51B
PARTISAN REVIEW
deeming his audience and himself. (It is not without irony that at this
point America is sending us such films as
Strategic Air Command,
which was a spectacular flop at this year's Berlin film festival, or the
Long Gray Line,
which fell through as an insipid glorification of
militarism. )
All this is at a time when the debate on remilitarization rages all
over Western Germany. At this appropriate moment appeared the film
08/15,
the biggest success of all, which satirizes the pre-war barrack life
and the sadistic training practices of the late German army. The film
is based on a slick novel, which is undoubtedly influenced by James
Jones's
From Here to Eternity,
without coming anywhere near its power
and sincerity. And here again, the past has cast an evil eye. The author,
H. H. Kirst, was discovered to have been not a Private Prew, who suf–
fered from the sadism of his military superiors, but a vigorous Nazi
officer, who is on record for his fanatic resistance at the end of the
war. Could this be a case of a real conversion? The superficiality of
book and film makes it doubtful. To be a good artist today
in
Germany
IS
also a test of character.
But what can serious literature do in this crisis of tradition? Purge
itself and make a new start. This is, on the whole, a matter of generations.
Thomas Mann's
Dr. Faustus
set an early example for the first possi–
bility, although it is not so much a cathartic work as one of subtle
analysis.
If
Mann's position was somewhat outside and above German
postwar existence, he nevertheless exerted an immense influence in mat–
ters of style, technique and subject matter, much more than his de–
tractors want to admit. He embodied, after all, the best of living German
literary tradition. His
Krull,
published as the first of two projected
volumes, was the bestseller of the year. But the completed book is a
let-down from the earlier fragment; the later adventures of the impostor–
genius Krull are, as some critics have pointed out, overwritten, facile
and casual. The second greatest success of the year among the serious
novels is a book absolutely in the Mann tradition, a novel called
Stiller
(a name) by the Austrian-Swiss Max Frisch. It is the slowly revealed
story of a man who, upon returning to his native Switzerland under an
assumed name, is arrested by the police, who try to establish his identity
with a man who escaped from various involvements some years back.
Frisch is heavily indebted to Mann in the ironic' representation of his
material, and his hero Stiller, although less naively corrupt than Krull,
basically poses the same question of bourgeois or public identity versus
privately human identity. It is interesting to see that the search for
