A Journalist in Naziland

CONFESSIONS OF A EUROPEAN INTELLECTUAL (315 pp.)--Franz Schoenberner--Macmillan ($2.75).

In the city of Munich, a few days after the Reichstag Fire, six grave men held a meeting. They were the owners of, and chief contributors to, Germany's famous political-satirical magazine--the weekly Simplicissimus, whose biting, brilliant cartoons had ridiculed human stupidity since 1896. Now, the owners of ' Simpl" had met to find an answer to the gravest question human stupidity had ever put to them: "What shall we do when here, too, the Nazis take over?" Simplicissimus' founder, stalwart Thomas Theodor Heine, put the reply calmly: "One simply has to go into exile--pauper fashion."

Into exile, pauper fashion (first in France; later, in the U.S.), went spare, spry Simplicissimus Editor Franz Schoenberner. Confessions of a European Intellectual is the witty, intelligent story of his life--a story whose capacity for hard sense and an all too rare humor gives it a distinct place in refugee literature. As befits the outlook of an editor of satire, it contains no awed descriptions of intimate meetings with famous people; as an intellectual confession it confesses nothing but disrespect for overintellectualized confessions.

Franz Schoenberner, who now lives in New York City and is working on another book, was reared in the rarest air of German intellectualism. Son of a Berlin pas tor, he was subject to spasms of brattish rage, until his adoring mother taught him how much safer it was to hurl abstract arguments instead of "all kinds of physical objects." By the time he was 13, sharp-witted Franz had logically argued his sisters into incurable neuroses, and ruled the household with an "intellectual regime of terror [that] would have been impossible in any other atmosphere than that of the German intellectual middle class." After his university career--which included lectures on subjects such as "The use of the comma by Lessing"--Franz had progressed so far into the abstract that the philosophy of Immanuel Kant appeared to him to be "escape literature." Suicide was the only logical next step. With the aid of a world-weary student of Sanskrit, young Schoenberner plotted a chain of thought of such intellectual intensity that it "would . . . dissolve even the body ... by pure force of thinking." When his body remained undissolved, Schoenberner decided to surrender to the "irrational force" of staying alive.

Judas Had the Place to Himself. Schoenberner also found two other important examples of the gap between appearance and reality. One was the result of a visit to Oberammergau, where Bavarian peasants performed their world-famed Passion Play. Schoenberner discovered that the peasant who played the role of Christ was thereby enabled to charge tourists twice as much rent for his rooms as any of his followers (Judas, it was whispered, couldn't find a roomer at any price; and St. John, who was the handsomest of the Apostles, finally eloped to the U.S. with a rich American widow). The second lesson in perspective came through World War I, in which Private Schoenberner, who had hitherto been crazy about horses, was given the job of grooming them. "It is amazing how different a horse looks if seen from above, from the saddle, or from below, when you are standing ... up to the ankles in manure, half asphyxiated by the stench."

Army life turned out to be less bad than Schoenberner had expected--thanks partly to the friendship of a brilliant, amiable Jewish doctor who simply could not grasp the simplest elements of Prussian discipline. On sighting Schoenberner, stiffly at attention on parade, this officer would leap forward, crying cordially: "How do you do, Mr. Schoenberner; have you seen that highly interesting article about the possibilities of psychoanalytic treatment even in cases of dementia praecox?"

Democratic Tic. The Bavarian revolution that succeeded World War I had its own puzzles. Schoenberner was not one of the literati who suddenly felt a new and urgent need to join the proletariat. Nor did he have much respect for the Democratic Party, whose platform, he thought, matched the names of two of its prominent leaders, Rindskopf and Kalbskopf (Oxhead and Calfshead). The general confusion was epitomized by a Munich professor who was called before a huge audience to give the real lowdown on the problems of German reconstruction. Owing to a nervous tic, this professor always broke into a broad grin whenever he had something serious to say. So infectious was his ailment that his audience, after listening to his grim dissertation on Germany's total collapse, walked out convinced that the apparent tragedy was just a huge joke.

Schoenberner's first job was with the Musa Press--a big publishing house owned by an eccentric millionaire who also had aa interest in a vest-pocket calculating machine. Then young Schoenberner became the Sitzredakteur (Sitting Editor) of the Munich Auslandspost, an unpopular job which meant chiefly that if the owner fell foul of the law, Schoenberner had the privilege of sitting in prison for him. From there, Schoenberner advanced to the editorship of Jugend (Youth), a noted humorous-literary weekly in Munich.

Editor Schoenberner's task was to keep Jugend youthful--a job he did so well that soon he was offered the editorship of Jugend's chief competitor, Simplicissimus. While Jugend hunted feverishly for a new editor, Schoenberner performed, the hilarious, exhausting feat of editing both weeklies at the same time. After reading and rejecting hundreds of manuscripts in the Jugend offices, he would speed over to Simplicissimus--only to find that the manuscripts he had just rejected had been sent out again to Simplicissimus.

Not So Funny Nazis. Much of Editor Schoenberner's book reads like the life story of a character invented by Ludwig Bemelmans. But its humor and gaiety paradoxically give place to sadness when Schoenberner describes his career with Germany's most humorous weekly. Simplicissimus had once numbered Thomas Mann among its staff and George Grosz among its cartoonists; it had published the maiden work of Heinrich Mann and Poet Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as stories by De Maupassant, Chekhov, Strindberg and Hamsun. Under the Kaiser, its Cartoonist-Editor Heine had been imprisoned in a fortress for the sin of reflecting too faithfully "the physiognomy of the reigning class, [of] too ostentatious Government officials . . . officers . . . Junkers [and] the subservient spirit of the small bourgeoisie." In this tradition, Simplicissimus also faithfully recorded each new step in Adolf Hitler's rise to power--a rise which Simpl found too ludicrous to be believable.

But as the years passed and the menace of Hitler became unmistakable, Editor Schoenberner experienced the pain of watching most of Simpl's staff succumb slowly but surely to the enemy. Strange palsies seized the hands of cartoonists when they were asked to depict Hitler; a poet who had made Germany laugh with his verses "On Hitler's Mustache" took to wearing a brown shirt. When Hitler's minions broke into the offices to tear them apart, they found a magazine that was already dead by its own hand.

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