After Dachau

"After Dachau" is a novel written by "Ishmael" author Daniel Quinn that was published in 2001.

Plot summary

The story is narrated by a young rich man, heir to a huge sum of money. He devotes his life to an organization called "We Live Again" which investigates the reality of reincarnation. People have souls that pass on to other individuals and give them their memories, usually alongside their own, but sometimes in replace of.

The story focuses on Mallory Hastings, a recently reincarnated woman and her fascinating integration into the new world. She recalls and narrates her experiences and memories of Hitler's victory and him extending his desire for an "Aryan" world to fruition. She realizes all that went wrong. The Nazis had won World War II and purged the world of all non-whites, the rewrote history as to make it known that Dachau, a concentration camp, was instead a battle with Adolf Hitler as its hero.

We find out the human race, now only the Aryan race has taken over the world and killed everyone. Using A.D. to refer to After Dachau, the turning point in their civilization. A.D.-A.D. refers to our A.D. and Mallory was born in this time in 1922.

We find out the Nazi purgings had started to take a cultural effect on America, and very soon Jews were being executed. Blacks were being "repatriated" but as it turns out, just put in concentration camps. Mallory, an Afro-American girl, hid out with her lover beneath the N.Y. underground and made a life until she was caught by the police and executed.

The narrator, in an attempt to bring light to this, contacts a newspaper and other communications to prove this to the world and explain to the Aryans the atrocities they had committed upon the world. As a result, his investigation gets him sequestrated in an unknown location for a short time until he could write three words upon a chalkboard. The words turn out to be "No One Cares" as it turns out, no one does.

The narrator explains that he cares, and he doesn't care if others don't care, he is still going to pursue this for his own personal interest. As he does, he opens an exhibit outlining all the relics from the old world, including works by Jewish authors such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. The story ends with him receiving a gift from his "uncle" (who was the one who imprisoned him), which he decides he will probably get published and him opening a shop where he displays pictures of Africans that had been saved in Mallory's hideout. Then one night, someone throws a brick through the gallery's windows, prompting the narrator to conclude that somebody "does care". The last line revealing that this is in fact a diary of a young girl during WWII, the Diary of Anne Frank.

Major themes

To novice eyes, reincarnation would appear to be a major theme of the book. However, this is not the case. Quinn has stated that he merely used reincarnation as a convenient vehicle for telling his story, and that he does not endorse (or oppose) the idea of reincarnation.

The major theme of this book is the social constructedness of history and of what we take to be the foundations of social reality. In this book, Quinn uses the example of the Holocaust to make his argument - he suggests that had history gone slightly differently (i.e. had the Germans won World War II), we might have been fooled into thinking of a monstrous evil as something not really worth concerning ourselves with. This dovetails with his other work, in that much of Quinn's work focuses on re-telling the conventionally accepted narrative of human progress over the last 10,000 years in a way that he hopes will inspire people to be horrified and realize the need to change course with regard to humanity's relationship to its environment.

Other points made:

1. Capitalism and the progress with it, is a Jewish invention, the Aryan (and a very collectivist) motto being "if it works why change it?"

2. History is written by the winners, and at such a distant point it does not really matter anymore because humans are resigned to bad action, which is explained via " No One Cares."

3. The view of history is a very Neo-Nazi view of the modern world.

4. A person's body does not constitute who they are.

External links

* [http://www.ishmael.org Daniel Quinn's website]
* [http://www.ishcon.org The Ishamel Community]