An American in Berlin
SWADOS, HARVEY
An American in Berlin Crazy in Berlin. By Thomas Berger. Scribner s. 438 pp. $4.75. PERHAPS the most valid of the various recent criticisms of American novels and novelists has been the...
...Similarly, the unrelentingly ironic point of view demands—and finally obtains—a kind of detachment that prevents readers from identifying wholeheartedly with characters...
...Not least is Berger's audacious use of the English language...
...it is a style that could hardly have emerged without the new developments in American prose writing by the innovators of recent years...
...He writes in American, in an engaging mixture of the colloquial, the obscene, the slangy and the poetic...
...No one is what he seems in this mordant and impious book...
...And what, finally, is a man...
...but it is the author's own...
...What is a Jew...
...What matters is that it exists, that it promises a real emotional charge to those adventurous enough to plunge on past the early murky pages, and that Thomas Berger is a name to remember, an important addition to the small group of important American writers, and a novelist with a great career before him...
...With these men the drama is rounded out, and it is their interacting one upon the other, in a complexly plotted story, that slowly reveals to us a picture of a city, a portrait of a culture, and an attitude toward mankind...
...What Berber has done instead is Reviewed by Harvey Swados Author, "On the Line'' to commence where liberalism ends, in the world of ideas...
...He is more a man who listens so bard, and discovers so many contradictory facts about people, that he is driven crazy (literally—but only temporarily— which is just one of the meanings of the tide) by the effort of learning so much and sorting out so much about his own German roots and his profound connections with the Jewish people...
...Nevertheless, there lies at hand the contemporary achievement of truly cultivated and thoughtful European novelists, and in consequence there have sounded the discontented voices, claiming that here in the United States the writer of fiction is seemingly incapable of dealing with any problems larger than semi-private psychological states of being...
...There are two other principal figures in the novel, in addition to a brilliant gallery of comic types drawn from the occupation forces of the United States and Russia...
...One is Nathan Schild, a lieutenant in U. S. Intelligence, a Communist, and a man of the Thirties who is spying for the Russians...
...His hero, the you,ng American occupation soldier Carlo Reinhart, is not a man of good will eager to avenge wrongs...
...the other is Schat - zi, a furtive little black-marketeer who serves as Schild's go-between to the Russians, but turns out to have been an early Nazi, a follower of R?hm and a classic opportunist...
...Who is guilty for what the former did to the latter...
...That we can do for ourselves...
...Carlo's female friends include little Trudchen, for whom he gets a job in his office, but who, it develops, is neither little nor innocent...
...PERHAPS the most valid of the various recent criticisms of American novels and novelists has been the complaint of the intellectual discrepancy between fiction produced by half-educated Americans and that composed by Europeans who are not just novel writers, but intellectuals and men of letters too...
...This is not however the traditional liberal American novel in which the well-intentioned writer sighs over the pity of it all and invites us as readers to sigh with him while he hates the Nazi as his enemy and loves the Jew as his brother...
...The result, when imposed on a steadfastly ironic point of view, is both stimulating and original...
...and Lori Bach, a sensitive older cousin of Trudchen's, who introduces Reinhart to two of the prize eccentrics in the shattered, battered city : her husband, a bloated philosopher, and her brother, a partly-Jewish physician and survivor of the holocaust...
...There are many things to praise about this brilliantly-lit narrative...
...It is true that great works have been produced in this country by men of little learning but great sensitivity and intensity, and that these men, with all their limitations, have been fairly typical in the creation of American fiotion...
...Of course this reviewer has reservations about Crazy In Berlin...
...Veronica Leary, his platonic pal, big and presumably innocent...
...naturally it is...
...The exuberance of language occasionally results in forcing...
...This is particularly true of Schild, whose background is detailed with absolute fidelity, but whose tragic fate leaves one quite cold and unmoved...
...The important news, however, is not that Crazy In Berlin is flawed by its weaknesses...
...What is more, it reveals an author thoroughly faithful to the demands of the novel as a medium of communication— he is hilariously entertaining, but he is above all a man who thinks and feels, and who makes us think and feel too...
...Well, here is a first novel by a young American who is not afraid to consider seriously and thoughtfully some of the central questions of European identity: What is a German...
...The questions are asked, and answers are argued over for emerge gradually and novelistically from a series of developments in the lives of the protagonists) in their logical setting, the ruins of Berlin in the autumn of 1945...
Vol. 41 • December 1958 • No. 46
