The Survivor

THE RETURN OF GUNNER ASCH (310 pp.) _ Hans Hellmuf Kirst -- Little, Brown ($3.95).

In war, it is not only the lucky who live. Some men, without being cowards, display an extraordinary knack for survival. Such a one is Gunner Herbert Asch, the fictional Wehrmacht veteran who for six years of World War II managed to escape the enemy's bullets and the stupidity of his own commanders. Asch survived, not as the anvil survives the hammer, but as a nimble, highly intelligent fly eludes the clumsy hand that would kill it. For Asch is a true operator, a hepcat of war who knows every nuance of the dance of death and leaves it to the squares to follow orders and die pointlessly in the mud.

Strummed Zither. This novel is the last of a fast-moving, often hilarious trilogy (The Revolt of Gunner Asch, TIME, March 5, 1956; Forward, Gunner Asch! TIME, Oct. 29) that carries its hero from his home town in Germany to the depths of Russia and back again. It opens in the war's last days as Germany is crushed between East and West. Asch, who has risen from the ranks to become a lieutenant of artillery, is part of a disorganized unit surrounded by U.S. troops. A stray Nazi colonel named Hauk and his sinister aide, Lieut. Greifer, order an attack on a crossroads "with everything that can still crawl." Its nonmilitary purpose, correctly divined by Gunner Asch, is to let Hauk and Greifer escape the U.S. net.

The costly and briery successful attack is about the only military action in the book. What follows is a competent black-market thriller which lacks only the zither-strumming of The Third Man. A secret is beaten out of a stubborn woman; a doublecrosser is shot dead in a forest; a valuable convoy of goods is lost, found, lost again. Throughout this tapestry of violence, Asch and his "good" operators --Kowalski, Stamm, Soeft--match wits with the "bad" operators, Hauk and Greifer. Both sides use the naive U.S. occupation forces for their own purposes, and Asch and company even capture a prisoner-of-war camp from its U.S. guards in order to kill the villainous Hauk.

Two Blankets. Author Kirst. tries doggedly to depict the mentality, talk and folkways of Americans, but except for an occasional phrase like "in the bag," the Americans sound totally Teutonic. But readers will find grim, retroactive amusement in Author Kirst's account of the hasty changes made in a German town as U.S. tanks approach: an old Nazi triumphantly reveals that his housekeeper is half Jewish; panicky Gauleiter and Kreis-leiter are sheltered in hospitals; a satisfactory "antifascist" working man is thrust into jail ("Wouldn't you like another blanket, Herr Freitag? Two more perhaps?") in the hope that the American conquerors will rescue him and make him burgomaster.

No one comes off really well in this disenchanted novel, but if Gunner Asch occasionally shows contempt for Americans both as administrators and fighting men, it is nothing compared to his virulent shame for his own people, who have, he says, "the biggest words, the loudest cries, the most willing hands, the most trusting hearts and the emptiest brains! God save us Germans from ourselves, a race of natural suicides!"

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