France needed only a few weeks in 1987 to try some of the worst crimes of World War II in the trial of Klaus Barbie. Dealing with the past of his own family occupies the author Sorj Chalandon his entire life.
Hardly anyone followed the trial of former Gestapo boss Klaus Barbie in Lyon as closely as journalist Sorj Chalandon. He has received several awards for his reports from the courtroom, which dealt with the deportation of Jewish children, mass shootings and torture. In his new novel “Traitor Child” Chalandon tells this process again. At the same time, the question is what role his father played in the 1940s. Understanding the depth of his father’s story has occupied Chalandon throughout his life.
Lyon, 1962. Chalandon is ten when his grandfather smacks him in the head for being a “traitor child”. During the war, his father was “on the wrong side” and wore “German clothes”. Grandfather’s accusations leave the boy confused – they hardly fit with his father’s heroic stories, to which he listens night after night.
In it, the father portrays himself as a French patriot who sabotaged the enemy and as a simple soldier who survived the war with great courage and skill. In other stories, he suddenly reports how he went into the fight against Bolshevism as an SS member or how he defended the Führerbunker in Berlin in 1945. Whatever role he plays, Chalandon’s father always thinks he’s on the right side. He is always braver and smarter than everyone else. If Chalandon asks questions, even critical ones, instead of answers he will throw fists and insults at him.
In 1987, Chalandon understands the contradictions of these stories. He is now in his mid-30s, a journalist with the “Libération” and knows that his father is a liar. However, he would like to know the truth from him personally, would like to know why he became a traitor and secretly hopes that his father will admit his guilt. Perhaps a small part of the burden of a traitor child can be taken away from him.
So he researches until he gets his father’s criminal file in his hands. All the lies that became the father’s protective armor during and after the war are now falling apart bit by bit. Chalandon’s father was a French soldier, resistance fighter, Vichy legionnaire, Nazi in an institution of the Nazi Party and a member of the communist youth. During the war he changed his armbands like shirts. Whenever the going got tough, when he threatened to fail, he lied to himself about an escape. Chalandon’s father was anything but brave or strong, he was a coward and didn’t achieve enough. He was a traitor to many armies, but above all to his own country. With the evidence in hand, Chalandon finally returns to the stuffy living room of his parents’ house and confronts his father: “I know everything, Dad.”
In order to link his desperate search for his father’s truth with the trial against Barbie, Chalandon moves the two events closer together in time. In the appendix to the book, the reader learns that the author was not able to view his father’s criminal file in 1987, but only in 2020. With this trick in the composition of the otherwise autobiographical work, “Verräterkind” manages to tell two trials: those from the courtroom in which world history is written, and those from the musty living room.
The readers benefit from Chalandon’s talent for vividly describing the intangible. Chalandon transfers the fear and disgust towards the father, the “bungler, slacker, loser”, but also the feeling of being a traitor himself because he is secretly digging through his father’s past.
Willing to identify with the truth-seeking hero Chalandon, one quickly reaches one’s limits when reading. Because Chalandon sticks to his father – although he is fascinated instead of disgusted by the war criminal Barbie and hardly misses an opportunity to belittle the deeds of the National Socialist. “Now it’s over” imposes itself with every statement by the father that downplays the Holocaust. In the end, the only way to stay tuned is a bridge of ideas: What if it were your own father?
Chalandon’s novel not only demands a lot of empathy from the reader, it also hurts. He shines the spotlight on the darkest spot in Franco-German history and forces you to look. Mainly because Chalandon gives a lot of space to the testimonies of Barbie’s victims.
“Verräterkind” is obviously not a book for in between or to wind down. You should read it anyway. Not only because Chalandon, with his captivating descriptions, which Brigitte Grosse translated from French with all their details, makes it seem like it’s 1987 and you’re in the middle of the courtroom in Lyon. It is particularly exciting for German readers to take a French perspective on National Socialism.
Read this novel first and foremost because Chalandon is brilliant at interlocking Barbie and his father. Gradually, the father, who was so elusive at first, becomes the projection surface for Barbie’s personality. In other words: a piece of Barbie, the guilt of National Socialism – it could be in every father, aunt and great-grandfather. “Verräterkind” is therefore not only great paternal literature, but also a piece of remembrance culture.
