The Anatomy of Courage

THE STEEPER CLIFF (340 pp.)--David Davidson--Random House ($3).

This is perhaps the best novel yet written by an American about postwar Germany. It is sometimes too stagey, often too self-consciously penetrating in its analysis of character. But it is honest, observant, and has a theme at once simple and troubling. Its hero, Lieut. Cooper, works in the Newspaper Section of Military Government; his job is to unearth heroes, i.e., German journalists who had bucked the Nazis and somehow survived. He squirms guiltily in his role of judging conqueror. How would he, as a German, have stood the test of the Nazi terror? What right has he, a noncombatant desk officer who has always doubted his own courage, to browbeat the uncourageous?

Many a contemptuous observer of the conquered Germans must have had moments when he asked himself such questions. Lieut. Cooper had reached the age of 37 without disproving his fear that he was a coward. "He had hoped finally it would be in this war, the first war in which the psychiatrists had made it 'all right' to be afraid, so long as you were brave," that he would rebuild his self-respect. "He had rushed out on Dec. 8, 1941, to seek another chance."

After the Last Shot. He didn't get it. He sat out the war in uniform in his native New York, half an hour from home by subway. "Now finally he was facing the enemy, in their holy city of Munich, but late, a month after the last shot." To his desk come scores of German newspapermen begging licenses to enable them to find work. As he flays the unheroic, passive collaborators among them, Cooper becomes obsessed by a desire to know what his own behavior would have been under similar circumstances.

He uses as a measuring-rod a man he knows only by a card in a file, Adam Lorenz, an anti-Nazi journalist who had stood up to Hitler before & after 1933. From Lorenz' father, wife and friends, Cooper learns that Lorenz too had to fight the unheroic in himself. He had become a hero, a concentration-camp veteran, because he had been afraid not to be one. Cooper's search for Lorenz, against orders from his superiors, becomes the major action of the book. "If I've come this far . . . it's because I'm obsessed with curiosity. I am letting the history of Adam Lorenz tell me just how I would have behaved myself in the Third Reich."

When Cooper finds Lorenz, he discovers that the Gestapo had ways of cracking even heroes, that those once tortured seldom successfully faced a second dose. Said one Gestapo victim, "indicating the gaudy Christ-on-the-Cross on the wall behind him, 'I'll wager that even He would not have undertaken it a second time. Not for anybody.' "

The Litmus of History. Cooper comes to a conclusion that many Americans will find distasteful, and more will dispute: "This too had to be granted, that we were the creatures of the history into which we were born. Had the seventy million Germans been born in America, they would have lived out their lives drinking soda pop. And had our nation of Americans been Germans, Andrew Cooper among them, we would have divided just as inevitably into Gestapomen and victims, a few of us heroes. It was history which exposed or concealed our capacities for brutality, heroism or cowardice. . . . History was the litmus paper. . . ."

Author Davidson, 39, is a journalist who had just such a job as his hero's with Military Government in Bavaria. The Steeper Cliff is his first novel (his wife, Hilde Abel, has written two), but he was well-known as a scripter of radio programs (Second Husband; Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons). Like Lieut. Cooper, Davidson fought the war from behind a desk in the U.S., got to Germany after V-E day.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.