Published to acclaim in 1977, this controversial novel of ideas
follows Konrad Rutkowski -- professor of medieval history and
former Gestapo officer -- as he returns to the scene of his war
crimes determined to renounce, or perhaps justify, his Nazi past.
In a series of letters to a brother-in-law, Rutkowski lays out his
ambivalent reactions to war and unthinkable violence, connecting
his own swirling ideas to those of some of the major figures of
European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche,
Freud, and others.
But the novel is more than an intellectual meditation. Pekic was
himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and
he drew on his first hand knowledge of police methods and life
under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of an
intellectual acting as a tool of repression. At the same time he
questions whether Rutkowski's ideology puts him outside the
philosophical tradition he so admires -- or if the line separating
it from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.
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