Mathias Énard’s The Deserters, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, is an unsettling novel about the impossibility of leaving completely: of escaping a country, a political ideal, a family, a war, or even a history that has already become part of who we are. Énard brings together two stories that initially seem to belong to entirely different worlds: that of Paul Heudeber, a German mathematician, communist and survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, and that of an unnamed soldier who deserts a contemporary war somewhere in the Mediterranean landscape after years of participating in its violence. Between these two stories stands Paul’s daughter, Irina, who spends much of her life trying to move away from the history of her parents, only to discover that history has a way of following those who attempt to escape it.
The novel asks a deceptively simple question: what does it really mean to desert? Is desertion an act of cowardice, betrayal or survival? Can abandoning something ever be an act of courage?
Paul Heudeber has survived one of the great catastrophes of twentieth-century Europe, yet survival does not free him from history. A mathematician and committed communist, he has experienced Nazism and imprisonment in Buchenwald, but emerges from the war believing in the possibility of another world, one founded upon reason, equality and fraternity. Mathematics and communism become, for a time, complementary forms of belief: mathematics suggests that beneath the apparent chaos of the world there may be an underlying order waiting to be discovered, while communism promises that history itself might eventually move towards a more just and rational society.
For Paul, mathematics becomes an order and hope that the chaos of history cannot entirely destroy. When Irina is a child, he tells her stories about the great mathematicians who gathered at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900, and for her these figures become almost mythical, representatives of a world of reason, beauty and knowledge that seems to exist somewhere beyond the violence of the twentieth century.
But gradually the two forms of Paul’s faith begin to diverge. The crimes committed in the name of communism: mass killings, deportations, torture and political imprisonment become increasingly difficult to reconcile with the utopia in which he has believed, while the Prague Spring of 1968 becomes a particularly painful rupture. The Soviet Union, which defeated Nazism, has also imprisoned, deported and killed people whom Paul considers his intellectual and political heroes. The discovery that the Soviets themselves used Buchenwald after the war to imprison their opponents makes the contradiction almost unbearable. Paul has survived one system of terror only to discover that the political system to which he devoted his life is capable of reproducing some of the violence he thought he had fought against.
The camp is no longer only a physical place. It has become part of Paul. In one of his letters to Maja, he writes:
“I feel as if life has sided against me, (…) many of my works have already been forgotten; (…) we are paying the price for our intransigence, our mistakes, and our too great submission to Russian warmongering. (…) I was perhaps wrong to believe, to conjecture, that humanity was made for peace, sharing and fraternity…I seek solitude. I don’t mingle with the crowd… I try to forget tragedies and war crimes…”
I was perhaps wrong to believe, to conjecture, that humanity was made for peace, sharing and fraternity…I seek solitude. I don’t mingle with the crowd… I try to forget tragedies and war crimes…”
Paul reflects on the literature of the camps and on the problem of memory:
“I could quote hundreds of phrases by Celan, Améry, Levi. I know what not returning means. But the experience of the camp vanishes. Its very trace in writing becomes illegible with time. Dozens of testimonies have been published, in all the languages of the camps – what will it be like in twenty, thirty years, when the authors of these testimonies have all died?”
And then he asks:
“Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen are nothing now but museums. Museum of what? Is it me they are looking at in this museum?”
The question asks whether the person who lived through history can survive inside the memory of others.
Paul’s faith begins to collapse, and with it his connection to the world around him. He retreats increasingly into mathematics, finding in algebraic topology a refuge from history, but even this refuge eventually proves insufficient. When the German Democratic Republic (GDR) disappears and Germany is reunified in the early 1990s, Paul feels that the world in which he had invested his hopes has vanished almost overnight, and the wars of the 1990s, particularly the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, reinforce his sense that the violence he thought Europe had left behind has returned.
