“Comedy in a Minor Key” by Hans Keilson

“Comedy in a Minor Key”  by Hans Keilson (1947)  – Translated by Damion Searls – 135 pages

Wim and Marie are a young couple living in what was called Holland during World War II.  The Germans have just conquered and are occupying Holland.  The Nazis are rounding up all the Jews, robbing them of all their possessions, and putting them on cattle trains bound for concentration camps.  Wim and Marie decide to hide a Jewish man in their house.  Why?  “Patriotic duty.”  “A purely humane act.”  “Almost everyone is doing it.”  “Christian charity for the persecuted.”  “It’s the only way we can fight back, the only way we can do anything at all to show that it is not right.  Civil disobedience.”

Nico is a middle aged man, a former perfume salesman, a Jew.  The Holland underground places him in Wim and Marie’s house.   At first as you can imagine, it is a somewhat clumsy situation, having a stranger living in your house, a stranger that must be hidden at all times.

A perceptive study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation, this novella is probably the lightest read of any book I’ve ever read about the Nazi era.  For one thing there are no Nazis in the book, except their looming presence.  The main reason this is a light read are the personalities of Wim, Marie, and Nico.  All of the dialogue is very natural, mostly in very short sentences, just as people would talk in this situation.  Wim and Marie make a well-matched couple, and Nico fits in as best he can.  “Comedy in a Minor Key” is a fast-paced vivid read with its share of scary moments.

The author of this novella, Hans Keilson, started out as a German, a Jew, but also hid out in the Netherlands during World War II.  He actually wrote the first fifty pages of this book while he was in hiding from the Nazis.  However the character who is hiding in this novel, Nico, is not Hans Keilson, because Nico is somewhat older than Keilson would have been at that time.  “Comedy in a Minor Key” is dedicated “to Leo and Suus, in Delft”, the couple that sheltered Keilson while he was hiding.

The dust is finally beginning to settle around the World War II literary scene, and we are discovering or re-discovering just who the exceptional authors were.   So far, we have discovered Stefan Zweig, Irene Nemirovsky, Hans Fallada, Dawn Powell, and Hans Keilson.  Someday hopefully another generation will figure out who the great writers of the early 2000’s actually were.

Hans Keilson turned 100 years old eight months ago.