Most first novels are emotionally explosive, going to the heart of the individual. Novelist Paul Pickering changed from journalism to fiction after a meeting with a man, known by some to be the war criminal Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz. Mengele performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas. He eluded capture possibly because he knew about high-placed people complicit in the Holocaust. Following his encounter with Mengele, Pickering no longer found it possible to write in the simplistic way that newspapers demanded. This journalistic approach could not express the intensity, range, and subtlety of feeling he required, especially as this encounter awakened links with his gypsy and Jewish background. And so he turned to fiction and produced his first highly acclaimed novel Wild About Harry, and he is about to publish his eighth novel, Lucy, on 15 July (Salt), about obedience, rebellion, and genocide.
Here he tells of his meeting with the man he was told was Mengele and about his new book, Lucy.
After university and a spell on a local evening paper I went on to work for the nationals. I worked for The Times, The Sunday Times, Punch, and Tina Brown’s Tatler. I was then head-hunted by Sir James Goldsmith’s Now! Magazine, and had to set up offices in New York and Washington. One rainy day, buried in the obscure anthropological magazine Survival International, I found a footnote which said that Josef Mengele, the camp doctor and Angel of Death at Auschwitz, was alive and well and poisoning Aché Indians in Paraguay with small-pox impregnated blankets. Wow! I thought. A scoop! Slowly, I gained the trust of the exiled Paraguayan community in New York and the Adams Morgan area of Washington, where an ambassador’s daughter who had been tortured by the far-right government of Alfredo Stroessner, led me to a grief-mad poet named Joél Filátiga. His son had been tortured to death and dumped naked and burned on his doorstep in Asunción. He said he knew where Josef Mengele was and if I helped him and the coup he was planning, he would tell me. Under the guise of a timber importer, I stayed with the poet’s family. I ran messages to the Movimiento Popular Colorado in Posadas, Argentina, which was in the middle of the ‘dirty war’. People were being thrown out of planes over the jungle and I have never seen anywhere so scared, at one house an Alsatian backed away whimpering, thinking I was like the soldiers who had called that morning.
I found it easier to identify with the Paraguayan and Argentinian dissidents and desaparecidos than think of Mengele as relevant to me. To this end I carried a copy of a receipt for a histological section of a head of a 12-year-old gypsy boy Mengele had checked out of Auschwitz to take home. He later murdered everyone in the gypsy camp.
After the coup failed, Filátiga and everyone not in prison fled. But a German diplomatic contact and a colleague of his I met on the chain-link ferry to Posadas in Argentina, who knew I was looking for Mengele, arranged a meeting with a man called Rodriguez, who the diplomat said was working for the Indian organisation API (Association de Parcialidades Indigenes).
On a red dirt road an hour from Hohenau in the south there was a large farmhouse, where a young man took me to a comfortable and unpretentious room with bookshelves loaded with Spanish, English, French, and German books, and a television. French windows opened out onto a garden where another young Paraguayan man sat in a chair, looking in. In a cage was a pink and black bird, a Paraguayan magpie-jay.
I tried to hide my surprise as a man who came in immediately resembled the pictures of Mengele I had seen published.
He went over to the bird, which knew him, before sitting down. He seemed fit and in late middle-age but was probably older, handsome, and relaxed with a twinkle in his eye and, above all, exuding a straight-backed European charm, as if we were in a café in Berlin. He was warm and expressive.
The man did not smoke and we drank coffee. I knew there was a Rodriguez who worked for API through English contacts in the organisation and had seen a picture of him. The man sitting in the chair opposite me was not this Rodriguez.
I said I was writing about the south of Paraguay and that the German diplomat in the capital said I should contact him, and we started to talk. The man spoke fluent German-accented English. On the desk was a book in German about Günzburg in Bavaria, Mengele’s hometown. Our talk moved to the local Germans and he mentioned Alban Krug and said he stayed with him (as Mengele had) and with Armand Raeyners, ex-SS owner of the Hotel Tirol in Hohenau, I said he must not have expected to have to leave Günzburg. He nodded and said he had been there for almost five years after the war ended.
He paused and was looking at the man outside the French windows. Then he said: ‘I did not think I would have to go over borders dressed as a woman’, which caused me to blink.
I then asked him if he was Josef Mengele. I tried to make the question as gentle as possible. The bird shrieked. The man just sat there smiling. The silence went on and on and an old clock was ticking away. He was staring at me with vivid blue eyes. The young man I first met came in through the door and the other, outside the French windows, approached the glass. The one who had come through the door beckoned me and the man who I had asked if he was Mengele continued smiling.
No further words were said but there was no doubt our meeting was over. He stood, we shook hands, and I left. There were no guns, no security, no one followed my rusting Volkswagen beetle. I saw no other cars on my way back. I remember my mouth being very dry. Mengele knew how to use the power of his own myth in a post-colonial world.