In 1995, Paul takes his own life. His suicide can be understood as the ultimate rejection of the world he had been forced to inhabit, and it “would transport Heudeber’s whole existence into another dimension like an entirely conscious translation of his essential trajectory towards ‘elsewhere’.”
Irina understands his suicide as the final expression of a desire that has accompanied him throughout his life, a movement towards the “elsewhere” that he has always sought. His death does not represent a complete escape because Paul has already discovered the terrible truth that there are places we can leave physically but never entirely leave psychologically.
“The camp is inside me.”
The camp is no longer simply a physical location in Paul’s past; it has become part of his interior landscape, something carried within him long after the gates of Buchenwald have opened. Paul can leave Buchenwald, become a mathematician, teach, write and withdraw into solitude, but he cannot leave what Buchenwald has made of him. In his case, desertion can be defined as the ability to leave a place, but the inability to leave what that place has made of us.
Irina inherits this history without having lived through its central events herself, and there is something particularly painful about this kind of inheritance because the past can shape a life even when it belongs, chronologically, to another generation. She is born in 1951, after the war, but the war is present everywhere in her childhood: in her father’s silence, in her mother’s political commitments, in the division between East and West Germany, in the physical separation of her parents, and in the memories of camps and persecution that surround her family. It is perhaps inevitable that Irina eventually tries to escape.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she travels to Cairo to study Classical Arabic and the mathematics of Omar Khayyam and Nasir al-Din Tusi, turning away from twentieth-century Europe towards the medieval Islamic world, another language, another civilisation and another meaning of knowledge. Cairo becomes a kind of intellectual refuge, distant from Berlin, the camps, the Berlin Wall and the history that has dominated her family. Irina travels away from her father only to discover that she has followed him.
Khayyam and Tusi are not merely mathematicians; they are poets, philosophers, historians and thinkers whose intellectual worlds refuse the boundaries between disciplines, just as Paul’s own understanding of mathematics had always extended beyond mathematics itself. Irina’s journey into the history of mathematics becomes another way of approaching her father, as though she has travelled across centuries only to find the same intellectual landscape waiting for her. History follows her there, too. The assassination of Anwar Sadat eventually brings her back to Berlin, while the attacks of 11 September 2001 create one of the novel’s most striking connections between past and present: watching the destruction of the World Trade Centre, Irina thinks of the destruction of Baghdad in 1258, which Nasir al-Din Tusi witnessed from the camp of the Mongol armies of Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. He saw a world being destroyed.
Baghdad and New York become connected through memory, and Irina discovers once again that the past is capable of returning in unpredictable forms.
Even Irina’s attempt to understand her own family history eventually becomes unstable. When, at seventy-one, she obtains her mother’s Stasi file and discovers that Maja had been an informant until 1985, the past she has spent decades trying to understand becomes even more uncertain: who was her mother really, what did Paul know, what did he forgive, and how much of Irina’s understanding of her own childhood was based upon things that were never entirely true? Her memories turn out to be fragile.
The unnamed soldier in the novel’s second narrative belongs to another war, somewhere in the Mediterranean, and yet his story begins to resemble Paul’s. He has spent three years participating in violence, pushing people into mass graves, watching people die because their names alone were enough to condemn them, and taking part in atrocities until violence has become almost automatic.
Then, at a particular moment, he refuses to kill a young woman. Instead, he lets her live and helps her escape. She cannot understand why he has spared her, and neither can he fully explain his own decision, because the man who has suddenly chosen mercy is the same man who has spent years participating in terrible acts of violence. He deserts the army, but what he really wants is to desert the person he has become. He wants to “tear the war out of himself”, just as Paul wanted to leave the camp. The unnamed soldier embodies “the effort to leave war”, not simply its violence. His narrative is deliberately blurred in time and place.
The soldier’s description of war is almost apocalyptic:
“The war has reset everything to zero, erased everything, flattened everything, filed everything down, automobiles charred by the roadsides, the airplanes stains against the setting sun, a throbbing sound, a whistle, and everything catches fire in screams of defeat (…) everything multiples Evil and pain.”
