The Night of the Amazons     by Herbert Rosendorfer, Translated by Mike Mitchell Original title: Die Nacht der Amazonen Original language: German Published by Trafalgar Square Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Hardcover, 247 pages ISBN: 043642584X List Price: $23.95, £13.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £13.99 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Hardcover, 247 pages List Price: £13.99 Not available for ordering Published by Minerva Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Paperback, 246 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering

The Night of the Amazons is the blackest of black satires on Nazi Germany. It charts the rise of Christian Weber, one-time groom and pub bouncer, who exploits his status as one of the ‘Grand Old Soldiers’ of the ‘Movement’ (i.e. the Nazi Party), and certain compromising facts he knows about Hitler, to a position of power and influence and an immense fortune. Weber’s breathtakingly complete lack of any moral sense gives him total self-assurance and he proceeds to gratify his appetites in episodes of self-indulgence which are both chilling and grotesquely comic.

The absolute control the Nazis exerted gave figures like Weber the means to act out their own private fantasies at public expense and, often, in public, presenting them as concerns of ‘national importance’. In Weber’s career this culminates in the ‘Nights of the Amazons’, grotesque Wagnerian pageants financed by the City of Munich, in which well-developed members of the Bund Deutsche Madeln (the Nazi girls’ squad) parade naked, apart from cardboard helmets and the odd sash, on horseback before an audience of tens of thousands.

Christian Weber, Munich city councillor and President of the Upper Bavarian Regional Council was a historical figure, not a creation of Rosendorfer’s fertile imagination. (Many documents are quoted, especially legal ones, revealing Rosendorfer’s own professional expertise as a trial judge). As a historical figure he was very minor, meriting little more than a footnote in the history of the Third Reich. Is it not, then, to do him too much posthumous honour to make him the hero of a novel? That is a question The Night of the Amazons itself asks, and the answer is that the scum that rises to the top of the fascist ferment reveals the utter emptiness of all its ideology, all its nationalist bombast and patriotic posturing. The patriotic sham is summed up in the picture of the corpulent Weber, at the end of the war, still driving his own private car round a bomb-ravaged city, while the Luftwaffe can do nothing to repulse the Allied bombers because of fuel shortages.

Weber’s biography is interspersed with short conversations between a pair of ‘respectable’ citizens which reveal the attitudes of the population at large which, with the pusillanimous acceptance of those in power, coupled with a denial of real knowledge and a rejection of responsibility, show an attitude which it is made clear continues into the postwar period.

There is a scene in the novel in which Hitler, a great Chaplin fan, watches, with growing rage, the comedian’s demolition of him in The Great Dictator. One response, and perhaps the most appropriate one, to a figure like Hitler and a movement like National Socialism is not serious discussion of their ideas, but satire, satire of a savagery that leaves all their pretensions in tatters and reveals the brute flesh beneath. It is a satire that The Night of the Amazons provides in rich measure.

‘The compromising details about the Nazi bosses that were known to Esser ran the gamut of all aspects of life, one might say from the purse to the penis. If he had blown the gaff, the Nazi government would have disintegrated like the piece of rotten fruit it in fact was. A rotten apple that was held together only by the hands of the Old Comrades. All for one, one for all. If one of them had taken his hand away, then the filth would immediately have gushed over the hands, arms and bodies of the rest.’ p123