Hot Fusion: Omega Minor

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Omega Minor screams to the heavens when it confronts the Holocaust, perceptively recounted thorough De Heer's eyes. The Nazis "are not killing a people," De Heer posits. "What they want is to turn back modernity, get rid of rationality and its twin brother uncertainty." Recounting Germany's demented diversion of resources from the war effort to the extermination camps, right up to the end, De Heer concludes that Nazism's defining goal was the Holocaust, not all that Wagnerian nonsense about Reich and glory. Yet he concedes: "History is the lie people tell to give meaning to their pasts."

Omega Minor was born of curiosity about a past that Verhaeghen, 42, never knew. "I was doing a postdoc at Potsdam in 1995," he recalls, moments before leaving his Atlanta home for a psychology conference in California. "I took the train to Berlin and emerged at Mitte, the center of old East Berlin. I found myself alone on this huge square, except for a strange glow coming from a glass plate in the pavement. There was a small white underground chamber lined with empty bookshelves. On it was that famous [Heinrich] Heine quote, 'Where they burn books, they will end up burning people.' It was the monument to the 1933 book burnings. I looked up and saw I was surrounded by Frederick the Great's Neoclassical buildings. Nearby were Hitler's bunker and the old Jewish synagogue. I was at the center of world history. I wanted to learn more."

So Verhaeghen began reading. He took courses in relativity, cosmology and Yiddish fiction. Nine years later, he was finished. "Honestly, I don't know why I wrote so much," he says. His Dutch publisher made him delete 120 pages of footnotes. He worked many of them, largely scientific explanations, into the main text, making the book a translator's nightmare. "Later, when the book was being translated into English, I saw a sample," he says. "It was excellent, but I didn't recognize my voice. Until then I hadn't realized I had a voice! So I did 30 pages myself and sent it to the [Flemish government] agency that subsidizes translations. Their outside reviewer thought my English was better than my Dutch."

As Verhaeghen slaved at the translation — "250,000 frigging words!" — prize money kept rolling in. "I was working on a sentence at the war's end, about how the former Nazi camps were being filled with prisoners by the Soviets," he recalls. "It struck me that it was happening all over again, in America — the limits on freedom of speech, the first evidence of torture." As a U.S. resident, Verhaeghen would have to pay American income tax on his prize money, then about $25,000. "I could imagine it would go for schools and hospitals, but in reality much of it would fund the war in Iraq." So he asked that the money be given instead to the American Civil Liberties Union and to Human Rights Watch. "I hoped my gesture would make people think. But there's been surprisingly little response. It seems we're all very afraid now."

For all his criticism of the U.S., it's revealing that the Flemish world's hottest novelist tends to refer to Americans as "we." While Verhaeghen remains a Belgian citizen, the pull of America is strong. "I've reached two points of no return. I've been here 10 years, and I'm married to an American," says Verhaeghen, whose wife is also a psychologist. "I don't equate the country with what is happening now. I believe America's heart is in the right place."

For now, his own heart is in psychology. He is finishing a book on aging and memory for Oxford University Press, so fiction must wait. "I'm completely exhausted. Omega Minor said it all; I have nothing left." Still, Verhaeghen finds his new surroundings intriguing. "Atlanta is a different kind of history — the Civil War, the civil-rights movement. Things are starting to move in my mind. If you see me in a seedy part of town, don't panic. I'll just be doing research."