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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