Pollak’s Arm is a poignant ode to storytelling, bearing witness to historical memory from the Trojan War to World War II. German author Hans von Trotha presents an imaginative report by an envoy extending a Holocaust life preserver to Jewish archaeologist Ludwig Pollak. Pondering the gesture, Pollak first needs to place his lifetime experiences with art, antiquities, and racial intolerance somewhere for safekeeping.
It’s October 15, 1943. Dusk is fast approaching Rome. Inside the Vatican, Monsignor F. hears about a Nazi list of Jewish residents to be rounded up by the Gestapo tomorrow. Thus far, Adolf Hitler has respected Vatican neutrality. Monsignor F. covertly extended protection to many. Now the retired prelate and ecclesiastical diplomat wants to enfold Pollak in the security of Vatican City.
K., a secondary school teacher from Berlin stranded in German-occupied Rome, is harbored there. The monsignor sends K. to Pollak’s nearby palazzo in a German car, the driver in an SS uniform for cover. K.’s mission? Bring back Pollak and his family (wife Jean and two adult children, Wolfgang and Susanna) before sunset, when the German-imposed curfew starts for everyone except doctors, midwives, and priests.
Monsignor F. knows Pollak, a longtime Rome resident, for discovering in 1906 the right arm missing from an ancient Roman sculpture, Laocoön and His Sons. Pollak wrote a book, The Arm of Laocoön, and donated the arm to the Vatican where the sculpture resides still. Virgil in his epic poem The Aeneid depicted Laocoön of Troy as he tried to warn those “[p]oor foolish townsmen of mine” when the Trojan Horse entered the city gates, crying “Trust not the horse”:
So saying, with mighty force he hurled a great spear
At the side of the beast and the rounded frame of its belly.
It stuck there, trembling, and then from the echoing hold
The hollow vaults, resounding, rebellowed aloud.
That action did not sit well with the gods. There was revenge:
When lo! From Tenedos, over the quiet deep
(I shudder to tell you) two snakes with coils never ending
Came breasting the sea, making side by side for the shore …
… they in unwavering line
Made straight for Laocoön. First each serpent enfolded
His two young sons’ little bodies, entwining them both
And with their fangs devouring their hapless limbs.
The snakes next encircled Laocoön, who lifted “his voice in terrible screams to the stars.” This horrific scene, fixed in stone by three ancient sculptors of Rhodes, was discovered in 1506. Michelangelo attended the excavation in Rome.
Von Trotha’s novel opens on October 17, 1943, two days after K’s visit to Pollak when K., still shaken, meets with Monsignor F. to give his report. I couldn’t get him to leave, K. declares in utter frustration, until he’d told me stories about every ancient artifact in his entire extensive collection. “He was using memories of the past to defer the present.” The sun sinks lower and lower as K. urges Pollak to wake his family and leave with him. Pollak continues to reminisce about his objets d’art.
Stories matter, Pollak keeps saying as he begins yet another. K. refuses to sit down for a long time, thinking if he keeps standing by the door, Pollak might depart. That hint, however, proves too subtle for the seventy-five-year-old art connoisseur.
Von Trotha divides his book into two scenes, each minimally staged in a room with two actors — K. and Pollak in his apartment, K. and Monsignor F. in the Vatican. In Scene 1, there’s a quick walk-off by two men as K. arrives, and a brief walk-on by K’s worried driver as darkness approaches.
Let’s break Pollak’s intricate stories down to the underlying dilemma. The novel’s core structure is simple: A man has a choice upon which rests his very existence. While weighing it, he gradually divests himself of treasured memories, using K.’s mind as a vault for safekeeping. No wonder K. is freaking out as the clock ticks and the curfew risk increases. “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” (as The Clash put it in Combat Rock).
Pollak has many tales to relate, crammed into every nook and cranny of his apartment and brain. K. tells Monsignor F.: “Giving a personal account. That was something Pollak kept repeating. That we all have a duty to give a personal account. He kept stressing the importance of telling our own stories, passing them on. That was why he wouldn’t let me leave.”
