War's Nameless Chaos
LESHINSKY, TANIA
War's Nameless Chaos The Tortured Earth. By Gert Ledig. Regnery. 219 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Tania Leshinsky Short-story writer, translator and critic Only in our time could a book of such...
...And yet, let's be fair...
...In spite of the author's talent...
...We remember the shattered bodies with the trembling, frightened remnants of a soul inside them...
...But it is a German book and we cannot forget it...
...most of all, the author's "beyondness...
...We are confused as to why or where the major or the captain or the runner acts as he does...
...The effect, therefore, is monotonous at times...
...a little lower than literature...
...with a peculiar and frightening detachment after the shock of sitting up and staring with dismay at the first pages, he reads on...
...The author has tried to be impartial...
...There are no characters, no plot, no sustained narrative...
...There are at least three reasons for this transformation: First, the writer himself is detached...
...Worse, in Ledig's hook the true brutalities, the premeditated crimes against human beings are committed by the Russians, while the German soldier is only the tortured sufferer, the mutilated victim...
...The jagged sleeves of his field jacket were clotted with blood...
...The soul of war is presented, but no personal history, no deep-going human relationships move us, except the short and superficial ones of the symbolic men...
...In spite of the horrors of the subject matter, we are able to enjoy the book because of its nobility of style, exquisite metaphors, the poetic calm...
...Reviewed by Tania Leshinsky Short-story writer, translator and critic Only in our time could a book of such shocking brutality have been written...
...War is never clear, and the chaos of it has been retained here...
...Meanwhile he had lost another foot...
...It is a bit early in history for us to be able to take this: we all remember who started, continued and heightened the inherent brutality of war to the highest degree of bestiality...
...In a novel, that is a grave shortcoming...
...This is the beginning and the end...
...What is lacking is any accusation against the initiators of this nightmare the Germans, any sense of guilt...
...We remember abstractions and remember them badly...
...War is confusing but a reader wants clarity...
...His soldiers are nameless and faceless...
...It is a strange experience...
...He is lost in short scenes although they are touching, dramatic and impressive...
...There is no Hans or Fritz or Rudolf only "the runner," "the major," "the captain...
...With his hands blown off and his head downwards he now hung in a bare stump which had once been a tree...
...finally, the book is written with poetic beauty...
...Almost perversely, we are able to enjoy it despite its incessant brutality...
...The Tortured Earth is a little above poetic reportage...
...Yet, paradoxically, this is not an indictment of The Tortured Earth...
...The reader cannot catch his breath and has nothing to lean on...
...We are faced with a mass of impressions, a wall of horrors, but after a while a strange transformation takes place in the reader's mind: He, too, begins to be brutally cold-blooded about mutilated pieces of human debris, and...
...This is not a "realistic" book: it is the essence of reality that is being presented in a terse, poetic prose...
...Here is the beginning: "The corporal could not turn in his grave because he didn't have one...
...There is no relief, not for a moment...
...There was a rattle of tracks and a moment later all that remained of the German corporal had been flattened out...
...But this is not a novel...
...second, out of a sense of self-preservation and because one cannot be shocked all the time, the reader plunges into a defensive numbness...
...Half an hour later, his mutilated body tell to the ground anyway...
...When he did reach the earth he was only half a man...
...On the contrary...
...In leaving the characters nameless, the book undoubtedly gains in stature, becomes symbolic and loses immeasurably from the artistic point of view...
...And it is one of the strongest books against war to come out of Germany...
...He had been caught by a salvo of rockets and flung into the air...
...The book has been written in a spirit of tortured doom and outraged rebellion against war and its unspeakable horrors...
Vol. 39 • August 1956 • No. 35
