Guiltuber Alles

BROTHERS IN ARMS by Hans Hellmut Kirst. 384 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

In his Gunner Asch tetralogy, West German Novelist Hans Hellmut Kirst explored the soldier's life in Hitler's Wehrmacht, in which he himself had served twelve years, and found a simple point: a dogface is a dogface, even under the sign of the swastika. Asch was a universal type, a latter-day Good Soldier Schweik, the goof-off who confounds every military system.

Having succeeded with satire, Kirst has now joined many of his fellow writers in the thriving literary guilt business. He lectures his German readers on their inexpiable wartime sins. His psychological thriller, The Night of the Generals, made into a poor movie (TIME, Feb. 10), was sharpened with moral indignation at the Nazi officer class, which served as Kirst's human symbol for German inhumanity during World War II. Like the earlier book, the present Brothers in Arms also has two levels, one occupied by Kirst's story, the other by his sermon.

The story moves at the beat of a beer-garden band. Sixteen years after the war, in the village of Rheine-Bergen, six veterans of a Nazi machine-gun squad face the necessity of killing a brother in arms for the second time. Their victim is Michael Meiners, left for dead on the Eastern front while the other squad members deserted before the advancing Russians. Meiners' reappearance menaces the peace of men who have deliberately paved over the past, and his murder is promptly arranged. In case any reader has missed the point, Author Kirst puts it on the tongue of the detective assigned to find Meiners so that his comrades can kill him. "The criminals or accomplices of yesterday," says the investigator, "have lost all consciousness of their guilt or complicity. They've genuinely forgotten."

Kirst's ultimate message is even more unrelenting than that. He specifically places the German spirit beyond redemption: it is a beast, sleeping only between wars, that will stir at any moment to do murder again. Kirst's readers, who beyond any question of guilt or conscience enjoyed the appealing roguishness of Gunner Asch, may be disconcerted to discover that his creator considers Asch a myth. What is more, they may not agree with that view.

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