC\CG[!??ZKb|x&hj݀1M\J˸tc- fmKDq@`JdS;wҚJ v:3:$;I)c@n]G`~c/T}\#u#1:N|0!baǴ5m.t0L&iY r:}Lf7@}.4-}KsLշm/mē :5N dE2$}@E!F uts(n4AK <qn@ pL JB>eZa1_Z&<<'Sq!S,1Poo )*|HmQ>%Y 1ShGxunZ|P}OpAo W<{lO' ;,ݗFtUl`6$";v@Pz1DI_qx̌[l]J0x j27&4=Ʌx8dBGRg=wda75 [>4i`7E_DLU4Ք-e \֕0FȔg`BF3XV2%ڎ7>£!gp9Ў.5R>:[P "HjuQI3ˠzܯ߭\̣pvZHs%>ݵ3n.w} -G;)<¥VrHGbQQt= ߴs]+l8=$B0H&N0W! <6J? +`G95?;XF'9V"SЊvGHwll=mG \I(O8pDAqh7 oÀY D)sHbMs8$|tT &P Г6P1 |Cq[D&Zi5ѝ|3hhKk-]9ɓi)( g_rZJr"y*Qʱmtfx17(m gD(nJPUR}{|q eFPDHgBږ3d!!'&L% S 3u#KWxBM[fvW&= ?\8KOSݛV!o;_ w0~6jcʖ>sa<&?D1(MBG#]ŸwŁI&C?a,O%(a2Ahd!1NY:iN^U?7Z% |H\M'_TYTsS.>]V%) W/ .LDV*bUX} R='Ww0[Nj)T{ :2i\xh#1'QjgG.»Dj?O)>nmLNVrK:ߪ0ʰUQd œz Kn:g};G9`uE0q\U1LfD_j*pgp7V(|ك})%̞;ˎ K @I5:Y$qJZ1GxrlmNXe[Ārq+ AJf~x2f6X) [`-l [!'4fR+VJyXlyنԱjU Ċ~ĩ>[~TB6T,s?Tr݂#sW5G(f,O2M)˨˚Բq\WvcΟyZՒ&j`ԙnFc+oTm 3Vvh6l{9ˮ f%TGCz#fҾN-YlR]IixvL1<A5@NĸT.^#JVmGl WeG A%5{l00îd7vHUS`AnIah7bj%m#G#̀H<4O䶓N\γa+#}ͭK27m-Mi_h [ƾLI9ms -m'O!I!95O*Qd lxQ"b)u+J=QqߋƎe^A nQ̍+3;OK'p+Qwa^aPʛg@%93xrRiEutAɴ,V"5JRBӔw8E*+(ЇMYZE$dȶa+A=IF^% N\gM}ނ-%[Tʞ|c})T"7Mu.Bmr-l./R,pxMbe/G߃T/wK ; J[tZQK|ە)^QC+V(̘sLuR x}&;*1ܛƮt[^q)V꒝ɮpϡ%ּ6L@j·9uF&76Ȁͧ?˯wfѣ|pi*ZFBҾJ=IR[yu~z22.#xe3۝ Ypsħy{e#XI ]pSs"ӑaK!L(bxb`?l(:!b5:ݟyhuY "ދCـ֌aS?I`A"T1wakH S 7!G庙Dam Jyvrt;^gP8V% +Re1;Ź odeK,+ &'s6XdȑXA` }̢hEjXuT)bWx}nWMh }?̑HQEvYuyɣK*J["u#Qө8RO9 ”goR3%=ٵG?ۊ}[yVG9dY Vi\ⵎjP5䌠XxVOqϯ;ZVFv^ifeoYRJdj;c%^ܿyDZb=ǜ*-^vg*_ Tw`bKdd[ kp9\vFvtM+Dkp8@9Ȩe.-,R3@4|f1AWƝSf eZ~qέTY|״&ZeVx!&FMՂ94!`YXٹ.,|CI^ǃXՐy\bM&S9X{ot0]xKϝW]QMk; <ٸNƖBlՊv @gqV 00:Yl_-`!M.{=N6%ioȇ=X^&-X#,6FJz@sQnݻkKW(SRO0X[mgCRKPD15DKk]Fvr@ace' ~ow'ڗ][TJh%M0Gl9(3:V]7Sd;`K1Y U i%mj!T9 _=oNfSROfy|].nmKyEV=!AӤ}^}oCw}q@-e Pq y%=q"+WvUAqq<{\ݖݿ7媿׏9}NRxxvw뿴b_w2yrZ>{N+mt/+g96d?T { % 1V?rsނ ";(XQTV/íǒcskCYNj|PO?ϭm"}<蕖1&%ޭ+(?mvǹ;]l[I%fgV.k ^|sw) 'Z_d3rL|r9\ryAQs߿Z-=Xšp7̮;9Yxz ^uR2kBbP" aIvd "W&qgCwdnh`V(FBhܱ9߯ӘLc^Ըbpq zya~WsK8=;! Jy$o#M~c]e`-1V'y~Ad7NKTR ņ; 9xJף+VKVv9uZҥ0?@;CP[`W4\fH_fGO[P\ͤ;xB._eEZ[HIf-5\?9eXk$JgX?;~3(~??tcNз4YN޲ƃGuW]6y+"5۹n%E*8~khU[իW\Yw@l+9Lkp~eSpt.':yp=]wP/Юlo(5Mâ+DJR7W$i:}^X 픳Bίy~9DƐSLt_vjfErP PM=a&06pΣh1p"LRT4>J*d0pfO'*M-ǛKdYv xj|m|:r-ø=T?T\،lNlwyAP"Vo7X'޹Z]v -ua,E's1vz+To?!Xy˯{ eW֫)_²Q9e3er:G5\dS:szAD2-! |7k߯B >SǍ[?aL^7\VvԞWR@"e!E&Z`A<>o SYAm+Rz*IHEM~Xwj:AY>dʼnߤ9[G[ɴlk^Vh7[PEfcRcN.T~WYv-@JW>c)n7T^nZŠZzz|f!_Nw,.0u*Y>Ru(hgB[IEkL
    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1