First a narrative of the Dreyfus Affair. Then Goethe, the heart of Pollak’s collection: “We’re safe as long as we keep reading Goethe. Language is the most important thing we have, beside art.” Pollak tears up recounting the loss of his daughter Angelina to tuberculosis, as well as the death of his first wife Margarete. His present wife Julia is sick with diabetes, but no insulin’s available for Jews in Germany. His sleeping children are weak and not allowed to work. Around family vignettes, Pollak sprinkles fascinating accounts of experiences with Auguste Rodin, Richard Strauss, J.P. Morgan, Bernard Berenson, and Benito Mussolini, among others. Pollak’s account of his visit to the Western Wall leaves him weeping.
Pollak shares how being Jewish kept him and others from academic careers, leading him to develop a love of museums and become known as a top art collector with a “flair for telling authentic from fake.” Chronicling the “fervid swell of nationalism,” he reminds K. though: “One mustn’t forget Pius XI’s battle against race theory.” Pius XII’s role, however, is still under debate after Pope Francis opened new archives in 2020, but COVID-19 has stymied research.
K.’s visit, minutes passing as lives hang in the balance, is marvelous enough as a short story. Yet von Trotha masterfully weaves it into a much larger saga linking to an ancient Greek myth and a sculpture. It becomes a Haggadah in the sense of a Jewish Passover story to tell your children over and over, hung on Exodus 6:6: “I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm.” For the next day, Saturday October 16, is Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath.
The novel hinges on that arm of Laocoön, which came to be known as “Pollak’s arm” after he recognized it in a pile of rubble. Previously a reconstructed arm reaching heroically skyward had been placed on the statue in place of the missing arm. The one spotted by Pollak, however, was bent backward in agony. “The right arm holds the truth,” Pollak explains. Was Laocoön a hero trying to rescue his sons, or a mere human — a victim?
One story cannot be told without the other. The reader must excavate the tale of a Jewish man bearing the weight of his fate along with his brethren. Ludwig Pollak’s story personifies the Laocoön statue.
Von Trotha conveys the sense of false security that left the Jewish population of Rome unprepared for the Gestapo sunrise roundup on October 16, when more than a thousand were deposited on trains to Auschwitz. Pollak tries to put the best possible spin on the coming day. “We don’t know whether the Germans will round us up tomorrow,” he tells K. “It’s only a rumor.” They’ll need me as an archaeologist, he thinks, to rebuild Rome after the war. Still, he transfers what he can of his knowledge to K. for preservation. K. recalls:
“He turned and looked me straight in the eye. One must give a personal account, he said. Particularly when the end is imminent. One must tell stories. One must write them down. One must ensure that memory remains, so that others might remember when you no longer can. Otherwise, you’ll be forgotten, along with everything that was ever important to you, and it will all have been in vain.”
What Von Trotha presents is not so much debate, dialogue, or even conversation between his two main characters but rather Pollak setting forth a dialectic, with K. literally standing as witness. The disputation occurs between Pollak and himself as he lobs ideas back and forth over his own mental net. Only occasionally does he refute K.’s desperate pleas directly. K. begs Pollak once again to rouse his family: “We must leave now. Immediately. Surely you understand. We’re in danger.” Which elicits this response: “Are we really?”. K. checks his watch as Pollak adds “… but hasn’t it long been too late? … Then a question: “How can you be so sure they’re coming?” as he launches into another story.
At times, it’s difficult to determine who’s actually speaking, or to distinguish between past and present. He in one paragraph might refer to German writer Gerhart Hauptmann while in the next he suddenly means Pollak, and in the following K. is the speaker indicated by I. Yet it’s hard to find fault with this incredibly complex narrative. Von Trotha’s extensive knowledge of German history demonstrates there’s still much insight to be excavated from Nazi ruins. Elisabeth Lauffer, who won the 2014 Gutekunst Translation Prize, conveys von Trotha’s innovative approach skillfully from one language to another.
On January 22, 2022, four Stolpersteines (stumbling stones) bearing the names Ludwig, Jean, Wolfgang, and Susanna were embedded in the doorstep of the former Pollak home for the project Memorie d’inciampo a Roma (Stumbling Memories in Rome) by German artist Gunter Demnig integrating memory into daily life.
What Hans von Trotha creates in Pollak’s Arm is in the same vein: a tender memorial preserving a story necessary for posterity.
[Published in English by New Vessel Press on February 15, 2022, 160 pages, $16.95 paperback. First published in German by Verlag Klaus Wagenbach in Berlin on April 4, 2021]
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