Jerry Stahl’s life, in many ways, was collapsing under the weight of personal despair:
Divorce. Depression. An all-but-dead television pilot.
But this was 2016. One of the most negative, toxic and consequential presidential elections in memory was underway – and Stahl, following along, also despaired for the future of the world.
So Stahl, an author and screenwriter, did something curious: He visited the epicenters of human despair. Stahl, who is Jewish, took a bus tour of World War II concentration camps in Germany and Poland as a way to gain perspective on his sorrow and the world’s tumult.
And then he turned it into a book.
“Nein, Nein, Nein! One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust,” was released Tuesday, July 5, by Akashic Books.
As a memoir, the book is deeply personal, discussing Stahl’s efforts to work through his depression, professional troubles and other issues.
But “Nein” also draws a connection between the Nazis of history, and the rise of authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and racism around the world, which multiple studies, polls and news reports have detailed.
The dueling narratives that would ultimately comprise “Nein,” along with the horrors of the Holocaust, converged on Stahl’s bus tour through Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald.
Stahl, 68, is the celebrated writer of 10 books and several television shows and movies.
Decidedly not a bus tour kind of guy, he decided to visit concentration camps to learn more about World War II and the Holocaust, and get some perspective on the personal and professional issues he was dealing with at home in Southern California.
The trip was meant to focus his out-of-control sadness, regret and fear, Stahl said.
“I am trying to discover (for) myself what I was feeling, because in this particular case the subject matter is so deep and dark that you’re operating on two levels,” Stahl said. “You’re writing about the crime of the 20th century, but you’re also writing about your reaction to it.”
While Stahl – who has lived throughout the Southland, including in Pasadena and San Marino – is a successful Hollywood writer, his life has been marked by its own, narrower type of regret and tragedy.
Stahl, who grew up in Pittsburgh, moved west after his father, a federal judge who served as Pennsylvania attorney general, died by suicide.
After winning a Pushcart Prize, a well-regarded literary award, in 1976, Stahl wrote for magazines and newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s. His first paying gig was for the Santa Cruz Free Press when he was 20, for which he made $8 an article.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Stahl wrote for popular and cult television shows, such as “ALF” and “Twin Peaks” – yet he did so while maintaining a vigorous heroin addiction. (He’s been clean for more than 25 years.)
Stahl is also the author of several transgressive novels, including “Happy Mutant Baby Pills,” “Bad Sex on Speed, Pain Killers” and “I, Fatty,” a fictionalized autobiography of silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle that was optioned by Johnny Depp.
But “Nein,” which Robert Downey Jr. recently optioned, is most similar to the book for which Stahl is best known, his 1995 heroin memoir, “Permanent Midnight.”
“Permanent Midnight” became a movie starring Stahl’s friend Ben Stiller in 1998.
Underscoring the similarities between the two memoirs, the 92nd Street Y in New York hosted a book launch for “Nein” in mid-June – featuring a conversation between Stahl and Stiller.
Stiller hung out with Stahl for nine months while the studio tried to finance the movie.
“Having Jerry there was invaluable to me, because he gave me the confidence to be this guy who was going through experiences I had never gone through,” Stiller told this reporter. “He supported me in it fully and it really made the difference.”
“Nein,” like “Permanent Midnight,” is written in a highly personal, hold-nothing-back style. Stahl said he wouldn’t quite call it “therapeutic” to put every sordid detail on public display – but certainly a form of expiation.
The bus tour, Stahl wrote in “Nein,” was “engendered in despair and (aspirationally) a cure for it at the same time.”
The show he was writing at the time was about a fun, happy-go-lucky marriage between an older guy and a younger woman who were having a baby. It was based on his 2015 memoir “OG Dad” – about the marriage that was falling apart as he worked on the pilot.
“You’re walking this tightrope, because you think you’re gonna go in and have this tremendous revelatory experience, which you do on one level,” Stahl said. “On the other hand, the first thing you see at Auschwitz is a snack bar with people eating pizza and drinking Fanta, so there’s a bit of a disconnect.”
That snack bar is where prisoners were once tattooed and got their heads shaved.
“The actual pizza ovens are, on some level, just as disturbing as the ovens in the crematorium,” Stahl wrote in “Nein.” Especially when you consider “the average prisoner’s nutritional intake came to roughly 800 (barely edible) calories a day.”
The subject matter sounds like a downer. But Stahl, who’s known for his dry-but-witty style, manages to write about that scene – and others – in a humor-steeped, yet meaningful, way.
Some of the most memorable scenes in the book, in fact, are infused with gallows humor:
There’s the story of Stahl visiting the gift shop at Dachau.
There’s the time he ran into a sliding glass door at the Buchenwald cafeteria.
And there’s the dichotomy of Stahl standing in a place of cruelty and death while his tour guide hopes aloud that the crowd wore comfortable shoes for the Auschwitz visit.
“We’ve got a lot of walking,” the tour guide said, according to “Nein.” “And we’re behind schedule.”
