The Meaning of Exile

FLOTSAM -- Erich Maria Remarque --'Little, Brown ($2.50).

Flotsam appeared first in the summer of 1939 as a serial in Collier's, next as the sincere, ineffective film So Ends Our Night (TIME, Feb. 10). In its final form, the result of a year's revision, it is worthy of an author who is responsible for the best novel about World War I, two of the best about post-war Germany.

The heroes of Flotsam are two among inestimable thousands of exiles: a young half-Jew; an older German who teaches him the ropes. The substance of Flotsam is the meaning of their predicament. This meaning is powerfully told in their misfortunes and, more powerfully still, in hundreds of details of the things they saw, did, felt, learned.

The story itself is as simple as starvation, as insanely complicated as law. Neither man has any legal right to existence; both of them insist on existing anyhow. Josef Steiner is hard and adroit: by cheating at cards he earns the thin security of a dead Austrian's doctored passport, works in a Viennese amusement park until Anschluss drives him to Paris. For young Ludwig Kern life is tougher: no papers, no such talent for moneymaking, an incautious enough heart to fall in love and travel with young Jewish Ruth Holland. Peddling toilet water (illegally) they move from Vienna to Prague, to Vienna, through Switzerland, to France, to Geneva, at times together, at times apart, in & out of jail, sickness, food, shelter and luck, at length to find relative peace, if not security, in the tolerance of a Paris which "had assimilated all the migrations of the century." Steiner has hardly joined them there when a letter from his dying wife draws him to Germany, to his own certain death. On money he has left for them, Kern and his girl buy passage to Mexico.

When Kern went into exile, almost a child, he had everything to learn. He learned fast: to live as though he were never going back; to exploit every opportunity ; to pick a lock; to quiet watchdogs; to box; to speak French. He learned also that prison clothes save wear & tear on your own; that a good-looking overcoat, though it puts off benefactors, also puts off police; that trickery, to succeed, must be simple; that the safest places for exiles are churches, museums and police stations; that an exile has three wars to fight, for food, for shelter, and against idle time; that the subtlest of his enemies is time.

Flotsam has brief incidents, descriptions, and mere casual statements that have the impact and brightness of poems: Kern's exquisite pleasure, under shelter of a fortnight's residential permit, in asking a policeman for the time; Steiners utter lack of interest in the world's news ("For someone swimming under water . . . the color of the fishes isn't important"); the man who stands at a Paris police window seemingly in perfect nonchalance, streaming with the sweat of terror; a magnificent passage in which Steiner watches Germany swing past his train window in the dark; Steiner's observation that for exiles "simply eating together almost takes the place of home and country. . . ."

The theme of Flotsam is one of the most massive, intimate and terrible derangements of human living within human memory. Remarque, able as he is, is not fully equal to it; perhaps no human talent could be. Besides, Flotsam has some lyric flights that droop in midair; some touches of sentimental sententiousness; some comedy too national quite to cross a border; one or two bits almost of cheapness. But Remarque, like Hemingway, has the rare ability to produce writing which is both a genuine work of art and popular; and to embody a generation. For that reason Flotsam is a deeply moving story that makes painfully clear, to readers who have forgotten or never understood, the real meaning of the words exile, emigre, rejugee.

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