strange; he longed for his familiar factory and comrades left
behind. His hardest task was to understand the villagers.
" ... There was much in them that was incomprehensible to
him, that was hidden behind a kind of impalpable curtain.
The village was like a new type of complicated motor, and
Davidov studied it intensely and tensely, trying to understand
its mechanism, to see clearly every detail, to note every inter-
ruption in the daily incessant throbbing of this involved ma-
chine." But he keeps stubbornly at it, determined to set the
pace even for the old farmers. ''I'll die at the plough, but I'll
do it! I'll plough at night by the light of a lantern, but I'll
plough three acres. I mustn't do less
I"
And he won.
Sholokhov was nurtured by the Don country, and no part
of it is alien to him; the birds, animals, plants, colors, sounds
and smells of the steppes. The ice melting in the spring, the
winter cold, Davidov plowing; "The rich black layer of earth
slipped from under the share over the polished mouldboard,
turning over on its side like a sleepy fish." The phenomena
of nature are here as fully and vividly delineated as in lesser
novels by those who timorously dodge the social overtones
dominating
Seeds of Tomorrow.
The new life whose birth-
pangs are attended by sweat, pain and blood; the agony of
tearing asunder the umbilical cord fastened to the past. Each
character, though endowed with motivations and attributes
distinct from the others, fits inevitably into the major theme,
enriching and fulfilling it.
And here is humor, too. The salty proletarian wit touching
on the uni'/ersal, as indigenous to American plains and fac-
tories as to Russian steppes. There is a superannuated Cossack,
fighter in his day, who feels degraded at his job of tending
the collectivized fowls. He was dubbed "the hen feeler," and
was twitted by a "Kalmik mare"; "See that there's a basket
of eggs by ploughing time or we'll make you ·ride the hens
yourself." And there is the nun who spread the story that
women of the collective farms who had reached the age of
sixty would be compelled to hatch out eggs in the traditional
manner by sitting on them. And the bureaucrat,
Secretary of
the District Committee, who wrote a note to his wife: "Liza!
I categorically instruct that you immediately and uncondi-
tionally supply the beare.r of this note with dinner."
Meanwhile,
the seeds of tomorrow are sprouting on the
steppes, in the factories, in a new literature of which Sho-
lokhov's book is a distinguished harbinger.
JACK CONROY
It Happened There
THE LAST CIVILIAN,
by Ernst Glaeser. Translated
from the German by Gwenda David and Eric Mosh-
bacher, McBride.
$2.50.
In
The Last Civilian,
Ernst Glaeser continues his narra-
tive of provincial life in Wurttemberg,
begun in
Class of
1902,
skipping the early years of the Republic and fixing
his attention on the critical period of the Nazi rise to power.
This change of events has furnished him a more significant
theme, and he has known how to transform it into a novel
that is even better than his first. If it manages to circulate in
Germany, it must awaken the bitterest remorse; for it must
force the German reader to relive the mistaken enthusiasm
and the careless illusions or the astounding indifference
through which the average German permitted the establish-
ment of the Nazi dictatorship.
But for outsiders, who can
take its story more calmly, it makes the history of the Nazi
putsch live as only fiction can do. Glaeser does for what
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
actually happened in Germany what Sinclair Lewis's
It Can't
Happen Here
does for what might as readily take place in
America. And because what has happened is easier to treat,.
because also Glaeser is incomparably the more sensitive novel-
ist,
The Last Civilian
is incomparably the better novel.
At first the opponent of Hitlerism is bound to be discon-
certed by the book. The heroic workers in their trade unions,
the vast network of radical organizations,
are missing from
it. The little town is overwhelmingly Social Democratic. The
sole radical in it has learnt only from experience. The mail-
car.rier, who has come back from the War, has learnt only
to hate everything militaristic; and for this reason alone he
makes his futile and private predictions of ill from the drilling
Nazis. Otherwise the reader sees fascism in all the possible
allurement of its first approach; its appeal to national senti-
ment, its revival of hope and virile action, its justifiable ob-
jection to the Versailles treaty, its plausible but erroneous
ascription of the growing poverty at home to oppression from
enemies abroad. Under the cloak of these sentiments,
the
essential rowdyism of the movement, its Jew-baiting,
seem
at first inconsequential; and the honest believers in democracy.
as they quail before its banishment and give way to the pres-
sure of business interests, are beguiled by the youth and
vitality of their opponents.
The Last Civilian
is really the story, so to speak, of the
first Nazi. Hanns has the amiability of a Tom Jones, his
open nature and lack of intellectual discipline. He falls vic-
tim to the Nazi illusions and is caught in the conflict of am-
bitions among the local Nazi leaders. In the microcosm of this
small town are repeated the conflicts of types and interests
that prevail from top to bottom in Nazi Germany. And the
characters of the book present them fictively transformed.
The strategist, Goering, appears as a clever, crippled, local
politician. The homosexual, Roehm, becomes in the novel a
sort of charming, well-intentioned Boy Scout leader. The
publicist, Goebbels, is reproduced in the editor of the local
paper, who forces his reporters to become liars and blackmail-
ers. Only the Jew-baiter resembles in detail his original,
Streicher, and he is made the immediate, effectual weapon of
the movement, which gradually transforms the misery, the un-
employment,
the fine love of country of these young Ger-
mans into racial hatred and rowdyism. Hanns, midway in
such a course, falls in love and withdraws.
But the move-
ment, sweeping on, ruins him and changes the atmosphere of
the community into one of mad hysteria and universal sus-
picion, until the town is crushed and writhing in the power
of a few blood-sworn conspirators who take their orders from
Hitler, as our lesser American racketeers from the central
authority of an Al Capone.
Such a narrative alone would be enough. But Glaeser has
seen fit to add the corroding drop of irony.
The Last Civzlian
is a German-American,
who, disappointed by the crudity of
American life, returns to his native city, where he expects to
find under the Republic that democratic ideals have at length
reached their haven. Under this fantastic illusion, he attempts
to cooperate, as a wealthy, public spirited citizen, with the
new democracy at the very moment when it is vanishing.
The love feast he has arranged for all the village on his estate
is broken up by Nazi Jew-baiters, and, his experiment a fail-
ure, he returns to the United States. But he brings back
with him, as a warning for us, one of the most powerful
novels written by a German radical in which an anti-Nazi
point of view makes possible a narrative of significant form
and characterization.
EDWIN BERRY BURGUM
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