Obedience Revisited: The Undertaking by Audrey Magee

One of the most popular posts on Annecdotal over the last six months was my review of The Good Children by Roopa Farooki. The theme of the novel, which evoked a lively discussion, is the downside of obedience to authority as exposed by Stanley Milgram’s research. In a series of psychological experiments, members of the public showed themselves willing to give painful and damaging electric shocks to another volunteer if asked to do so by an authority figure. This research arose from the attempt to understand the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. In her Bailey’s prize shortlisted debut, The Undertaking, Audrey Magee further illuminates this theme through the marriage of Peter Faber, an ordinary German soldier, and an ambitious young woman, Katharina Spinell.

The traditional Pakistani arranged marriage which Natasha Ahmed flagged up in the comments on my post seems almost romantic relative to Peter and Katharina’s union, motivated by his desire for leave from the front and hers for the hope of leaving home and a secure pension should her husband die in service. Yet love blossoms against the odds and it’s only the thought of his wife that sustains Peter through the ill-conceived midwinter assault on Stalingrad. She, meanwhile, in conjunction with her acquisitive mother and excessively compliant father, is helping herself to the luxuries left behind in Berlin by the deported Jews.

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One of the uncomfortable pleasures of this novel is how we are exposed to everyday acts of cruelty perpetrated by characters we care about. Katharina’s lack of compassion for the Jewish mother who must carry her hungry baby in her arms while Katharina pushes hers in a state-of-the-art pram mirrors Peter’s and his fellow soldiers’ eviction of families from their homes to their certain death in the bitter snow. Because we know about the concentration camps, the couple’s rationalisations of their behaviour seem especially delusional. Yet because we know they were on the losing side in the war, their dreams of a golden future have a particular poignancy. (The omnipotent fantasies and blind patriotism of the Japanese is portrayed in a similar way in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.) We’re also given an insight into how the humiliation experienced by their country during the First World War has secured their commitment to the Second, a cultural consequence of transgenerational trauma flagged up by Lori Schafer in relation to my post on that theme.

Stylistically, the novel unfolds through short scenic chapters with a preponderance of dialogue, almost as if it were a radio play. Chapter 25 consists entirely of a brief conversation between Katharina and her father after her severely traumatised brother becomes another casualty of war: 

 Mrs Spinell went to bed and remained there under blankets in her dressing gown.
‘Should we fetch Dr Weinart?’ asked Katharina.
‘She’ll come out of it,’ said Mr Spinell. ‘Just give her time. It is a terrible thing for a mother.’
‘And for a father?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you feel guilty, Father?’
‘No, Katharina. Should I?’
‘I don’t know. I do.’
‘Why?’
‘That he went back.’
‘There was nothing to be done.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘We have to play our part, Katharina. To follow orders.’
‘No matter what the consequences?’
‘Otherwise it’s chaos.’
‘It’s chaos, anyway.’
‘It will be worth it.’
‘Worth Johannes?’
‘He would have understood.’ 

This is a society in which love is a liability, as Katharina discovers when she attempts to stay loyal to her husband after his “disgrace” in surrendering to the enemy. But when Berlin falls, and Katharina discovers both the limits of the Nazis’ generosity and the universal brutality of soldiers, the marriage contract undertaken by the couple is severely tested.

Thank you Atlantic Books for my review copy of The Undertaking. For more about this novel the author’s ideas behind it, see my Q&A with Audrey Magee. You can discover more about the obedience experiments by watching the video on my post The Tragedy of Obedience. My short story on this theme, The Experiment Requires, has now been published by Fiction on the Web. For other angles on the treatment of the Jews under the Nazi regime, see my reviews of In Paradise and By Blood.