The Boy Who Started A War
An Interview with Harlan Greene by Jameson Currier

On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish man living illegally in Paris, walked into the German embassy and shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat. The assassination triggered Kristallnacht, the organized Nazi pogrom against the Jewish community inside the boundaries of Third Reich and was the symbolic beginning of the Holocaust. Many historians have speculated that the young Grynszpan had intended to shoot the ambassador, Count Johannes Welczek, but according to author Harlan Greene in his new novel, The German Officer’s Boy (University of Wisconsin Press), the shooting was the accidental result of the seventeen year-old Grynszpan’s affair with the older, twenty-nine year-old German officer. Earlier this year I spoke with Greene, whose prior works include two historical novels about gay life in Charleston (Why We Never Danced the Charleston and What the Dead Remember) and an admirable shelf of non-fiction books on Southern history.

Jim Currier: Where did you first hear or read that Herschel might have been gay?

Harlan Greene: I had been seeing it in footnotes of books for a long time. Because my parents were Holocaust survivors, I was always reading about the Holocaust. I first noticed the reference in the mid-1980s in a book by Frank Rector called The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals and, to be frank, I didn’t believe it. I thought someone was trying to write gay history into everything. Over time, it seemed something more credible to me.

Currier: Why did you decide to novelize this story?

Greene: I have published nonfiction and I really believe in the integrity of nonfiction—I published a biography of a minor South Carolina writer and that took seven years to write and that was also from having access to his voluminous correspondence—he lived in a Victorian house and kept every little bit of correspondence he’d ever written. But to do something where I didn’t know the original language and would have to rely on foreign travel to do it correctly was beyond my ken. I’m not an academic. I don’t have summers off. And that’s not my field. I realized I wanted to do something with it and it seemed to me long after I embarked on the novel that I probably did take the right turn because there was very few facts out there.

In the novel, Greene has the affair between Grynszpan and vom Rath begin the summer of 1938 and continue until November, when Herschel, whose papers were not in order, was about to be deported from France. Greene’s vivid, complex novel follows Herschel’s imprisonment in France and his subsequent time at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and it is a masterful weaving of deception, twists, cover-ups, politics, and public relations ploys during Herschel’s confinement. Throughout the novel, Greene intersperses many historical facts and documents, including the press release from the physicians whom Hitler sent to Paris to examine Grynszpan, Joseph Goebbels’s speech in Munich the night before Kristallnacht, the radio address of American journalist Dorothy Thompson, and the postcards from the Grynszpan family.

Currier: What sort of ‘artistic license’ did you use in creating this story as a novel?

Greene: Herschel’s imprisonment in Sachsenhausen—that’s fact. The things that I invented were Herschel’s family background and his angst—that’s made out of whole cloth and there is a lot of foreshortening of the time, particularly after Germany invaded France. Herschel’s first attorneys—they’re based on truth—I only had their names. The way I got their personalities was when Vincent de Moro Giafferi supplanted them, they sued, saying that Herschel was their client. Some of the money raised for Herschel’s defense was paid off to those attorneys.

Currier: Was Herschel really a ‘rent boy’ while he was in Paris?

Greene: The character of Dothan [Herschel’s procurer in the novel] is whole cloth. Some of the specific books on Kristallnacht would talk about the claim of Herschel being gay, and it was hypothesizing on the historians part to say he wasn’—Herschel lived in a part of town that was notorious for boy prostitutes. These historians didn’t even realize what they were saying, so they gave me that suggestion. There were many famous rent boy cases at the time.

Grynszpan’s fate has become one of the unsolved mysteries of World War II and the Holocaust. The last time anyone saw Herschel in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was September 1942. A number of post-war sources have contended that Grynszpan survived only to resume his Paris residence after the War and start a family. One of Grynszpan’s original lawyers reported that he had been beheaded by the Germans after his transfer into their hands in 1940. All of Grynszpan’s family survived the war except for an uncle who was murdered in Auschwitz, and Grynszpan’s sister who died in Russia, where the family took refuge. The Grynszpan family later immigrated to Israel, where they played a part in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Herschel’s father and brother testified that all their previous efforts to find him had failed. In the late 1950s, the family petitioned the German government for a death date in order to give the family closure. Herschel Grynszpan was declared dead June 1, 1960.

Currier: Was it difficult to find a publisher for the novel?

Greene: My agent started trying to send it out in 1996. And it’s certainly gone through permutations since then. One major publisher accepted it and then the big wigs threatened to fire the editor. My agent kept saying he’d never seen anything like it. I was just assuming it was for the salability of it—that they were assuming it was box office poison. There was a verbal contract which they had to rescind. People liked it, people hated it, people didn’t do it. My agent was very persistent. Then I read an article in Lambda Book Report on the University of Wisconsin Press and saw that they did gay and Holocaust works, so that seemed to be a pretty good fit for this.

Harlan Greene’s parents, Sam and Regina Greene, survived the Holocaust in Russian work camps during World War II. They were married in June 1939 shortly before war broke out. After the war, his parents moved to Charleston, where his mother had an aunt and a first cousin. Greene, born in 1953, was raised in Charleston where he now lives with his partner, Jonathan Ray. Greene began writing The German Officer’s Boy in the late 1980s when he lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his companion at the time, Olin Jolley, was starting his residency in psychiatry at the University of North Carolina. In October of that year, Jolley was diagnosed with AIDS.

Currier: Your own life has been a remarkable journey. How did your background play out while starting to write this novel?

Greene: I started working on this novel right when Olin was diagnosed with AIDS. Ironically, it was on Yom Kippur of 1989 that he basically went into the hospital and almost died. He subsequently lived seven years. I think that’s one thing that launched me onto this novel—and I’m certainly not comparing my experiences with Olin being sick with Holocaust experiences—but what struck me in those first few months when Olin got sick and we weren’t telling his parents—was that I was leading something of a double life, pretending everything was fine but there was this devastating experience that I was going through. It struck me that this might be what someone felt who was passing at the time—a Jew pretending not to be Jewish pretending not to be going through a tragedy. Olin’s experience made me read a lot more stuff into Holocaust works and appreciate my parents experience much more.

Jameson Currier is the author of the novel, Where the Rainbow Ends, and a collection of short stories, Desire Lust Passion Sex. His short fiction can also be found in the anthologies Men on Men, Best American Gay Fiction, Best Gay Erotica, Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, Making Literature Matter, Rebel Yell, and Circa 2000, among others. His story “Snow,” published in the first issue of Velvet Mafia, was selected for Best Gay Erotica 2003 and Best American Erotica 2004.