The war has erased the structures of ordinary life. The streets that once connected neighbours now divide people from one another:
“Street that separated us from our neighbour is filled with death. (…) The war sliced through shared life, the life of fathers, brothers loaded into truck, buried in mass graves… others by our hands…”
The soldier remembers the violence he inflicted to such an extent that it has altered his face. Yet he still cannot fully understand himself. He “doesn’t know the causes of his actions, he doesn’t know why he does what he does, why he acts, to what purpose, by what means, what heavenly motivations or earthly machinations move his sullied hands…”
The young woman is nineteen, although she says that no one is really nineteen in wartime because “everyone is over a hundred years old in war”. War destroys not only bodies and homes but also the ordinary structure of time: childhood disappears, the future disappears, and the young are forced to carry experiences that seem to age them beyond their years.
Énard never tells us precisely who the woman is, nor does he name the war in which she has been caught. Yet some details of her story inevitably bring to my mind the fate of Yazidi women subjected to Islamic State violence and enslavement. Perhaps she is Yazidi; perhaps she deliberately remains something broader, one of the innumerable women whose identities disappear behind the anonymous word of war.
The unknown soldier and the unknown woman stand on opposite sides of violence; he is a perpetrator; she is a victim. Both are trying to cross a border that is more than geographical. He wants to escape what he has done, while she wants to escape what has been done to her and find somewhere where she can heal.
The soldier has left the army, but he cannot yet leave the person he became inside it. Like Paul, he carries the war inside himself.
This is where the two narratives finally converge, because Paul, Maja, Irina and the unnamed soldier are all, in different ways, deserters.
Paul deserts the political world when his faith in communism collapses and he retreats into solitude. Maja deserts her family for political life. Irina deserts twentieth-century Europe by travelling towards another language, another civilisation and another period of history. The soldier deserts his army in an attempt to escape the violence that has become part of him.
Their reasons are different, but their destination is remarkably similar: elsewhere. And yet none of them can completely arrive there.
There are geographical borders that can be crossed and political systems that can collapse; countries disappear, walls fall, ideologies die and people move from one place to another, but there are other borders that are much harder to cross: the border between memory and forgetting, between guilt and forgiveness, between the person we once were and the person we have become.
Perhaps this is why mathematics matters so much in The Deserters. Mathematics promises a world in which something can remain stable, where there might be an order beneath apparent chaos. History offers no such reassurance. History is repetition, rupture, disappearance and return. Writing, however, offers memory.
As for Irina, eventually she chooses solitude:
“My father’s so sudden end haunted me. My solitude even though I had chosen it myself and accepted it, was an immense echo chamber for my sadness, where melancholy resounded, amplified until it became profound happiness.”
Irina has spent her life searching for an elsewhere, but she finally discovers that there is no country, century or intellectual refuge in which history cannot reach her.
By the end of The Deserters, the twentieth century has not disappeared. The GDR is gone, the Soviet Union is gone, Yugoslavia is gone, Paul’s political ideals are gone, and yet the violence that shaped them has not vanished. When Irina hears the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she feels the return of something she had hoped belonged to the past:
“the chain rattling of these ghosts terrifies me.”
The ghosts are not simply the dead; they are patterns returning in new forms, the same fears, the same borders, the same violence and the same displacement appearing again beneath different names. There is no complete desertion. We can leave countries, ideologies, armies, families and even life itself, but we cannot always leave memory.
The deserters of Énard’s novel are therefore not simply those who flee. They are also those who remain, those who carry memory, those who write, those who remember the dead and those who refuse to allow people to become merely names in history books.
The Deserters is a meditation on what we carry when we leave: the countries we have abandoned, the people we have lost, the wars we have witnessed, the histories we inherited without choosing them, and the ghosts that continue to walk beside us long after we have crossed the border.
