Taking the Villain’s Part

William H. Gass’s 1995 novel The Tunnel, recently reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press, is not a comfortable book. Its narrator, the Iowa-born, German-surnamed history professor William Frederick Kohler, is a bit too friendly toward the Nazi regime. One of Kohler’s previous books, completed before The Tunnel formally begins, argued that the Nuremberg Trials were a “charade.” Now Kohler is trying to write the foreword for his new book, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. “It was my intention, when I began, to write an introduction to my work on the Germans,” the novel opens. “Though its thick folders lie beside me now, I know I cannot.” What he writes instead is a confessional autobiography that features every conceivable gripe Kohler has ever had with himself and everyone who’s ever crossed his path. His narration is crude, hateful, and sexually explicit.