But the trip wasn’t all humorous incongruities.
Visiting and writing about Holocaust sites did reveal a certain truth.
“None of your problems—and by ‘your’ I mean ‘mine’—none of it matters,” he said. “This is so huge and so much bigger than my personal torments and idiocies and struggles.
“And I always wonder about the prisoners themselves,” Stahl added. “How far into their captivity did all the obsession over success, money, marriage, sex, ambition, how far did that last before it just dissipated into the straight-up struggle for survival?”
Yet, his personal and professional struggles weren’t the only contributors to Stahl’s emotional despair during that trip.
He also feared for the world around him – that the horrors of the Holocaust would turn into a type of prologue for society’s future.
Stahl’s fears, as it turns out, weren’t entirely unfounded.
The year 2020, for example, was the 15th in a row during which global freedom declined, according to a country-by-country report published by the nonpartisan Freedom House.
That organization – which researches the state of, and advocates to increase, freedom around the world – found that in 2020, the share of countries designated “not free” had reached its highest level since 2006.
The United States saw its freedom score also decline, according to that report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is currently conducting a war in Ukraine – six years after the authoritarian was accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
At home, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States, according to the American Jewish Committee. The number of hate crimes in California spiked in 2021, the state’s Department of Justice said in a report published late last month.
And Stahl’s conclusion, for many people, won’t be particularly comforting.
“The Holocaust of the 1940s is done,” Stahl writes in “Nein,” but “the ongoing genocide-adjacent assault on human rights—globally, locally, nationally—continues.”
Stahl’s final message is either one of hope or tragic fatalism, depending on your perspective.
But Stahl is a man who has experienced depression and addiction, flitted between professional success and failure – and yet he has never lost his gallows humor.
Perhaps that makes it easier to understand why Stahl says his message to readers is one of hope.
“My message of hope is that the Holocaust was not an exception,” he wrote in “Nein.” “It is the time between holocausts that is the exception.
“So savor these moments,” Stahl added. “Be grateful. Even if the ax is always falling.”
Jerry Stahl will discuss, read and sign “Nein, Nein, Nein! One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust” during a conversation with Evan Wright at 7 p.m. July 28 at Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., in West Hollywood. For more information, visit booksoup.com.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
Jerry Stahl Learns to ‘Savor the Moments Between Holocausts’ in His New Book
Nein, Nein, Nein! One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust, about LA author Jerry Stahl’s bus tour of European concentration camps, makes the connection to the current political environment and delivers a reflective tome infused with gallows humor
By Justin Chapman
When author and screenwriter Jerry Stahl embarked on Holocaust tourism—bus touring the World War II concentration camps of Germany and Poland—in the heat of the 2016 U.S. presidential election for his latest book, he felt like he was “visiting the future.”
In Nein, Nein, Nein! One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust, out Tuesday, July 5, by Akashic Books, Stahl draws a clear connection between the Nazis of history and the rising alt-right and authoritarianism of today.
“You have to remember that Hitler was considered an ass clown, too, initially,” Stahl said. “He was the subject of great mockery and derision and nobody took him seriously. The same could have been said for Trump. He was a sideshow, but then the joke turns out to be on us when that sideshow becomes the center ring and the main event—and it turns out we’re the sideshow.”
Referring to outgoing Rep. Madison Cawthorne (R-North Carolina), who posted a photo of himself on Instagram in 2017 at the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden, Germany—along with a caption that said Adolf Hitler’s vacation home had “been on my bucket list for awhile”—Stahl said that “in America now, that’s almost mainstream. Obviously, Joseph Goebbels invented the Big Lie, but needless to say, it still works.”
Stahl, 68, is the celebrated writer of 10 books and several TV shows and movies. He began his career writing for magazines and newspapers in the 1970s and 80s after winning a Pushcart Prize in 1976. He grew up in Pittsburgh and moved west after his father, a federal judge who served as attorney general of Pennsylvania, committed suicide. Stahl’s first paying gig was writing for the Santa Cruz Free Press when he was 20, for $8 an article. In the 80s and 90s, Stahl wrote for TV shows such as “ALF” and “Twin Peaks” while maintaining a vigorous heroin addiction. Today, he’s been clean for more than a quarter century.
His transgressive novels include, among others, Happy Mutant Baby Pills, Bad Sex on Speed, Pain Killers and I, Fatty, a fictionalized autobiography of silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle that was optioned by Johnny Depp. Robert Downey Jr. recently optioned Nein.
But Nein is most similar to the book for which Stahl is best known, his 1995 heroin memoir, Permanent Midnight, which was made into a movie starring his friend Ben Stiller in 1998. On June 12, the 92nd Street Y in New York hosted a book launch featuring a conversation between Stahl and Stiller about Nein.
