BERLIN LETTER
519
identity, for the real human being behind the appearance, is also the
theme of a new novel by the prolific young Walter Jens, a professor
from Tuebingen, who recounts the life of a writer and scholar who
commits suicide because he refuses to become old
(Der Mann, der
nicht alt werden wollte).
The other, more obviously cathartic theme dominant in recent
German literature is that of guilt. Several novels on this theme by writers
of the older generation have recently appeared; and while they are
reputable and competent, none has had the strong impact one would
like to feel. Alexander Lernet-Holenia's
Der Gra! Luna
(Count Luna)
is an interesting study in the psychology of guilt.
Edzard Schaper writes with a soul-searching, religious intensity
(he is a Catholic convert) ; he is one of the most accomplished German
novelists of our time. The title figure of his new novel
Der Gouverneur
(The Governor) is the Swedish governor of Estonia at the time of
Charles XII. After the Russian victory of Poltava he prepares for re–
turn to Sweden when it becomes his duty to pronounce judgment on a
young Swedish officer accused of a war crime. On the disorderly re–
treat from Poltava, the young Count Cronstedt had fallen in with a
band of marauders who murdered the family of an Estonian nobleman.
Only one daughter escapes, and Cronstedt is found wounded and
numbed at the place of the slaughter. His trial is complicated by po–
litical factionalism, but in the course of the investigations it turns out
that he did not really take part in the crime, in fact was injured when
he tried to protect the surviving daughter. The governor realizes after
many scruples and deliberations that formal justice is misapplied here.
It is the girl's love and the grace of God, administered by the Lutheran
Swedish chaplain, which redeem the sinner.
This novel is polished, thoughtful, sincere in its own deeply re–
ligious way, and written in the best tradition of the German quasi–
philosophical novel. But it is perhaps just on this account that it falls
short of its task. Schaper takes up one of the most serious problems of
our time, and of life generally, a case of guilt in war, only to reveal it,
reluctantly and almost furtively, to be a case of mistaken innocence.
Everybody is really very noble in this novel.
But it is perhaps unjust to demand from Schaper, who is around
sixty and chose to set his story in the eighteenth century, the cathartic
book about the immediate past and the experience of war. Such a book,
however, is eagerly awaited. A few months ago, there appeared in a
large, inexpensive edition the diaries of a young writer and war his–
torian, missing since the battle around Berlin in 1945: Felix Hartlaub's
