Book Review: Max

What is this about?: Max, who is Lebensborn, part of an SS-supported group in Nazi Germany dedicated to breeding Germans true and Aryan. We hear Max from the womb, already indoctrinated into the Nazi way of thinking, and it’s heartbreaking and confronting. This story is about Max as he grows up, and what the Nazis couldn’t stamp out and what they turned him into at the same time.

What else is it about?: His friendship with Lukas, a Polish boy who can pass as Aryan and who was taken from his family to become German.

Should you read this: Yes. But, be ready to understand Max and hate him at the same time.

Stars: 4/5.

Blurb: Meet Max—it’s 1936, Bavaria, and he’s still a foetus inside his blonde, blue-eyed mother. Utterly indoctrinated in the Nazi ideology, he will address you, tell you his story until 1945—his destiny as an exceptional being, the prototype of the ‘Lebensborn’ (Fountains of Youth) program, designed to produce perfect specimens of the Aryan race to regenerate the Reich. When Max meets Lukas, a young Polish boy who resembles him but who rebels against the Nazi system, cracks starts to appear in Max’s convictions…

Where to begin? In his mother’s womb, I guess. We are introduced to him as he anticipates his birth, critiquing his mother’s hips and how they will aid him in his appearance. There’s his glee that a highly placed doctor within the SS is here at his birth and his determination to show the doctor just what he’s made out of: that he will do the SS proud.

Make no mistake, Max is a Nazi. We follow him through his birth, through his formative years and even with him being assigned to work with a Polish informer gathering names for his SS masters. He takes his job seriously, as if he were 25 and not 5, but that ignores the point of this book: that being a Nazi is in Max’s blood. He lives, breathes and believes everything Hitler does.

When he changes, as the book promises, it’s subtle. Or perhaps it’s as unsubtle as can be, I can’t decide — I think it’s going to depend on the reader a little how Max changes. For me, it’s subtle because Max doesn’t recognise his humanity when it asserts itself against the strength of his Nazi indoctrination.

And, for me that’s where the heart of this book lies: that there’s something in Max that is rebelling as best it can against what he’s learned he should be. I want to think that the author is right, that there is an innate goodness in us all that will reassert itself against the weight of everything we grow up with.

It’s not that Max is a preachy novel, determined to make readers believe in the humanity in us all — Max himself is not a character remotely like that. Both sides of him fight against each other in order to emerge triumphant, often leaving a confused Max in their wake.

Lukas is his greatest test — the Polish boy who refuses to be Germanised. They meet at a school and Lukas almost has a death wish, daring Max to report him when he reveals he still considers himself Jewish and Polish, and not German as the school is teaching him to be. But here’s the thing, Max knows exactly what will happen to Lukas if he does, and so he doesn’t report him, despite his training and learning everything that it is to be a Nazi.

Instead, he worries about Lukas, he protects him and listens to him too — and so Max earns a friend. But, this friendship does not run smoothly, and Max struggles to reconcile his indoctrination with everything Lukas is.

In the end, you’re going to feel wrung out and as Sarah Cohen-Scali says in the dedication to this novel you’re going to love Max, defend him and adopt this orphan of evil. She is hopeful for Max, for others like him under the weight of the evil they embrace. Cohen-Scali isn’t saying that change is easy and some cases possible, but that there is some goodness in everyone even underneath their hate. It’s up to them whether they listen to that goodness or not. And sometimes, like here, you’re not going to get a happy ending.

What do you think of Max?