OUR PHILOSOPHER

This unsettling tale concerns the persecution of one man in pre–World War II Germany.

Herr Veilchenfeld, a philosopher in his 60s, comes to a small town after apparently having been forced to leave his university position. He finds that “instead of talking to him, people hurry by him silently.” Someone breaks a window in a home he’s visiting. Young men beat him up on the street, then take him to a group of older men who shave his head. Someone pees in the milk bottle delivered to his door. Another group invades his home and trashes his library. When he tries to move elsewhere, the town bureaucracy ties up his paperwork and finally shreds his passport, declaring him a noncitizen. Hofmann never explicitly says why all this is happening. But he was a German writer (1931-1993) for whom some history is inescapable, even for a book first published in 1986, 50 years after Veilchenfeld arrived in the town, even when the crime is not mass slaughter but the slow destruction of one person over three years. Hofmann never uses the words Jew, Nazi, Hitler, or brownshirt, as noted in the introduction by his son, the poet and translator Michael Hofmann. The full name of Bernhard Israel Veilchenfeld comes only on Page 51 and the last year of the action, 1938, on Page 99. Hofmann tells his story through the voice of a boy who has no sense of what he’s witnessing. The author surrounds his philosopher with mostly nondescript townspeople who abet, approve, or only quietly, and rarely, censure. Veilchenfeld exists and suffers in nearly total isolation—as a man in a small town, as a human in history. The author’s notions of complicity aren’t original, but they have an unusual force in his understated style and its clear translation, as does the implicit suggestion that the reader take a moment to multiply this victim by millions.

A painful, powerful work.