A Canadian at the Cabaret

Stephens Gerard Malone’s I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin reflects a shifting approach by Canadian writers to the country’s relationship to war. The books that set the stage for it—although they approach the link between European history and a Canadian point of view differently—include Timothy Findley’s The Wars and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. In those groundbreaking novels, a Canadian leaves youth and a stable future behind in order to gain the kind of difficult knowledge available in Europe during wartime. Malone’s strategy is similar at the outset, as we meet his main character, Michael Renner, in 1932, while he muses about childish things on a Nova Scotia shoreline. “In Michael’s twenty-five years,” Malone tells us, “he’d only once tried to spend a night away from home.” In quick order he is packed off to Berlin to help his paternal grandmother cope with a recent stroke.

Ever the innocent abroad, Michael is initiated into European ways at the Hamburg Bahnhof, where his luggage is stolen and his effort at changing money leaves him “suspecting that Shylock had fleeced him on the rate as his father said his kind no doubt would.” This is one of the few inklings the novel provides of pre-war Canadian ideas regarding the imminent collapse of European peace and descent into racial war. We know that Michael is dedicated to his family, and we learn that he is conflicted about his sexuality, but I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin does not aim to examine, in Jamesian fashion, the naive, open-eyed North American world view alongside the more dangerous and custom-ridden ways of interwar Europe. Although great public events lurk behind each scene, the story is almost completely a private one, focusing on Michael’s stumbling efforts to create a new life for himself in pre-war Berlin. Once he has departed from his home, it vanishes from the narrative, apart from a few letters he receives about what he has left behind.

As if inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s famous description of a narrator as a camera with its shutter stuck open, Malone positions Michael as a kind of neutral recording instrument. The increasingly perverse public life of Nazi-dominated Germany rolls over him like a tidal wave. He is a bystander at the burning of the Reichstag. He witnesses efforts to euthanize the sick and handicapped, as well how the German population rallies around the jingoism of the 1936 summer Olympic games. Michael’s response to such events is generally mute.

The text on the inside cover of the novel suggests that Michael’s predicament reflects “the way ordinary people slip naively into horror,” and this does describe Michael’s pre-war experience. He watches helplessly as his grandmother’s property passes into the hands of self-interested relatives and is torn down to make way for civic renewal. He marries into an unselfconsciously Nazi family and ends up playing a role in the production of chemicals that will be central to the extermination of Jews in gas chambers. Because Michael is meant to be naive, these events are not explored in detail, whether for their ethical or political repercussions. The Nazi abuse that attracts sustained attention is the systematic exclusion of gay men from open society. Michael comes to recognize his own desires as he encounters closeted men of power and explores the underground culture of Berlin’s night life. Malone follows these themes in some detail in the latter part of the novel, where he portrays the imprisonment of gay men at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.

What strikes the reader as new in all this—or at least as a departure from previous fiction about the German annihilation of Jews, gypsies and other “undesirables”—is the use of the war as a backdrop for the personal transformation of the lead character, who is a sort of dupe, a man with no real role to play in the European disaster.

The Jewish themes of the period are buried deep in the book’s narrative architecture. One of Malone’s stranger decisions is the use of the term Juden throughout the novel to refer to Jews, when all other German-speaking dialogue, rendered as it is in English, avoids the use of specialized German words. This estranges the reader from who these Juden might be, and why it is that German society had chosen to promote them as public enemy number one. Jews are not, in fact, a central concern in the novel, and when they do appear at its end, in crowds of camp victims being marched to Sachsenhausen from places further east, they remain abstract figures: “columns of shuffling near-dead,” “thousands of translucent-skinned skeletons,” “the last of the pitiful zombies.”

It does not seem that Malone was motivated by the urge to enter the immense canon of Holocaust literature. Rather, I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin has a drawing-room quality. Malone is proficient at portraying callow talk, whether in bourgeois living rooms or secret cabarets, where characters try to behave normally while Berlin burns. He presents, as well, a portrait of repressed gay desire, which is arguably the novel’s central concern. Michael’s unrequited love for a younger man is finally fulfilled in a sick ward at Sachsenhausen. There, we are meant to recognize his abiding goodness, as though his innate simplicity survives regardless of what he has seen and done.

In its narrative style, I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin is more like a Hollywood presentation of the war than the novels of Findley or Ondaatje. There are big cinematic scenes of air planes colliding with city pavement, and historical turning points such as Kristallnacht or the Berlin Olympics are evoked in shorthand, in a page or two. At times, the reader feels that it is not narrative but aesthetic effect that Malone pursues with the greatest effort, as scenes are built, like a Max Beckmann painting, of images and colour. An example of this appears early in the book as Michael is introduced to the “best club in Berlin for jazz”:

A similar strategy is applied to the description of camp inmates fighting over a scrap of food:

Michael remains a camera recording these scenes, his volition annulled by their strangeness and grimness.

In Findley and Ondaatje’s novels, both the main characters’ personal stake in world events and the examination of the events themselves are key concerns. Canada, too, operates as a counterweight to European experience. Malone’s book narrows the equation, removing Canada, as well as the meaning of European disaster, so that Michael, at novel’s end, is a ghostly figure haunting the rubble of Berlin, with no intention to return to his Canadian past and no clear role in the European present.