War Fiction

Of all the horrors Hitler made, it is possible that the war on the Eastern front was the worst. It is a proper paradox that the worst has inspired the best in postwar German fiction. Two recent samples:

THE TORTURED EARTH, by Gert Ledig (219 pp.; Henry Regnery; $3.75), is a fearful book about men whose substance has become nothing but flesh and fear. A German battalion is before Leningrad, and this is its obituary. The major in command, learning that his wife and child have been killed back in Germany, orders a senseless attack. Revenge, he hopes, will help his private anguish. But in the end, most are beyond revenge or anguish. At first this seems just another war novel beginning with "knavery rubbing elbows with horror in this louse-ridden cesspool under the hill of death." Slowly, the reader comes to know through Ledig's prose, which shows its simple structure like a field-stripped carbine, why this book has been bought in tens of thousands by Germans. There are few names, and even the scene is one of those anonymous "inhabited places" that appeared in Russian war communiques, as featureless as its invaders. Russians and Germans blur in this cartoon of death. The sense of death-in-life is all the stronger for the author's calculated casualty-report style; the loss of a barrel of a machine gun has the same weight as the death of a crazed corporal who tries to mine a flame-throwing tank, and whose head "burned like a match." In the book's most telling episode, a captain goes mad when he is compelled to execute as a deserter a stunned and muddled laggard sergeant major who is trying to get back to his unit. Author Ledig, a twice-wounded veteran of the Russian front, has given his royalties from this painful book to an orphanage for war victims. Readers can deduce this compassion from his apparently brutal narrative; what is at work here is not the notorious German talent for self-pity. Men--Russian and German--die in the same mechanical terms, and the Russians share and share alike. Finally, young (34) Narrator Ledig denies himself a soldier's permissible cynicism. His major is led at the end to a military funeral, where, after listening to the "unctuous" chaplain, he and his sergeant exchange an almost mute confidence. Everything but God has been destroyed, the sergeant seems to say. "It would be unthinkable," replies the major, "if that were a lie too."

THE TRAIN WAS ON TIME, by Heinrich Boell (142 pp.; Criterion; $3), carries its Eastern-front German soldier-hero to his death while he is still on furlough in the Ukraine, which is about as ironically far as the you-can't-win theme has ever been taken by a war novelist. The soldier, Andreas, is a kind of displaced poet in uniform. From the moment his leave-train begins puffing towards Przemysl one autumn day in 1943, Andreas is haunted by the irrational idea that he is a bridegroom of death being rushed into one of destiny's shotgun weddings. As the car wheels click, he blows a mental farewell kiss to a field of flowers, a scrap of music, a patch of sky. In Author Boell's deftly understated handling, all that might be mawkishly sentimental in Andreas' goodbye to life develops instead the percussive pathos of Lear's grief-crazed cry over the body of his daughter, Cordelia. "Never, never, never, never, never!" Into this intense reverie of earthly leave-taking floats human driftwood from the general shipwreck of war. A cuckolded buddy runs his tongue over and over the story of his wife's infidelity with a Russian as if it were an empty tooth socket. A blond fellow soldier of eroded good looks reveals that a brutal sergeant seduced him into homosexuality. Finally, there is a Polish tart and spy so moved by the lines of suffering in Andreas' face that she forgets her trade and plays Bach to him on the brothel piano.

This is the third U.S.-published novel, touching, well-written and yet tenuous, in which 38-year-old Author Boell (Acquainted with the Night; Adam, Where Art Thou?) has feelingly symbolized a guilty Germany doing penance for its sins through suffering and death. But both author and characters seem to be locked in a permanent decontamination chamber of the soul, having still to learn that the ultimate bill of health is to be able to forgive one's self.

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