BOOKS

Erich Maria Remarque, the Violent Author...

Erich Maria Remarque, a cordial, gen-
tle-mannered man of 60, came to the
U.S. in 1939 and became a citizen in
1947. He lives in a small apartment high
above New York's 57th Street, with a
superb view straight down Manhattan
Island. He writes in longhand at a desk
where he can see the view or, when he
chooses, a framed letter of Goethe. In
the room are his spinet-style piano and
a number of small and choice works of
art, including a Degas and a bevy of
exquisite Chinese bronzes. He still keeps
a house on Lake Maggiore in Switzer-
land, and goes there for a few months
at a time. Despite this peregrinating
between two continents, he says:

"I now think of New York as my home. It is an unbelievable city. There is virtually everything here. I am very happy to have become an American. I have met exceedingly cultivated people in America. Americans have an innate sense of freedom, whether they realize it or not. They act toward each other that way. It is so easy to mix with others. This freedom is something it is very hard for a European, who has not observed it, to conceive of.

"I had been thinking about writing 'The Black Obelisk,' about treating that early part of my life, for years (see review

below). But there were so many difficul-
ties. I wanted to write about Genevieve,
the girl in the asylum. I thought I might
do a novel just about her, but it seemed
to me it would have been too static,
with not enough interest. Then I gradu-

ally came to feel that I wanted to write
about all the other things at the same
time—the tombstone business and so on
—and that Genevieve could be part of
the whole. Scenes with her could be
worked in among others, and the whole

Bob Steppy

Remarque: Tombstones and poetry and a girl named Genevieve

Long Ago and Tender...

THE BLACK OBELISK. By Erich Maria
Remarque. Translated by Denver
Lindley. 434 pages. Harcourt,
Brace. $4.50.

Erich Maria Remarque ("All Quiet
on the Western Front") has plunged back
into his own past and written a nostalgic,
humorous, and tenderly moving novel
out of his life in the wildly inflationary
Germany of 1923. The paradox is that if
readers of "The Black Obelisk" did not
know it was deeply autobiographical,
they might suppose that the book's char-
acters and incidents were invented. That
is because the conditions of Remarque's
life at the time were of such a peculiar
nature in themselves.

In a small Westphalian city he was
working in various capacities for a tomb-
stone concern, writing poetry, and on
Sundays playing the organ in an insane
asylum. His connection with the tomb-
stone firm exposed him both to macabre
and highly comic sides of inflationary
economics. His poetry led him into a gar-
rulous literary club. But the shaking
event in his life-disillusioned by the war
as he was-was his friendship with a girl
he met at the insane asylum.

In the novel he calls her Genevieve.
She was a delicately lovely schizophrenic,
shifting without warning between two
personalities. One of them (Jennie) was
shrewish. The other (Isabelle) was de-
voted to the young man, and in their
talks she raised the most disturbing ques-
tions concerning the world's appearances
and what might lie behind them:

"I feel her hair on my face; it is soft and smells of hay. Her face, too, is soft, and I feel the delicate bones, her chin and the curve of her brow, and suddenly I am once more deeply astonished that behind this narrow hemisphere there lives another world with wholly different laws and that this head, which I can so easily hold in my hand, sees everything differently, every tree, every star, every relationship, and itself too. A different universe is shut up inside it, and for a moment everything seems confused and I no longer know what is real-what I see or what she sees or what is there when we are not..."

With Isabelle he learned to know
depths of love he had never suspected.
And then one day, as the doctor at the
institution had predicted, she became a
"normal" Genevieve, failed to recall their
intimacy, and he never saw her again.

Out of these widely disparate ma-
terials, Remarque has made a novel full

of the savor of youth—promises, pleas-
ures, anguished questioning, and the
beauties of the natural world. In these
pages. Hitler and Nazism are rising, and
savage portents of them appear. As a
matter of fact, Remarque left Germany
for Switzerland before the Nazis came
to power. Later, they burned his books,
and in 1938 they took away his citizen-
ship. But it is Remarque's singular
achievement that, with all the hindsight
in the world, he has been able to evoke
his 1923 with love.

►Summing Up: Finest Remarque novel
in years.

... And a Savage Time

THE LEGION OF THE DAMNED. By
Sven Hassel. Translated by Maurice
Michael. 277 pages. Farrar, Straus
and Cudahy. $3.75.

It might be too much to expect any
book to do for World War II what Erich
Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the
Western Front" did for the first one. But
as an indictment of the savagery and
elemental stupidity of war, this saga of
a small band of German tank troopers
comes close.

Classified by its publishers as a "docu-
mentary novel," it is said to be 90 per

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Newsweek

... A Quiet Man

thing might be moving. I hope it is.

"Once I had seen my way, it came
easily. Ten years after the first war many
things had come together for me and I
suddenly wrote 'All Quiet on the West-
ern Front' in just four weeks. 'The Black
Obelisk' took a year. I don't know what
ever happened to Genevieve."

Remarque, who is noted for his hatred
of war and Nazism, is anything but
violent in temperament. Markedly re-
 collective enthusiasm for food and drink and wit, for the
small and fast Italian sports cars,
and for American women and comic
strips. Among his chief admirations in
modern American writing are the earlier
works of Thornton Wilder and Ernest
Hemingway. Among modern Europeans,
one of his preferences is André Malraux.
Remarque's philosophical interest has
carried him far outside Western philoso-
phy into such areas as Zen Buddhism.

But in his conversation there is re-
peatedly heard the veteran of Europe's
disasters. "You know," he says, "I am in
a curious position. Most writers at some
time or another want to go back to their
roots, to revisit actually or in imagination
their home towns. But if I want to go
back, it just isn't there. It's obliterated.
Bombed out."

cent factual. The author (Sven Hassel
is a pseudonym) is a Dane who was
mobilized into the Wehrmacht because
of his Austrian paternity. Captured, after
deserting from the army, he was sent to a
concentration camp, temporarily paroled
to de-fuse unexploded bombs, then
released into a penal regiment, a battle-
hard Panzer unit used to spearhead ev-
ery attack and cover every retreat. With
the tanks, Sven rolled across the vast
arena of Hitler's war from the Mediter-
ranean to the approaches of Moscow.
Along this bloody swath he suffered an
incredible number of experiences which
are compressed into this slim book.

At one point, he is captured by the
Russians, interrogated, and put to work
in a factory; he escapes to rejoin his regi-
ment and fight in the great summer tank
battles that swirled back and forth across
the Ukraine; he is wounded, hospital-
ized. At the front he helps to murder his
brutal company commander and even an
old score with a disgusting Nazified
chaplain. In the end he has lost every-
body: His wife has been executed; his
mistress has died in an air raid; his com-
rades have been butchered at the front,
and his gentle lieutenant has gone mad.

Although all but the toughest readers
may blanch under the impact of this
chronicle of insanities, they will find be-

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