A Peculiar Kind of Exoneration
EVANIER, DAVID
A Peculiar Kind of Exoneration THE BATTLE By A lexander Kluge McGraw-Hill. 255 pp. $5.95. Revieived by DAVID EVANIER Contributor, "Commonweal," "Dissent," "Midstream." Alexander Kluge's book...
...But his "novel" manages to describe the turning-point of the war without ever confronting the fact of Nazism...
...There is just one specific reference to the Nazi reality: When the Russian truce officers arrive, a German general asks, "What are these chimpanzees doing here...
...He is the lower-class upstart with bad taste...
...Since their heyday during the Counter-Reformation, these schools have remained under-developed...
...The bulk of the book, however, intentionally runs contrary to the spirit of these vignettes...
...This is Stalingrad as it would be described by an uninspired German historian...
...Attendance List For a Funeral, was well received by American critics last year...
...The young German writer's latest work to appear in English, The Battle, is a series of documents (whether invented or real is not said) about the battle of Stalingrad...
...Hitler, triumphant at his betrayal of Chamberlain, is shown going up to congratulate his foreign minister "like a farmer who has been well represented in court and buys his lawyer a beer...
...Should he have been replaced by a more dignified German...
...All wars are bad...
...Is that what went wrong with the Third Reich...
...Hitler "looks well in tails, he is a gentleman, like the one he saw in Linz...
...We learn, for instance, which members of supply regiment 389 survived the night of January 23, 1943...
...troops "south of the Loire" won permission to wear their top uniform button undone...
...Although Kluge sandwiches a few strokes of his own between the data, these are for the most part brief character portraits without distinction...
...But the dictator is a "product of a meager South German Catholic grade-school education...
...He was the only member of the extensive array of commanders who lacked confidence in his brain and preferred to rely on his reflexes...
...We are given long lists of sheer names and ranks...
...I didn't know any Nazis...
...Yet even this seems no more than another of the author's devices for adding color to his documentation, not an explicit way of displaying a racist mentality...
...Remove the concentration camps, references to Jews, sadistic experimentation on human bodies, and what do you have...
...Hitler is fond of sweet South German dishes...
...While the book does not actually imply that the Germans were justified, it nevertheless seems to offer a peculiar kind of exoneration...
...Since Kluge treats Stalingrad as an example of military and human stupidity, and since he goes on to depict German officers gently and Hitler as a fool, some questions become inevitable: Did Hitler mess the whole thing up...
...It contains none of the ordered documentation of Peter Weiss's Investigation and only a little of the black comedy of Jakov Lind or Gunther Grass...
...The officers are portrayed sympathetically, for the most part acting like military men anywhere...
...Each chapter presents a different document emanating from a different German source: the clergy, the press, the government, military doctors, and officers...
...Military foolishness, nothing more...
...Curiously, there is a marked contrast between Kluge's treatment of the officers and his treatment of Hitler...
...It wasn't so bad anyway...
...But this accumulation of detail provides no insights, either about Stalingrad in particular or war in general...
...Alexander Kluge's book of short stories...
...Kluge marshals an enormous number of facts and figures...
...and complete Christmas menus...
...Some critics have placed Kluge in the ranks of his countrymen Grass and Heinrich Boll...
...Or the soldiers' customs in clothing: "With the tacit approval of their commanding officer, the first lieutenants of artillery regiment 6 wore their uniform jackets an inch and a half longer than was permitted...
...Taken out of the context of Nazism, Stalingrad becomes simply another example of military and human stupidity...
...Is The Battle, then, another example of the German schizophrenia that says: "I was not a Nazi...
...Look at Vietnam...
...Occasionally he does come up with an interesting aside, such as the social conventions in one artillery detachment whose officers "married only rich daughters from the Magdeburg plains...
...records of the tonnage of air supplies dropped on Gumrak??from January 4 (250 tons) through January 17 (none), and up to January 21 (97.3...
Vol. 50 • October 1967 • No. 21
