Ladislav Fuks’ novel The Cremator (literally ‘The incinerator of corpses’) was originally published in 1967, and adapted in 1969 into a film by Juraj Herz. Only in 2016 was the novel finally translated into English by Eva Kandler. Fuks wrote a number of books which focussed on the German occupation of Czechoslovakia – his first novel, Mr. Theodore Mundstock, was written from the point of view of a Jewish man in Prague fearing deportation; this was followed by a more autobiographical collection of short stories, each one telling the fate of a Jewish friend of a Czech schoolboy. The Cremator is unusual in that the central character is a collaborator rather than a victim.
Karel Kopfrkingl works at a crematorium and, from the novel’s first pages, he is presented as a devoted family man, visiting the zoo with his wife, Lakme (“my gentle one”), seventeen years after they first met there. That they met in the predators’ section near the leopard is perhaps an indication of the dangerous world in which they live – the presence of a snake (“I wondered then… why they put the snake in the Predator’s House”) the first suggestion of the temptation Kopfrkingl will suffer at the hands of his friend, Willi. Our first impression of Kopfrkingl is that he is kind and loving – even their pet cat is “our enchantingly beautiful one”, and he discusses giving Mr Strauss, an acquaintance (“He’s a good, tidy fellow”) the opportunity to work as an agent for the crematorium on commission. He treats his children – sixteen-year-old Zina and fourteen-year-old Mili – with patience. When Zina calls her piano teacher “an old trout” he reminds her that she will be old one day and:
“We mustn’t harm anybody, even in thought.”
He does, however, have a number of eccentricities, the most noticeable of which is his habit of renaming things. He tells Strauss to meet him at the Silver Casket restaurant event though it is actually called The Boa, and his wife’s name is not Lakme:
“You call me Lakme instead of Marie and you want me to call you Roman instead of Karel.”
When he buys a portrait of Nicaraguan President Emilian Chamorro he decides it is a portrait of Louis Marun, a French politician:
“We’ll cover up the name on the mount with a strip of paper.”
This tendency represents his desire to see the world as he wants rather than as it is. Later, when he is convinced to support German occupation, and Hitler’s mission in general, it is because he believes that it will make the world a better place. His peaceful nature is indicated by his interest in the Dalia Lama, the subject of one of two books he owns, the other being the regulations for crematoria. He is intellectually limited, his conversation consisting of reading tragic stories from the press and commenting when he is not repeating remarks others have made to him. In this way he is persuaded by his friend Willi to support Hitler’s invasion. Willi convinces him that only the strong can change the world:
“Our German, Willi, is probably right when he says that you have to fight for justice, happiness and peace… I hardly expect the weak ones to do away with persecution, exploitation or poverty; they can only suffer, poor things.”
It is Willi who encourages Kopfrkingl to take his son to a boxing match and persuades him that Jews are a “wretched people who don’t understand anything. They’re so ancient, they’re senile…” The novel is not, however, a straight-forward story of corruption of innocence. It has elements, not only of dark humour (for example Willi’s asking Kopfrkingl if burning bodies is the limit of his ambition) but of surrealism, and is built around a number of set pieces – the boxing match, a visit to a waxworks of the plague, a trip to the top of an observation tower. Fuks also includes a number of recurring characters who are spotted in these various locations – “a pink faced girl in a black dress”; “a little old fat man in a stiff white collar”. The intention here is unclear – does it show Kopfrkingl’s inability to distinguish reality clearly, or are these future victims of the Nazis? As the novel moves towards its conclusion, reality becomes less certain – for example, it seems unlikely we are to believe he is visited by a delegation asking him to be the next Dalia Lama – and Kopfrkingl’s actions more extreme. The ending – a coda set in 1945 – is simialrly ambiguous (as with the film where the original ending was cut and then lost).
The Cremator skilfully navigates it various tones – from comedy to horror – without ever losing sight of the character of Kopfrkingl. While other characters are often less three dimensional, this is how Kopfrkingl sees them, his apparent empathy only skin deep. Though its arc is obvious, some potential subtleties exist (is, for example, Mili gay as is hinted, or Kopfrkingl a philanderer, as regular check-ups with his doctor suggest?). Overall, it is a powerful, and sometimes shocking, examination of the road to fascism for a very ordinary man.