Idealism Gone Mad
HANSER, RICHARD
Idealism Gone Mad Love and Terror By William Herrick New Directions. 250 pp. $13.95. Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "A Noble Treason, "Putsch! How Hitler Made Revolution" In one of those...
...Is everybody supposed to know ?) I n addition, we are introduced to the Belgian 7.65, to Baretta semiautomatics and?evidently as a fillip for the connoisseur —to the esoteric "Heckler and Koch handgun...
...How Hitler Made Revolution" In one of those tedious and repellent charades that pass for drama in some circles, Bertolt Brecht has a character say: "What vileness would you not commit to exterminate vileness...
...We must join with our Arab brothers in the destruction of Israel," Viktor notes in his journal, because the Jewish State is part of the international establishment and hence must be destroyed...
...His protagonist calls himself Viktor X, because he thinks he is a white Malcolm X and because the X stands for his unknown quantity as a foundling, a child of the fire-bombings of Hamburg...
...the hostages marked for piecemeal death huddle in abject fear at the airport when the Israeli commandos come charging in with their tommyguns blazing...
...Naturally, they are ferociously anti-capitalist and ami-West as well...
...They take a training course as guests of Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi...
...What motivates these radical world-changers, what happens when doctrinaire idealism goes mad and rotten, is the theme of Love and Terror, a book perhaps too small for the implications of its sweeping title...
...It is, again, Clara Z., the old one who has lived through it all and now sees through it all, who quotes the line from Chamfort: "Be my brother, or I will kill you...
...There are echoes of Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades and the Entebbe raid in this tale, though none of these is specifically mentioned...
...The formulation changes from Brecht to Hitler to the Baader-Meinhof gang in yesterday's Germany to the Red Brigades in today's Italy...
...Viktor's partner and lover, Gabriele, is even less convincing as a newborn terrorist...
...Her-rick's characters personify, by what he makes them say and do, the warped and corrupted romanticism that causes Viktor to picture himself as "the archangel of the Revolution, bloodied sword in hands...
...Such lapses aside, Herrick often sueceeds in catching something of the blind, insensate compulsion of the true believer who, contrary to Brecht, does not exterminate vileness with his own vile-ness, but only generates more of it...
...It isa rather free-floating bandof terrorists that coagulates around Viktor and Gabriele...
...Sink into the mud, embrace the butcher, but change the world: it needs it...
...For fanatics and killers, this motley group lives on a rather gaudy scale...
...A gun in the hands of a terrorist," they say, "tells the truth...
...But theconcept remains constant, as do the consequences for the world they all want to make over in their own conflicting images...
...The daughter of an immensely rich West German industrialist, she drives a silver Porsche and is tricked out with every frill and frippery that Gucci and Chanel can supply...
...it shows he has overcome whatever feelings of guilt and compassion the Holocaust might arouse in the unenlightened...
...This is a sentiment expressed even more brutally in the old German saying that goes: "Und wirst du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag' ich dir den Schadelein...
...Especially effective is Herrick's running contrast of the new breed of terrorist and "the old ones," who in their time believed, too, in "the necessary murders, the necessary lies...
...All this gives the proceedings an inappropriate James Bond-ish tint that is made even more pronounced by the author's penchant for gun-dropping...
...In any case, she supplies the deviant sexual gymnastics that Viktor's tumultuous nature demands as a parallel to his physical ruthlessness...
...Yet by narrowing his focus to a manageable set of characters and events, Herrick is able to strike off selected scenes that are both vivid and harrowing and thereby throw some light on a subject that needs all the illumination it can get...
...Is there a better line," asks the wise Clara Z., "to define our century...
...As he and his confederates sink into the mud and embrace the butcher, they spout the murderous maxims that sustain them at their bloody business...
...Curiously, they call policemen "bulls," a term dating back to the '30s and Little Caesar...
...What a marvelous word...
...A West German mayor is snatched from his home and held for ransom...
...In one direction they take us to the Gulag, in the other to Auschwitz...
...Herrick peppers his pages with references lo the "Russian Kalashnikov" without ever telling us what that is...
...They speak scornfully of "left fascists" and -of "bringing down the citadel of the counterrevolution, the Kremlin...
...a banker, a relative of one of the terrorists, is shot down on a Hamburg street and left to die in his own blood on the pavement...
...A willingness to kill Jews is a mark of high capability in a terrorist...
...A violence which destroys all reason, makes for panic, which then becomes an instrument for the destruction of the organized mass: the State...
...Herrick's concern is for the character of the participants, however, rather than for the overt event, and here, unhappily, he is less successful...
...Now, in his new novel, William Herrick puts a parallel sentiment into the mouth of a contemporary character whoexults: "Chaos...
...She seems to have taken togun and torch because her kinky relationship to her father borders closely on the incestuous, knocking her emotional life badly out of kilter...
...This, of course, was also the attitude of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis...
...Why Viktor, who was brought up by stolid waterfront unionists, has become a flaming, ravaging terrorist is very flimsily set forth...
...If you won't be my brother, I'll smash your skull in...
...Once hooked on this kind of thing, a writer all too easily slides into aberrations like: "Helga, who had already drawn her Heckler and Koch, shot one of the special agents...
...His conversion, having something to do with the discovery of a Nazi taint in his foster parents' past, occurs almost from one paragraph !o the next and remains a soft spot throughout the narrative...
...Their truth...
...Later he takes the name of Ahmed ben Hussein, which suggests that the trade of terrorism also has its trendi-ness...
...They constantly talk American slang, using every toilet-wall word, read The Hollywood Reporter, and chatter about bank "heists" and "smoking joints...
...They speak of "The Cause" without defining it precisely...
...Hitler used that saying, too, and acted on it, as our contemporary terrorists are doing...
...Clara Z., an old one, meditates on the successors—now out to kill her?and says: "They are our children...
...Such passages are crisply done and have the tang of reality...
...Besides Gabriele's silver Porsche, they move about in a blue Ferrari, a silver Jaguar, a white Rolls, and a Mercedes sports car of unspecified color...
...like Brecht, they were so appalled at the state oftheworld that they set out to change it by any means, at any cost...
Vol. 64 • October 1981 • No. 16
