Wiedergutmachung

MAKING GOOD AGAIN by Lionel Davidson. 308 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

A claim to indemnification for loss of life may be asserted if the persecutes has been deliberately or frivolously killed or driven to his death. It shall be sufficient if there is a probable causal nexus between death and persecution.

--German Federal Law

The West German government's commendable attempt to pay reparations to the victims of Nazi cruelty is the most remarkable effort in history to treat sin as crime and then atone for it in cash. In absolute terms, the whole idea is preposterous: How can one recompense a man for his own death? And though payments, of course, are made to next of kin, the Wiedergutmachung (literally "making good again") is a legal anomaly that intentionally permits all sorts of quasi-legal advantages to the claimants. It is a "beautiful piece of liberal and humane legislation," as one of Lionel Davidson's German characters sums it up, that "any crook who puts his mind to it can milk."

Few have, for a vast majority of the tens of thousands of claimants have been wronged beyond any state's power to recompense them. Yet the slender thread of civilized existence often seems to hang upon little more than society's fragile agreement to pursue and uphold such imperfect payments and restraints as the law allows. In the process of tracing out the perplexities of just one claim, British Suspense Novelist Lionel Davidson (The Rose of Tibet, The Menorah Men) has created an odd, quiet novel that contemplates the limits of private responsibility and public guilt.

This moral terrain, though fascinating, is often overwrought in literature. And Davidson's low-key philosophic inquiry, conducted in a wonderfully conversational tone and decked out with the trappings of an international suspense tale, runs the risk of seeming schematic or frivolous. He produces a rich victim of Nazi terror who, it turns out, may not be dead after all. The story deals in breathless comings and goings across the Central Europe of today and yesterday--yesterday in this case being 1939, just before Hitler's "final solution" was set in motion. Davidson detours into the painfully recollected and infinitely poignant shifts of law and finance that were used to raise the money necessary for getting Jews out of Germany.

Woozy Notion. To this the author adds three central characters--a German, an Englishman, a German-born Israeli--all lawyers assigned to the case. At first, they seem to invite a formal, wooden trialogue that might be entitled "stances to be taken when confronted by the enormities of the past." The German protects himself from guilt by evolving a woozy, romantic notion of national change and renewal. Today's "good, decent people," he reflects hazily, could no longer be "the same people who had performed the actions . . . the horrifying things they had." The Englishman avoids large moral judgments, clinging instead to those personal restraints and responsibilities that can be defined or implied by the law. Overriding them both is the Jew, Dr. Johann Zadik Grunwald, a crippled survivor of Dachau who journeys back to Germany for the first time since his escape to make a claim for an Israeli charitable organization.

Grunwald sees the Nazi horrors less as crimes against the Jews than sins against life itself. Such sins, he observes, are atonable, if at all, only in heaven--and only through a sense of guilt. The Germans, he believes, feel none. "How is it possible for them to make good again?" he asks. "The dead they can't repay. The dead family without an heir they can't repay. If they'd managed to kill every member of every family, they'd have nothing to repay."

Which one is right? Is there, in fact, any polemical stake that society can drive once and for all into the heart of this monster from the past, and so dispose of the problem? Clearly not. Cleverly, wisely, Davidson offers no final solution. Instead he slowly turns the book into a rueful seminar on the possibilities that men have of ever "making good again" after various sorts of failure. In the process, the word Wiedergutmachung becomes a kind of pun that can be read on a number of levels, some hopeful, some somber: restoring to virtue a society that has lost its virtue; paying old debts; returning to success after losses in life or love.

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