Last Things

By Melvin Maddocks

THE END OF THE WORLD:

A HISTORY by Otto Friedrich

Coward, McCann & Geohegan

384 pages; $19.95

Up to a certain age, the young have a happy difficulty accepting the inevitability of their own death. But at no point in history has any human being of any age had a problem imagining the end of the world. The day the sun does not rise seems to be buried like a dread case of dej`a vu in the collective unconscious, just waiting for a sign or portent to release it.

Otto Friedrich, a senior writer at TIME who has already sampled cataclysm in Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, addresses himself here to seven catastrophes. Each is so profoundly shaking that the survivors cried, like Petrarch after the Black Death swept Europe in 1348, "When was such a disaster ever seen, even heard of?"

Friedrich possesses the narrative skill and scholarship to play divertingly upon the nerves of a generation of readers obsessed by the fire and ice of their own visions: World War III; a cosmic flood from a melted polar icecap; incurable plagues. But in the end, he has written something much more like a moral inquiry. As he scrutinizes the crimes nature has committed against man, and man has committed against himself, from the sack of Rome (A.D. 410) to the Lisbon earthquake (1755), from the Inquisition (1209-44) to Auschwitz (1940-45), Friedrich has added to Petrarch's rhetorical question Job's absurd yet necessary demand: Why?

Once upon a time the victims thought they knew the answer: sinners were being crushed by the hand of an angry God. The Black Death, killing 25 million Europeans, or an estimated one out of three, provides Friedrich with a syndrome. As they suffered what they believed to be God's scourge, the Brotherhood of the Flagellants thought to echo his wrath by whipping themselves. When this holy masochism failed, the Brotherhood and others adopted a second response. They invented a scapegoat, turning their scourges literally and figuratively upon Jews in Germany, France and Switzerland. (The End of the World, among other things, is a subhistory of anti-Semitism.)

For Friedrich and most modern readers, the idea of a punitive God is less terrifying than the notion of a fanatical human: the problem of evil as the mad light in one's brother's eye. Even more revolting than the corpses Friedrich keeps heaping up are the bloody cries he records, calling for more massacres. Faced with the peasants' rebellion, the rebel Luther exhorted: "Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly." In the name of historical dialectic, a terrorist much admired by Lenin, Sergei Nechayev, declared: "Our task is terrible, total, universal and merciless destruction."

The climax of all the jigs of death has to be, of course, Auschwitz. At this hell-on-earth in the countryside of Poland, where 4 million people were killed, the world as slaughterhouse reached its peak of efficiency. Men, women and children were murdered by gas, by flame thrower, by artful orchestrations of hunger and typhus. In his quiet voice, Friedrich lays it all out meticulously, as tidy as the camp commandant's garden. What more can reasonably be said about history's perversions of Judgment Day?

The powerlessness to resist an apocalyptic event may be exceeded by only one worse form of suffering: the inability to explain it. Elie Wiesel, sent to Auschwitz as a boy, has spent a lifetime examining and re-examining the Holocaust as historian, novelist and theologian. Three years ago, after revisiting Auschwitz, he confessed, "I understand it less and less."

Holocaust, doomsday--the very words are beginning to slide glibly off our minds, Friedrich fears. From war-game scenarists on down, we are all in grave danger of becoming professional waiters-for-the-end. After being a text for religious and then philosophical consternation, "the idea of the end of the world has finally become an instrument of international propaganda," Friedrich writes.

Obviously the author wonders whether writing a book on the whole subject is absurd. What can the scratch of a pen accomplish when all the big bangs turn banal in the end? Sometimes he presses too hard. The ball of fire that appeared over Siberia in 1908 never quite finds its symbolic connection to his account of the Russian Revolution. A narrative on the ill-used Anabaptists begins so remotely that a reader gets lost in the preliminary spirals. At Friedrich's high level of risk, a measure of failure is unavoidable. But what would we do without this book?

When the poet Anna Akhmatova was waiting in line outside a prison in Lenin grad during a time of political apocalypse -- the Yezhov terror -- a woman with lips blue from the cold asked her, "Can you describe this?"

Akhmatova answered, "I can."

Then, she noted of her questioner, "something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had been her face."

Friedrich, like Wiesel, has finally understood very little. To understand very much would be an insult. But he has borne witness to a horrific, obscene lot, and the reader must feel something of the grati tude that the woman in the cold felt to ward Akhmatova.

-- By Melvin Maddocks

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