Culpability and Compliance in Jiří Weil’s ‘Mendelssohn is on the Roof’
By: Claire Stratton
Tags: Jiri Weil, Literature, Resistance, Nazis

Mendelssohn is on the Roof is a story of both complicity and resistance during an era of Nazi-induced terror. It examines life in occupied Prague through a kaleidoscopic lens; the experiences of its many characters interact in such a way that they are reflected in and by each other, creating a bounty of small intersections and exchanges. Rather than progressing linearly, the novel jumps between, comes back to, and combines individual storylines, creating a labyrinth of linkages littered with discontinuities in time and in plot. Characters that appear in the beginning of the story often reappear unexpectedly later on, leaving the reader to contend with the connections between each appearance. Nuance and ambiguity emerge out of these instances of discontinuity as they create interesting associations and juxtapositions between different characters and events. One such discontinuity can be found by tracing the Head of the Central Bureau’s unnamed mother as she appears throughout the novel. Although a minor character, her inclusion in the story is intentional and significant. We are first introduced to her in an early scene in which her son, an especially cruel Nazi higher-up, works on finding the perfect gift for her birthday. Although not explicitly stated or emphasized, she quietly reappears as the screaming woman that Becvar, a Czech workman, heroically saves during a brutal air raid. This intersection of the two storylines associates Becvar’s resistance to Nazi power with the old woman’s motherly love for her Nazi son, revealing the unsettling truth that a single action can simultaneously double as one of resistance and of complicity.

Because the mother of the Head of the Central Bureau is nameless, it is initially ambiguous if she is the screaming woman in the air raid. Examination of a few key details, however, support the conclusion that they are the same woman. The first piece of evidence is simple; the women in both the gift-giving and air raid scenes are elderly and connected to power within the Nazi hierarchy. In the gift-giving scene, the woman’s son describes her as a “white-haired lady” (50) and an “old lady” (51). We know that her son has power because he knows the truth about The East and he is in charge of dealing with the fortress city and the transports. We learn that he uses this power to “sen[d] her weekly packages from the Protectorate” (51), establishing their relationship as one in which he can pull strings for her. The description of the woman in the bombing scene parallels this. This woman too is described as “an old dame” or “old woman” (154). She has the power to send Becvar back home because, as she tells him, “she has a lot of pull in the various bureaus…her son is some kind of general or marshal or something” (156). The second piece of evidence is that the women in both scenes are uniquely identified as vestiges of the past. The gift-giving scene reveals that “the old lady lived in her memories” (51), describing how she would spend her days gazing at her late husband’s portrait and reminiscing on her son’s childhood through his notebooks and toys. Similarly, the bombing scene describes how the woman is “all dolled up in old-fashioned clothing” and is wearing “the kind of bonnet on her head that they wore in the last century” (154). This attachment to the past is characteristic of both women, and so this detail helps confirm that they are indeed the same woman. The third piece of evidence explicitly places the Head of the Central Bureau’s mother in a bombing, clearing up any remaining ambiguity about whether or not the mother is the screaming woman. In an almost throwaway passage about the Head of the Central Bureau, “the city where his mother had lived hadn’t been spared bombing after all. The old white-haired lady had not been killed, thank God, but her villa was destroyed” (200). Together, these three pieces of evidence prove that the Head of the Central Bureau’s mother is indeed the screaming woman, thus creating a curious, yet undeniable linkage between their respective storylines.

By establishing this linkage, it is confirmed that Becvar saves a Nazi’s mother. While this action may be understood as something purely instinctual, thoughtless, and coincidental, it is further complicated by already established associations with his character. By tracing Becvar’s thread to the beginning of the novel when he is working on the Mendelssohn statue project, we discover a surprising fact– Becvar has a history of demonstrating small acts of resistance against the Reich. First, he blatantly opposes Nazi ideology when he confronts Schlesinger’s belief that “Jews and gypsies are a hostile element because they’re not Aryans” (88). He challenges this thinking by confronting Schlesinger: “I once read some kind of book… saying that the gypsies come from India and that in India they’re Aryans. Somehow the whole thing didn’t make sense to me” (89). This rejection of the definition of Aryan identity and of Nazi persecution of the Romani people is an example of a small act of resistance, demonstrating Becvar’s refusal to, at least fully, immerse himself in their racist ideology. Second, when the workmen are finally given orders to knock down the Mendelssohn statue, Becvar again acts in defiance against his Nazi superiors. As the men put the noose around the statue’s neck, “Becvar had an idea…That statue must be important since they’re making such a fuss about it. We’ve got to knock it down, obviously, but let’s do it real carefully…And then, when this is all over, our fellows can put it back up again…It came down so slowly that only a hand came off”(89–90). He saves this statue because he believes that, one day, it will be erected once more after the Nazi project has terminated. The intentionality of his actions shows how his disobedience is not meant to simply spite his superiors, but rather to take a meaningful stand against them. His small acts of resistance are thus revealed to be deliberate and powerfully political.

