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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



Vengeance is Mine

by
Friedrich Torberg


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase Vengeance is Mine


Title: Vengeance is Mine
Author: Friedrich Torberg
Genre: Novel
Written: 1943 (Eng. 2026)
Length: 116 pages
Original in: German
Availability: Vengeance is Mine - UK
Mein ist die Rache - Deutschland
Mia è la vendetta - Italia
Mía es la venganza - España
  • German title: Mein ist die Rache
  • Translated and with a Note by Stephanie Gorrell Ortega
  • With an Introduction by Menachem Kaiser
  • With an Afterword by Marcel Atze

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Our Assessment:

B+ : powerful story, well-presented

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Books Abroad . Fall/1944 F.C.Weiskopf


  From the Reviews:
  • "Mein ist die Rache, a weird story of the escape of a prisoner from a concentration camp, is told with remarkable skill, in both phrasing and construction. It is true that there is a sort of super-pointe which, in the reviewer's opinion, spoils the final effect." - F.C.Weiskopf, Books Abroad

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Vengeance is Mine is an as-told-to-me story: there is a framing device, the narrator explaining how he encountered: "a gaunt, hunched figure, a man about forty" on a New Jersey pier (whom he has seen here before) in November, 1940, but the story proper is then entirely the one the stranger relates (the narrator explaining that he is presenting it just as he heard it: "as an ongoing narrative, just as he related it"); only when the man is finished does the original narrator again resurface, in some final exchanges with the stranger. The framing is helpful, however -- first in providing some context for the stranger's story and then in allowing for a final, pivotal reveal.
       The novel opens with the narrator on the pier, waiting for friends to arrive from Europe; it is the fourth time he is here -- and each time previously he had seen the same man there. With some time on his hands while his friends go through the lengthy formalities he now approaches the man and asks him whether he is waiting for someone as well; the man explains:

