The Third Man by Randolph Splitter

Reviewed by Malcolm Spencer 

Spencer, Malcolm. Review of The Third Man, by Randolph Splitter. Journal of Austrian Studies, vol. 57 no. 3, 2024, p. 241-243. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/oas.2024.a955474.

 

Randolph Splitter received a doctorate in English at Berkeley and then taught literature and creative writing at colleges in California. He now lives in retirement in Portland, Oregon, where he "writes novels, dodges raindrops and exercises his social conscience" (to quote from his website). In 1981 he published a monograph on Proust that has recently been reissued with a new preface, and in 2017 came out with The Ramadan Drummer, a novel about multiculturalism. He has also published Body and Soul, a collection of stories, and has written several prize-winning screenplays.

His latest work of fiction is The Third Man, which is about a group of Austrians, all of Jewish background, who, living in Vienna in 1938, experience the Anschluss and its disastrous consequences—dispossession, exile, and, in the case of several of them, deportation and death. The story is part of Splitter's own family background: his parents left Vienna in 1938 and his young cousins were able to find refuge in England through the Kindertransport. He has used some elements of his own family history to create characters in the novel—such as the apprentice butcher Ignaz Natanson, who later as a refugee in England uses the name Nigel Nicholson—and has freely imagined others.

Giving a novel the same title as Carol Reed's celebrated film of 1949 (and the novella by Graham Greene which formed the basis of his screenplay) might seem to risk plagiarism. Indeed, the novel's cover art is a black-and-white image of the Riesenrad in Vienna, automatically evoking for readers the most famous scene in that film. But, in fact, Splitter cleverly integrates the film into his narrative: in the prologue, the protagonist Ignaz/Nigel has been engaged to be an extra in Shepperton Studios as Orson Welles's body double (since they both have the same physique); in the epilogue, Ignaz and his partner Cristina are watching the film in a London cinema; unbeknownst to him, so is Julie Bernstein, who had escaped to England on the Kindertransport and whom he had met as a child in Vienna. "A couple attracted Julie's attention. […] The woman was dark-haired and pretty, the man strong-looking with a broad chest and large hands. But his face seemed oddly familiar, like the face of someone she used to know" (352, the final words of the novel).

It is significant that Splitter has written screenplays, because The Third Man resembles (if only superficially) the kind of Netflix series in which a group of imagined characters are placed against a known historical background with familiar events intruding into their lives in the form of newspaper headlines or radio broadcasts. Readers of the Journal of Austrian Studies will probably be critical of the historical inaccuracies of Netflix series such as Freud or Die Kaiserin. But a strength of Splitter's narrative is that it contains no such mistakes—it has been very carefully researched. Even small details are accurate: in November 1938, during the pogrom in Vienna, Ignaz is arrested and is taken to "an elementary school on Karajangasse" before being transported to the Dachau concentration camp (99)—this is a precise, authentic detail. The only errors in Splitter's text are linguistic or typographical: it is mostly written in contemporary American English, but the German the characters occasionally use is not always correct, and several locations in Vienna are misspelled. These are minor slips, and it should be stressed that Splitter uses his narrative to raise major issues such as the reasons for antisemitism and its troubling continuation after 1945 and the practical difficulties of "denazification" after the war ("[The term] implied that you could pick out the offending elements, like salt in water or impurities in food," 264). The fictional format allows Splitter to explore these issues in imaginative ways. For example, when Ignaz/Nigel returns to Vienna after the war, he tries to track down the young man who in 1938 had forced his mother, Klara, to clean the pavement with a toothbrush (the infamous event and photograph is integrated into the narrative), only to find that the man had been killed fighting in the Wehrmacht in Italy, with his sister now reduced to life on the streets to support her child fathered by an American GI. Thus is Ignaz confronted with the moral impossibility of revenge.

The first three chapters of the novel ("Red Vienna," "The City without Jews," and "Anschluss") take the story from the civil war of February 1934 up to the end of 1938, when Julie's parents, Paul and Rachel Bernstein, make the agonizing decision to send their seven-year-old daughter to England in the Kindertransport program. At this point of the story, all the people are still in Vienna, giving the text a single focus. Thereafter—inevitably, given the tragic course of events—Splitter has to divide his text into shorter sections that either portray Julie's adaptation to life with a foster family in provincial England or show Ignaz/Nigel's life after he is interned as an "enemy alien" in Britain after having jumped ship in London en route for Shanghai and then is conscripted into the British Army, serving in North Africa, Italy, and finally, Four Powers–occupied Vienna.

The Third Man is readable, imaginative, and extremely well researched; its author is clearly a person of humane values. It is neither a short text (like one of Joseph Roth's works of the 1920s about dispossession and exile), nor is it, at 350 pages, a novel of epic length, though its historical frame, stretching from Austria in 1934 to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, would have justified such a work. The later chapters contain much screenplay-like detail (all of it realistic) that could perhaps have been compressed into a more economical novel, with its first half in Vienna and its second half set only in England, with the other locations left more to the reader's imagination.