The establishment of Becvar as a source of internal political resistance in the novel reframes the rescue of the Head of Central Bureau’s mother as another possible example of his resistance. Interestingly, it parallels his resistive salvage of the Mendelssohn statue in both its depiction of the old woman as a statue as well as in the result of the rescue. When he encounters the old woman, she is standing on a wall with her mouth open, screaming, mirroring the image of Mendelssohn perched on the roof of the concert hall. The old woman’s body is “completely covered with plaster dust” (154), furthering the idea of her as a second statue in need of Becvar’s rescuing. Becvar saves the Mendelssohn statue in hopes that the famous Jew will be allowed to once again rise when Prague is freed of the Nazis and their ideas. In a similar manner, his rescue of the old woman preserves another form of resistive hope that is enshrined in her. The Head of the Central Bureau’s mother lives in her memories, in a more innocent past in which her husband is alive and her son is still her little boy. Because of this, she spends her days dusting her late husband’s desk and armchair and taking care of her son’s old toys and school notebooks. When she is transformed into a statue during the bombing, she comes to immortalize a pure love for her son and a lived memory of a time before their hellish present. In Becvar’s impulsive decision to rescue the woman, he thus preserves a naïve hope for a lost past, a pure, motherly love that stands in stark opposition to the gas chambers, the starving bodies, the happenings in the East. This single action can thus be understood to be one of resistance based on the recognition of the network of associations that intrinsically tie Becvar’s resistive past to the old woman’s propensity for the past. At the same time, however, this single action can also be understood as an example of Becvar’s complicity, of his supporting of, and even benefitting from, the Nazi project. Once labeled “a secret enemy of the Reich” (93) by Schlesinger after his involvement with the Mendelssohn statue, he ultimately leaves the warfront as a public hero of the Reich. He is rewarded with a document that allows his return home and that praises how “he had distinguished himself during the bombardment” (157). He is seen favorably in the eyes of the Reich because of his service to them; he rescued the mother of a powerful Nazi from near certain death. The moment in which he saves her can be read as a self-sacrifice– as he drags her to safety, thus completing the rescue mission, “he fainted. Suddenly life returned to the old woman” (155). His fainting represents a metaphorical death and it is revealing that it is immediately followed by the woman’s revitalization. The juxtaposition of his fainting “death” and her rebirth thus suggests that this action is transactional, that in this moment, he gives his life for the Reich, surrendering himself to its control. In this way, rescuing the old woman fully implicates him in the Nazi mission. Additionally, he bolsters their cause by directly serving the Head of the Central Bureau (by saving his mother), for which he is handsomely rewarded. The old woman, and thus the Reich by extension, compensates him with the opportunity to go home. The deals he makes and favors he accepts from the Nazis further evidence how his rescuing of the old woman can be clearly understood not as an act of resistance, but of complete complicity.

Mendelssohn is on the Roof integrates fractured individual narratives that, together, create a labyrinth of linkages amongst characters, events, and ideas. The lives of Becvar and an old woman become unexpectedly enmeshed during a bombardment, although there is ambiguity about the identity of who he has actually saved. Following the threads of key details about the old woman in the bombing reveals that she is the loving mother of the Head of the Central Bureau, a man whose life work is to realize Jewish extermination. Becvar’s proclivity towards resisting the Nazi project complicates his rescue of the mother of a Nazi, ultimately underlining how a single action can be understood both as an act of resistance and of complicity. This blurring of the distinction between resistance and complicity challenges conventional notions of culpability, forcing us, as readers, to realize the nuance in how we assign both guilt and honor, in how we delineate a good deed from a bad deed.