Heidegger's Glasses by Thaisa Frank

A book review

Twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger's glasses may have inspired one of his insights on the nature of being when he briefly "fell out of the world" while looking at them, "as though he'd never seen glasses or knew how they were used." In a sense, all of Germany "fell out of the world" when Hitler took over. Heidegger's Glasses plunges readers into the midst of Nazi absurdity. Many death camp inmates, soon to die, were forced to write home to make the camps sound pleasant. The letters, of course, were never answered. In the novel, because Heinrich Himmler, obsessed with the supernatural, feared the lack of answers could unsettle the dead and endanger the Reich, a group of Jewish linguists were diverted from the camps to answer them. The linguists live in an abandoned mine that has been converted into a spartan but fanciful underground bunker. "There was a canopy of fake sky with a sun that rose and set, and stars that duplicated the constellations on Hitler's birthday."

Elie is the mother figure to this group of the saved and incarcerated. She flirts with an SS officer who gives her food, coats, chocolate, playing cards and other confiscated miscellanies which she takes back to her charges. Her occasional secret excursions to whisk Jews out of the country terrify her lover, who tries to tamp down his jealousy but fears that one day she will take one risk too many. When the project is ordered to produce a plausible answer to Martin Heidegger's incomprehensibly philosophical letter to his Jewish optometrist, an Auschwitz inmate, Elie cannot resist temptation. Her efforts spiral into her most absurd and dangerous mission yet.

The converted mine is a fictional fancy. The "Curator's Notes" that open the novel feel factual but are written by a character, so teasing out history from fiction can be difficult. It's probably best to take the whole novel, one of the most strikingly original to be written about Nazi Germany, as allegory. It's a strong one. (2010; 336 pages)