     "I am waiting for seventy-five," he continued. "For seventy-five people, but not one has showed up. That's why I leave alone."
       Given the time and place, readers will already have a sense of who the man was waiting for -- refugees fleeing war-torn Europe, most likely Germans and Jews. (There was still a fair amount of traffic from Europe into the United States in 1940 (as also the US was not yet at war): the annual quota for German immigration in the years around then was around 27,000 (though also with over 300,000 on the 1940 waiting list ...).)
       The stranger tells his story, explaining that: "I am going to tell you what happened at Heidenburg Concentration Camp" -- a small camp ("five hundred at the highest count") near the border to Holland, its prisoners put to hard labor breaking up stones where he was interned. (The Nazis first established concentration camps in 1933; while the best-known are the infamous death-camps such as Auschwitz there were literally tens of thousands of forced labor camps under the Nazi regime.)
       He describes the camp as being: "not so bad" -- explaining:
Maybe it sounds grotesque to you that a concentration camp was "not so bad." Well, even Hell, when you look at it from the inside, has its different levels. At the time I was interned, someone in Dachau, let's say, had good luck compared to someone in Buchenwald. By that standard getting sent to Heidenburg was great good luck. Fortune takes unusual forms.
       A new commandant, SS Group Leader Hermann Wagenseil, changes the situation completely. Wagenseil has a different approach to punishment than is the norm: everywhere else: "group punishment was, as a matter of course, standard practice. When someone transgressed, the whole group he belonged to had to pay". Not so under Wagenseil -- "since commonality in suffering is like any commonality. It brings people together, gives them strength and comfort". Wagenseil couldn't stand for that: "He demoralized us by taking away our shared suffering. He individualized it. He called out individuals".
       Among Wagenseil's first acts was also to separate the eighty Jews out from the rest of those in the camp, putting them all in a 'Jew barracks' -- the worst barracks in the camp, and also one too small to possibly fit eighty men at one time. The Jews send a small delegation to explain to Wagenseil that the conditions are physically impossible, but he's not a man who listens to reason -- and knows exactly what he's doing. When he dismisses them he tells them: "There will be enough room in your barracks. I assure you".
       What Wagenseil manages is to drive some to despair and suicide; he doesn't need to have them killed because he can drive them to their own deaths.
       Some in the barracks suggest it will go on until twenty have died; then there will be (just) enough room in the barracks -- but one man sees the bigger picture clearly:
     "Hss. Twenty ? What makes you gentlemen think that ? I am telling you it will be everybody ! Everybody !"
     Gurewitsch intervened, perhaps for Seligmann who was crying uncontrollably:
     "You cannot mean eighty people --"
     "Eighty ?" Little Kohn continued. "It will be everybody ! Don't you get it ? Each and everyone of us ! The commandant here in our camp is just a little guy. He is doing on a small scale what the big guys are doing everywhere. They want to wipe us all out. Wipe out every last one of us."
     "It is true," Loeb whispered. "It's true. It is probably the same in all the camps. Or maybe it is worse. It's true. Probably ..."
       (These events and that exchange presumably took place earlier in 1940; the Nazi 'final solution' making the killing of Jews essentially official policy and shifting from small-scale to mass-killing only came about in 1942, at the Wannsee Conference (see e.g. Peter Longerich's Wannsee); Torberg wrote this novel in 1943, a time when many certainly already suspected such a policy was in force but -- certainly officially abroad as well as among the general German population -- preferred to remain in denial and/or turn a blind eye to it, but as the passage suggests: even already in 1940 the writing was clearly on the wall and obvious to anyone looking at the situation clear-eyed, Nazi rhetoric having long made clear its ultimate horrific goals, and willingness to reach them at any and all costs. (Readers would do well to consider this, given the so-similar anti-Jewish, Muslim, and foreigners-generally rhetoric that is currently so widespread in so many countries.))
       In discussing the deaths among themselves, the Jews note that none of the suicides chose to act against Wagenseil, even as they apparently had opportunity to. One prisoner in particular, Aschkenasy, argues that this is good: "It is good his sacrifice remained pure before the Lord. To me belongeth vengeance and recompense sayeth the Lord". As the one telling the story notes, this plays into the hands of the persecutors: "They are sure we will rely on God for vengeance" -- rather than taking anything into their own hands. But, as the title of the novel suggests, there comes a point when one of them decides not to leave it up to God, but rather that: 'vengeance is mine' .....
       Much of the arc of the story of course isn't surprising, given the title as well as the fact that this one-time prisoner in Heidenburg now paces a pier in New Jersey, meaning that he must have been released (unlikely) or escaped. And the fact that he waits for the seventy-five left behind of course also speaks volumes -- not least about his feelings of guilt, of what the course of action that he chose must have led to (though we, like him, can never know exactly what their fate was).
       Central to the story is this debate as to who should take vengeance -- should one trust in and leave it up to the Lord, trusting that He will see to 'justice', or should one act ? -- and the question of free will; the one telling the story struggles greatly with these issues. He did make his fateful choice -- but struggles still with the question. Torberg's final twist just hammers it all home all the more strongly.
       Vengeance is Mine presents a moral-philosophical (and, I guess, religious) dilemma very well. Wagenseil is pure evil -- and represents and presents Nazism distilled in its purest perversion. As he cooly explains to the man:
The international Jewish conspiracy consists of the fact that there are Jews. And it will exist until there are no more Jews. Every Jew is part of this conspiracy by virtue of the fact he is a Jew. Since these are the circumstances, we must eradicate this threat. I hope, sir, you understand why you are being interrogated.
       In this time where antisemitism and hostility to anyone 'foreign' have again become both far more widespread and more intemperate than they have in decades, Vengeance is Mine is all too topical -- while, as Torberg shows, the question of exacting justice and vengeance remains as thorny as ever.
       Vengeance is Mine is a slim novella -- padded here with an Introduction and an Afterword (the latter, in particular, useful and informative -- but (spoiler alert) one that is better read after finishing Torberg's tale) --, but, expertly served, packs quite the punch, and it is good to now see it available also in English translation.

- M.A.Orthofer, 19 December 2025

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Links:

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About the Author:

       Austrian author Friedrich Torberg lived 1908 to 1979.

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© 2025 the complete review

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