Sansal, Boualem. An Unfinished Business

An Unfinished Business tells the fictional story of the brothers Rachel and Malrich Schiller through their diaries. Rachel (Rachid Helmut) and Malrich (Malik Ulrich) are half-German and half-Algerian. They were born in Aïn Deb, a small village in Algeria, and moved to France in their youth, away from their parents. Their father, Hans Schiller, is respected in Aïn Deb for his fight for Algerian independence. However, after Rachel commits suicide and Malrich finds his brother’s diaries, he finds out that Hans Schiller was in the SS; he was a chemical engineer and worked to develop Zyklon B, the gas that was used in the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps to murder large groups of people.

Hans Schiller never told his children about his Nazi past. Rachel finds out about his father’s past when he goes through his father’s belongings after most inhabitants of Aïn Deb are massacred by Islamist extremists. His father had kept his medals and documents. Rachel travels throughout Europe, the Middle-East and North Africa to retrace his father’s footsteps, in an attempt to understand the man. The more he discovers, the more he hates his father; not only for being partly responsible for gassing of hundreds of thousands of people, but predominantly for not facing up to his crimes after the war. Hans Schiller escaped Germany after the war ended and fled, through Turkey and Egypt, to Algeria, where he remained silent about his past.

Rachel’s journey ends at Auschwitz, after which he returns to France and kills himself two months later, on the anniversary of the Aïn Deb massacre. His suicide is his, and his father’s, atonement – Rachel felt he had to bear the guilt of his father’s actions, and his own death is both the only way out of the guilt as well as some sort of redress for his father’s victims. Rachel gasses himself with exhaust fumes, in parallel with the manner in which his father’s Zyklon B gassed Jews in the concentration camps.

Malrich acquires his brother’s diaries after his death, and starts reading. Initially he refuses to accept that his father was responsible for any crimes, but when he continues reading and eventually also goes to Aïn Deb to visit his parents’ graves, he starts believing his brother and likewise struggles with accepting that his father was a different man than he had seemed to be. Malrich spends most of his time on the sink estate near Paris, where a strict imam and his henchmen control the social order. Malrich often – and increasingly as he reads more of Rachel’s diary – refers to the estate in terms of it resembling a concentration camp. Moreover, the jihadists who murdered the inhabitants of Aïn Deb are compared with Nazis: “the Islamists, those Nazi bastards” (Malrich’s Diary – 16 December 1996).

The novel portrays the children of a perpetrator who struggle with their father’s crimes; Rachel cannot bear the guilt and commits suicide, while the novel ends with Malrich being half-heartedly convinced he should change circumstances on the estate, to stop the imam’s rise to power. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ is useful here. Postmemory is the (often traumatic) memory that the generation after the generation that experienced the event bears with them – they are inherited memories. In Sansal’s novel, Rachel and Malrich suddenly inherit the memory of their father’s past when Rachel unearths Hans Schiller’s documents; they now have to deal with their father’s past and the feelings of guilt they inherit with it.

Furthermore, Michael Rothberg’s ‘multidirectional memory’ is visible in the novel, where Nazi concentration camps function as a way for Malrich to understand the situation on the estate, but also vice versa; while the novel starts with Malrich knowing the estate but knowing barely anything about the Holocaust, his own experiences help him to start understanding what happened in the concentration camps. Moreover, the tense (de)colonial relationship between France and Algiers is also connected to the Holocaust; Malrich was part of the youth division of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), to fight for Algerian independence. Rachel calls this group the FLN-Jugend, in parallel with the Hitlerjugend groups. The novel thus portrays a three-way multidirectionality; the Holocaust, (de)colonisation, and religious extremism.

Author of this entry: Nynke Hartvelt

Sansal, Boualem. An Unfinished Business. (2008) Translated by Frank Wynne, 2010. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.