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PARTISAN REVIEW
produced Bach and Goethe, who had been singing "A Mighty Fortress is
Our God" since the Renaissance?" It was not until the early sixties, how–
ever, that she journeyed to Germany to find, as she has declared, "the origin
of the worm-the worm that had destroyed the structure." The result was
a group of stories about Germans including the novella-length "Pegnitz
Junction." She called the coll ection of these published in 1973, "not a
book about Fascism, but a book about where Fascism came from ... the
historical causes of Fascism-just its small possibilities in people."
"Ernst in Civilian C lothes" concerns a generation practiced in for–
getting. It is the twentieth anniversary of Stalingrad, and Ernst-now
either thirty-four or thirty-six (his identity papers are not genuine)-finds
that the television recap makes the battle seem "a defeat all around, and a
man with dull memory ... can easily think that France and Germany
fought on the same side . .. or else there were two separate wars, one real
and one remembered." In 1945, he had joined the Foreign Legion
"because the food was better on their side of the prison camp" and eigh–
teen years later, after Indochina and other places, he prepares to return to
Germany. Only eleven pages long, the story is a complex web of Ernst's
wandering, uncertain recollections as he spends a last day in Paris in
Willi's room and hears a neighbor he has been watching scold and beat
her child who cries (for to whom else can he cry?), "Maman, Maman!"
Ernst feels foreign to himself in his borrowed civilian clothes; he has been
in uniform since he joined the Hitler Youth when he was eight. Except
for the time when he had buried his papers and uniform outside a village
he cannot remember the name of and struggled, feeding on bark and
garbage, to the house where his stepfather was burning his own SS uni–
form in the cellar-and had not been let in. All of his life, as Gallant gives
us scattered bits and pieces of it, feels like "an endless leave without the
hope and the dread of return to the barracks."
"The Pegnitz Junction" is a pastiche of reality and dream vision, a sur–
real journey into the interior of postwar Germany, or, rather, into German
consciousness. The journeyer is a girl from a rebuilt baroque town in sev–
enties Germany whose literal adventure is quite unpolitical; she has gone
to Paris for a holiday with her lover and his little son and now returns with
them on a slow train. The experience has not been a success; Herbert has
been preoccupied with little Bert, and Christine's relations with the child
are difficul t.
It
is not certain that she will not, after all, marry another man,
to whom she has been engaged. The train trip is tedious and uncomfort–
able and is still unconcluded when the story stops. But the reader soon
notices the complex layering of political and literary parody Gallant has
applied to these events. Christine's voyage into the heart of darkness of her
own country will remind the reader of Conrad or of Kafka
(The Castle
is
