NEIN, NEIN, NEIN!

Gonzo meets the Shoah in this wildly irreverent—and brilliant—tour of Holocaust tourism.

Convinced that the history of mass murder and total war is being reborn in the age of Trump and his “whole destroying-democracy and damning-future-generations thing,” Stahl, best known for his drug-soaked memoir, Permanent Midnight, traveled to Poland and Germany. “I needed to go to Naziland,” he explains. What he found, apart from the expected horrors, was a simple assault on good taste—e.g., a cafeteria in Auschwitz where tourists suck down kielbasa, dressed in the usual shorts-and–T-shirts uniform that marks them as rubes for all to see. The ghost of Hunter S. Thompson (who’s invoked here) hovers in the wings, but Stahl is sui generis, with a refreshingly self-deprecatory edge (“Don’t be an asshole,” he tells himself) and a delightfully sharp tongue: “Hard not to imagine Steve ‘I Financed Seinfeld’ Mnuchin on Meet the Press: ‘Say what you will about the Third Reich, they were big on infrastructure!’ ” Stahl knows his Holocaust history, sometimes more than his guide (who muttered loud enough for him to hear, “I hope you’re not going to be my Jewish problem”), but he was also prepared to be surprised. When confronted with the enormity of Nazi crimes against humanity, he writes, “contemplation turns to paralysis, and you end up going nowhere, gripped by the moral equivalent of couch lock.” The author doesn’t hesitate to make pointed comparisons between Nazis and the members of the mob who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “Trump’s fecal lynch mob [who] bore chuckly logos like Camp Auschwitz.” Stahl’s takeaway is worth pondering: The Holocaust was no exception in history; instead, “It is the time between holocausts that is the exception. So savor these moments. Be grateful. Even if the ax is falling.”

A vivid, potent, decidedly idiosyncratic addition to the literature of genocide.