470
PARTISAN REVIEW
next year or the year after that, were never going to be. The so–
called joys of anticipation became crystal ciphers, more relevan t
to
someone as yet unborn than to myse lf, and with that began my
extraordinary sense of having been di spossessed of my future .
Not qu ite an automaton, I nonetheless felt more abstract than
any person should. And in the long run I knew only that the
name Stauffenberg stood for a certain line of force, a pressure
exerted, a will gone rigid as wood. Again and again , I wanted
to
do something irrelevant , something that had nothing to do with
S'gruber [Hitler). What a good time, I thought, to begin a stamp
collect ion, or to become an authority on index fin ge rs; but such
folderol was out of the question.
N o more tha n Stauffenberg does West go in for fold e rol , but ne ither
is he di spossessed by Stauffe nbe rg's me re hi story, a lready delive red
by authors cited in the nove l's "Pre liminary." Instead , Wes t dilates
Stauffenberg's fame, which has bee n sharp prec ise ly in its thinness–
like a knife blad e. Ironi call y, as I read the novel on a train, one
survivo r of a concentrat ion camp inte rrupted to in sist that Stauffen–
berg had been the
only
man who made a n attempt o n Hitl er's life.
Such all-too-typical, reduct ive pra i e, as ide from its unders ta ndable
in accuracy, only emphas izes the cha racter's la ment: "It would a ll
have bee n so diffe rent if I'd ente red hi tory as the ma n who kill ed
Hitl e r: the one ma n , the only." But no , this man , whose youth was
ha il ed by Rilke a nd whose mat urity knew the fri e ndship of Stefan
George, was doomed to ente r hi sto ry as the ma n who
tried
to kill
Hitl er. West, howeve r, recove rs the richness of Sta uffenbe rg's life by
undoing the abstrac tion , by introduc ing that ri gid "line of fo rce" into
a compl ex, varied field. In his
Book of Hours,
Rilke's cha racte r asserts
what Stauffenberg accomplishe through Wes t's "hi storical imper–
sona ti on":
Mein Leben ist nicht dicse steile Stunde ,
darin du mich so eilen siehst.
Ich bin ei n Baum vo r meinem Hintergrunde.
My life is not this swift hour
through which yo u see me speed.
I am a tree in fron t of my bac kground .
ever subo rdinated to charac ter, the novel's adventure properly
a ri ses from tha t cha racter, which was develo ped a ri stoc rat icall y
"with a responsibility to ca re fo r othe rs," but with tra ining that