“Ben did a lot of research [for the movie version of ‘Permanent Midnight’],” Stahl said. “I took him down there on Eighth and Alvarado and Fourth and Bonnie Brae and all those old stations of the LA junkie cross. He lost a ton of weight, made himself really sick and made himself feel and look like shit. It was hardcore, man. It was very De Niro ‘Raging Bull’ and Christian Bale ‘The Machinist.’ He went way out there.”
Stiller, who hung out with Stahl for nine months while the studio was trying to get financing for the movie, told this reporter that “having Jerry there was invaluable to me, because he gave me the confidence to be this guy who was going through experiences I had never gone through. He supported me in it fully and it really made the difference.”
Since then, Stahl has written several episodes of “CSI,” “Maron,” “Escape at Dannemora,” the HBO movie “Hemingway & Gellhorn” and many others. He has recently lived in San Marino, Silver Lake, Pasadena and Mt. Washington.
Nein, like Permanent Midnight, is a memoir written in a highly personal, hold-nothing-back style. He wouldn’t quite call putting every sordid detail on public display “therapeutic,” but certainly a form of expiation.
“I am trying to discover myself what I was feeling, because in this particular case the subject matter is so deep and dark that you’re operating on two levels: you’re writing about the crime of the 20th century, but you’re also writing about your reaction to it,” he said. “And you’re walking this tightrope, because you think you’re gonna go in and have this tremendous revelatory experience, which you do on one level. On the other hand, the first thing you see at Auschwitz is a snack bar with people eating pizza and drinking Fanta, so there’s a bit of a disconnect.”
That snack bar is where prisoners used to get tattooed and their heads shaved. “The actual pizza ovens are, on some level, just as disturbing as the ovens in the crematorium,” he wrote. Especially when you consider that “the average prisoner’s nutritional intake came to roughly 800 (barely edible) calories a day.”
The subject matter sounds like a downer, but Stahl, who’s known for his bone dry but always witty sense of humor, manages to write about it in a hilarious yet meaningful way. Some of the most memorable scenes in the book are infused with gallows humor.
Such as his visit to the gift shop at Dachau. Or when he ran into a plate glass sliding door at the Buchenwald cafeteria. Or when he overheard a young man in khaki pants and collared shirt—à la Charlottesville—compare the crematoriums to pizza ovens and mansplain to his newlywed on their honeymoon that the gas chambers weren’t real while they stood in the Auschwitz showers where countless Jews were gassed with Zyklon B.
Or how about when someone on his tour bus whisper-sang, “One hundred bottles of Zyklon B on the wall, one hundred bottles of Zyklon B, take one down and spray it around, ninety-nine bottles of Zyklon B on the wall…” and he looked around to see if anyone else heard, or if it was for his benefit (Stahl is Jewish).
Or when his tour guide said, “I hope you are all in comfortable shoes for Auschwitz. We’ve got a lot of walking. And we’re behind schedule.” As Stahl writes, you wouldn’t want anyone to “succumb to death camp bunions. In the end it’s always a battle between personal comfort and psycho-historical horror. It feels vaguely wrong that the concentration camp experience doesn’t hurt. Then again, nobody’s marketing actual terror and atrocity, just the experience of strolling around where terrifying atrocities were committed.”
Nein originally appeared in a shorter form as a six-part series for Vice called “A Tour of Hell, from Hell,” but he always planned to turn it into a book, it just took him a few years to “find a way in.” The challenge was that by the time he sat down in 2020 to start that process, his notes from the trip were mistaken as trash and thrown out. So he wrote it from memory, though the book is full of specific details and conversations.
He was also dealing with a litany of personal and professional issues at the time of the trip—divorce, depression and bombing a TV show pilot gig in which he had to write about a fun, happy-go-lucky marriage between an older guy and a younger woman who were having a baby, based on his 2015 memoir OG Dad that the network executive never read, while said marriage was falling apart. As he wrote in the book, his trip was “engendered in despair and (aspirationally) a cure for it at the same time.”
But visiting and writing about Holocaust sites did reveal a certain truth to Stahl: “None of your problems—and by ‘your’ I mean ‘mine’—none of it matters,” he said. “This is so huge and so much bigger than my personal torments and idiocies and struggles. And I always wonder about the prisoners themselves. How far into their captivity did all the obsession over success, money, marriage, sex, ambition, how far did that last before it just dissipated into the straight up struggle for survival?”
Stahl concludes the book by pointing out that while “the Holocaust of the 1940s is done, the ongoing genocide-adjacent assault on human rights—globally, locally, nationally—continues. My message of hope is that the Holocaust was not an exception. It is the time between holocausts that is the exception. So savor these moments. Be grateful. Even if the ax is always falling.”
Stahl is always working on more novels and screenplays. You haven’t seen the last of his brutal, incisive take on this world yet.
Jerry Stahl will discuss, read and sign Nein, Nein, Nein! One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust in person and in conversation with Jonathan Ames at 7 p.m. on July 5 at Stories Books & Café, 1716 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, and in conversation with Evan Wright at 7 p.m. on July 28 at Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. For more information, visit storiesla.com and booksoup.com.
