Corruption by Bankroll

THE FINAL BALL (255 pp.)--Gere/ Galser--Pantheon ($3.95).

There is a new monster at large in Germany today and its name is prosperity. That is the view of Gerd Gaiser, South German novelist, World War II flyer and sometime schoolmaster. His countrymen's real religion is materialism, he feels, and their real measure of success is possession. In this book, Novelist Gaiser tries to show that in such a society, good people can only be hurt, while the greedy are blissfully unaware of their own ugliness. Says one well-to-do mother to her well-padded daughter: "Ditta, one shouldn't breathe a word. But our Lord has let us win the war after all."

The industrial town of Neu-Spuhl has dug out of its wartime ruins and is booming. It is ugly, and the reddish dust from a nearby factory settles over everything. But there is plenty of money, and keeping up with the Schmidts has become a fulltime job. The crassness of the parents rubs off on the kids; already the teenagers are deciding club membership by family wealth and measuring the success of a vacation by the money spent.

Standing above this seamy landscape is Soldner, a decent schoolmaster who is appalled by the grossness of pupils and parents. There are exceptions, of course, and he falls in love with a fine woman who refuses to believe that her soldier husband, missing in World War II, will not one day return. It is her daughter, one of Soldner's students, whose nightmarish experiences give the book an aura of suspense that is more effective than its theme of corruption-by-money. The bearer of horror is a mentally unbalanced youth determined to have the young girl. His pursuit gives the novel a sense of imminent disaster and a switch ending more appropriate to a mystery than a thesis novel.

Author Gaiser's story is expertly plotted and for the most part cleanly written. But he calls on characters who are dead to testify about the shortcomings of the living and forces his moral points in weighty Teutonic terms. Much of what he says about the new Germany may be true, but it could with equal truth be said about the people of any country and any time who want the things that money can buy.

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