The relaxed meeting is where the transformation of the Faustian character, the Doctor, into the affable Harry originated in my novel. Mengele playfully used the alias Dr Fausto Rindón. Dark humour was never far away, as when I got lost in Asunción and had to ask the secret policeman following me the way. He did not know either. In the south, one house where I stayed, an orphan’s refuge, was frequently surrounded and machine gunned by the local warlord, a South African priest, who shot a man in the foot for talking in church. Back in Asunción I was arrested, but managed to escape across the Paraná river, under blankets in the back of a taxi.
Photographic or taped proof of my meeting with the man I was told was Mengele was not possible, so there was no journalistic coup and the complex, paradoxical nature of Paraguay, inaccessible to journalism, impelled me towards my first novel, as did the meeting itself with the calm, amused, blue-eyed man with his red-bound copies of Balzac that somehow reminded me of my anti-fascist father, a note of nostalgia for the innocence of childhood that I had not expected to be triggered by Mengele, who embraced power in a terrible but non-political way. I think he enjoyed the mass-killing, the torture, the fake experiments as a diverting entertainment and when it was over adapted, smiling, to the peace. I have thought of him increasingly since writing Wild About Harry as, for me, he is the ultimate destructive protagonist. The apotheosis of the absence of good.
I had been working undercover for months and was sacked for using my company American Express card to support the coup, but fortunately had a contract and a pay-off so went to the Trinidadian carnival. In the meantime, my wife had fallen off a platform bed in our flat and broken a vertebra in her back—we were not able to talk and for a while she did not know I was alive, because Private Eye, so helpfully, had said I had committed suicide. When I returned to London, I wrote a funny column for The Times and an agent asked if I had ever thought of writing a novel. My near fatal hunt for Mengele, the coup, the shootings, the torture, and the repression, provoked an earthquake change to fiction and my first novel Wild About Harry.
My new novel Lucy, my eighth, is a return to my core themes of the bargains we make and authoritarianism. And to Berlin, like my third novel, the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Blue Gate of Babylon. Lucy takes as its epigraph the quote from Hannah Arendt: ‘No one has the right to obey’, whatever bargain they have made, Faustian—with the devil—or otherwise. The book is about how one survivor in Berlin takes over the lives of three others, in the way Hitler took over a country. In Lucy the man takes them over sexually as well. Operation Lucy, once an idealistic if shabby espionage ring against the Nazis, has changed into one that murders communists and rebels not killed by Hitler, and ultimately its own operatives. Like the authoritarian character in the book, or the Third Reich, Lucy becomes a self-devouring monster. The novel is absurdist and at times darkly comic, pointing out the best intentions, when they pass through the looking-glass of human failings, are most often changed to the opposite.
Lucy taps into a welcome sea-change across the world about obedience and rebellion, the mounting student protests across America and Europe and Africa and Asia against the horror in Gaza. Lucy takes place in the actual and moral wasteland of immediate post-war Berlin. For me, no one has the right to the Nuremberg defence, ‘I was only obeying orders’. Set partly in a German kibbutz, founded by Nazis to remove Jews from Germany, Lucy shows a clash between the utopian ideas of the kibbutz and the toxic nationalism and colonialism necessary to found the state of Israel, a state the rabbi in the book points out was forbidden by God after the destruction of the temple.
I hope Lucy is an anti-war novel in the tradition of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Catch-22 means no escape because of contradictory rules, Lucy is the Lucifer paradox, where the only good is bad, and only bad is good. And it is a gypsy woman and refugee who most completely rebels, and literally washes herself clean in the blood of revolution. I believe Lucy’s story prefigures the new tectonic changes, alive and growing in our world, which will be for the better. I am an optimist.
Paul Pickering
Paul Pickering is the author of seven novels, Wild About Harry, Perfect English, The Blue Gate of Babylon, Charlie Peace, The Leopard’s Wife, Over the Rainbow and Elephant. The Blue Gate of Babylon was a New York Times notable book of the year, who dubbed it ‘superior literature’. Often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Pickering was chosen as one of the top ten young British novelists by bookseller WH Smith and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize three times. Educated at the Royal Masonic Schools and the University of Leicester, he has a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University where he is a Visiting Fellow, presented his doctoral thesis to the Bulgakov Society in Moscow, recently completed a Hawthornden Fellowship Residency on Lake Como and is a member of the Folio Prize Academy. The novelist J.G. Ballard said Pickering’s work is ‘truly subversive’. As well as short stories and poetry, he has written plays, film scripts and columns for The Times and Sunday Times. He lives in London and the Pyrenees. A major theme of his novel Elephant, published by Salt in 2021, is innocence. His new blackly comic, absurdly realist novel Lucy, about obedience and rebellion, political and sexual, is published on July 15 by Salt. He is working on a new novel, CONVERSATION WITH A LION, about how things fit together and fly apart. The novel tries to explain the impossible absurdity of living, impossible like a conversation with a lion.