Swastikas Under the New Chrome?
PACE, ERIC DWIGHT
Swastikas Under the New Chrome? The Fear Makers. By Wilfrid Schilling. Doubleday. 312 pp. $3.95. The Bridge. By Manfred Gregor. Random House. 215 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Eric Dwight Pace East...
...Reviewed by Eric Dwight Pace East European specialist, "Life" magazine BY AND LARGE, all explanations of Germany's manic behavior in its last three wars are variations on two basic theories...
...strut their symptoms...
...The Fear Makers will make pleasantly unpleasant reading for those who agree with Morgenthau...
...Schilling's observations about the new German society are significant and disturbing, but the message tends to gum up the mechanics of his novel...
...A former German underground member, he volunteered to help the French occupation authorities ferret out war criminals in his home district...
...On the other hand, the novel form limits the impact of Schilling's message...
...The expository baggage slows the plot and no author can satisfactorily develop characters by simply tagging them as to their ideological subspecies...
...If, like Henry Morgenthau, you believe the Germans are hopeless delinquents, you refuse to put your head on the block for West Berlin, you are shocked at the finagling over Spanish bases, aghast at the swastika-smirching and hopeful that someone somehow will lock Alfried Krupp back in his Pandora's box...
...His book profits from a smooth and short-winded translation by Robert S. Rosen which surpasses Oliver Co-burn's stilted rendering of The Fear Makers...
...The hero of The Fear Makers is a chain-smoking liberal journalist named Alfred Link...
...Fifteen years after World War I ended came 1933, the year German democracy voted itself down the drain...
...The fact that his book was first published anonymously and that he identifies places only by their initials gives a factual ring to his message...
...Unfortunately the first theory's loudest supporters, with respect to West Germany at any rate, are the Communist press and radio...
...In contrast to The Fear Makers, Manfred Gregor's The Bridge provides subtler ammunition for the adherents of the Marshall-Conant view...
...West Germany may be something short of a Periclean democracy, but its institutions of freedom seem safe enough, safer perhaps than ours seemed at the bottom of the McCarthy era...
...Nevertheless, the question is still wide open, and two recent German novels, The Fear Makers and The Bridge, are very much to the point...
...But the Government's consistent anti-anti-Semitism and the popularity of anti-Nazi movies like Erwin Leiser's new Mein Kampf argue with Gregor that the Germans are fundamentally decent...
...The result is that any American observer who doubts Germany has really changed its spots finds his protestations have an unpatriotic ring...
...The lesson clearly is that no nation is inherently evil if its boys are still plain, human boys even when rigged out in boots and steel helmets and commanded to kill...
...Wilfrid Schilling is an anti-Nazi journalist who was hounded out of Germany by vengeful Fascists and now lives in Belgium...
...That message is that "the launching of a new Nazi movement is unnecessary," because "there are everywhere in Germany . . . former Nazis entrenched in ministerial departments of the individual Federal states, in banking, in industry, in the police, in the judiciary, in the diets and in Parliament, in the diplomatic service, in the political parties, and even in the Federal government itself...
...If he described his own personal odyssey, he might produce a tale as moving as Zweig's Die Welt von Gestern...
...The novel's theme, and its great strength as a work of art, is that the schoolboys are Everyman, not Superman...
...Link's wife and friends struggle to have him released, but he languishes in prison while a succession of minor characters, each "typical" of some facet of the German national character (the complacent jailer, the ramrod officer, etc...
...Even now, over a decade after the last German war, it makes a great difference which theory you subscribe to...
...If he named the names of his own oppressors and the dates and places where they have wielded their new power, he would have a story that would evoke far more sympathy and support in this country...
...For lack of any more conclusive evidence, history indicates that Schilling is at least overanxious, if not dead wrong...
...Now, 11 years later, the victims and their cohorts have wormed their way back into power in the community, and they have Link charged with robbery and thrown into prison for his work with the French...
...Link himself is adequately drawn (though far less vividly than the prisoner-protagonist in Darkness at Noon), but his ever-loving wife, in translation at least, comes across as a sort of Teutonic Vassar girl, refined and prim, who flounces past her husband's Fascist oppressors as though they were so many unwed mothers...
...The swastika contagion, the grubby little Reich party, even the Adenauer cult, seem to buttress Schilling's claim that the old Germany is lurking just under the new chrome plating...
...If, like General George Marshall and James Bryant Conant, you believe the Germans can remain decent world citizens this time, you tolerate their aberrations and are grateful for their strength...
...His book tells the story of seven adolescent "soldiers" ordered to defend a crucial bridge against oncoming American tanks...
...As novels, the books do not constitute legitimate historical evidence, but both are "autobiographical" and both, in different ways, are as moving as that other recent work of fiction, The Ugly American...
...Gregor rings the changes on his characters with economy and skill—and a lack of sentimentality remarkable in a German novelist...
...This is a tremendous and heartening improvement over the last postwar period...
...The first is that there is some hereditary quirk in their national character which makes the Germans perennially docile and murderous...
...They react to the torture of warfare like adolescents on any continent...
...The Congress and the Administration, of course, are reasonably fervent adherents of this second thesis...
...The author was one of the German teenagers who were yanked into the Wehrmacht as cannon fodder in the closing months of the war...
...In the ensuing bitterness and confusion two Nazis were beaten up and robbed—but not by Link...
...It is now 15 years since World War II...
...The second is that the German people are innocent—or at least redeemable—and that only chance combinations of geography, history and evil leadership have set them off on their national binges...
...It is hard for any observer to assess Schilling's and Gregor's views of the Germans in the light of recent events...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 50
