To Zenzi by Robert L. Schuster

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Zenzi by Robert L. Schuster Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) to zenzi Robert L. Schuster New Issues Poetry and Prose https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo86883959.html 344 pages; Print, $18.00 In Robert L. Shuster's To Zenzi, a war ends, a society crumbles, teenagers die or come of age, and the hunt for a good Nazi continues. To Zenzi is a sometimes picaresque, other times nightmarish, and always momentous romp through the smoldering ruins of the Third Reich, although the narrative will lurch across time and continents. Whether Shuster prevails in a quest that has already been attempted in books and Hollywood movies may be more of a matter of taste than literary merit for some. The search for any good Nazi has been complicated in recent days by the damage Nazi-inspired groups and politicians are intent on exacting here and abroad in self-aggrandizing campaigns to accumulate power. The redemption of Shuster's protagonist, Tobias Koertig, is further complicated by the circumstances that make his exploits as engaging as they are unnerving. Shuster relies on a combination of coincidences and allusions to establish the bona fides of innocence for his protagonist, thereby qualifying him as a good, or at least guiltless, Nazi. As Germany buckles under the British bombardment and the advance of Russian troops in the spring of 1945, thirteen-year-old Tobias loses his parents, wins the heart of his beloved, joins the military, and makes an enemy that will haunt him for the rest of his life. The scope of the novel is so broad readers will likely recognize tricks employed, or territory already covered, by Haruki Murakami, Flannery O'Connor, Norman Mailer, Michael Chabon, and Margaret Atwood. To [End Page 56] reveal how the novel parallels these authors would lay bare too many spoilers, and that's not counting the shades of J. D. Salinger. But unlike Salinger or his Holden Caulfield, Tobias is not interested in reclaiming innocence. He has a more immediate task: survival. Yet Tobias can't help making his case as uninformed and not responsible for the horrors of the Nazi regime, some of which he must endure himself, in the form of arbitrary and capricious adults. His service as a child soldier and eventual Reichsillustrator, Hitler's personal artist, is harrowing at times, to say nothing of his escape from Berlin to surrender to the Americans. In seeking to ensure Tobias is indeed sympathetic enough for his readers, Shuster also depicts the strange collision between boyhood obsessions and Nazi rituals, and hence the appeal joining Hitler had for so many. Tobias is both naive and unreadable about how much he knows and when he chooses to know it. He pleads ignorance about the aims of the Nazi enterprise and is quick to report that his father "despised the regime and its Chancellor." A talented sketch artist, Tobias is forbidden by his "Vati" from drawing the Reich's weaponry and from reading or listening to war bulletins. His father's plan must have worked, because he declares no knowledge of geography, and is oblivious when his erstwhile girlfriend, Kreszentia Fuchs (the Zenzi of the book's title), advises him on how to avoid being sent to the front lines. "You need to develop an imagination," she says. Tobias will make great use of Zenzi's advice over the years, although he might not be conscious of it. And though he describes himself as "only a few years beyond a belief in Santa Claus," his upbringing occurred in close proximity to the duplicity of the Nazi regime. For Tobias's father is an art dealer, a dangerous profession that brings the family in contact with banned music, artists, and Jews. At times Tobias seems to know exactly what his father is up to: "in the last decade he had exploited the Nazi fat cats, selling them the heroic nonsense they liked." But when Martin Bormann tells Tobias he had bought art from his father, Tobias is shocked—but not that shocked: "Vati had never told me such a thing, though he had once boasted, with cynical triumph of shipping photographs to Göring...