Books: The Guilt of the Lambs

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In Germany, the writing that followed the nightmare of World War II was not a literature. It was a record of unassimilated shock. In books and trials, the horrors of the past were convulsively laid bare and the guilt placed upon major Nazis and lesser savages like "Hangman" Heydrich and Ilse Koch. But as the handful of notorious Nazis was again and again brought to public account, it became easier and easier for the rest of the Germans to think of themselves as innocent victims—lambs who had been set upon and held in thrall by wolves.

Then the economic miracle transformed West Germany from a defeated enemy into a valued ally. The haunting moral question of how the Hitler regime had come to dominate 80 million people and what responsibility countless small German citizens might personally bear for it was never adequately faced and exorcised —not even in literature. With the new prosperity, popular writers switched, like their counterparts everywhere else in the world, to sex and success. Germany, it seemed, could find neither the literary talent nor the inclination to come to grips with the most, overwhelming experience in its history.

But in the past two years, the growing success of three writers—Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and Uwe Johnson—has signaled a change. Their achievement represents the fulfilled promise of a handful of serious writers, most of them young and linked with a maverick literary movement known as Group 47, who have persistently gone on trying to probe beneath the surface prosperity to the uneasy past. As artists, they know that the dramatic story of Nazi Germany must lie not with the wolves but in the everyday lives of the lambs—those many individuals whose accumulation of fear, self-protective indifference or private greed let it all happen. In short, the guilt of the technically innocent. What lends urgency to their literary inquiry is the parallel most of them see between the new smugness and materialism in Germany and the spirit that existed among self-seeking Germans under Hitler. What makes their work noticeable is that it at last is showing the power and subtlety needed for so dark and difficult a subject.

Whisper to Howl. Most spectacular example is a sprawling, scurrilous first novel, Günter Grass's Tin Drum, which has won prizes and stirred anger all over Europe, sold 150,000 copies in Germany, and will be out in the U.S. next month.

Grass, a 35-year-old ex-tombstone carver, is probably the most inventive talent to be heard from anywhere since the war. In The Tin Drum, he employs every technique from realism to surrealism, every tone from a whisper to a howl. The gaudiest gimmick in his literary bag of tricks, however, is a character named Oskar Matzerath. For Oskar is that wildly distorted mirror which, held up to a wildly deformed reality, gives back a recognizable likeness.

Like Grass, Oskar is the son of a German grocer and his pretty Polish wife. Unlike Grass, Oskar, when he is three years old, refuses to grow any more. He remains 31 inches tall. With a man's intelligence in a baby's body, he is largely ignored by adults. What he sees and overhears as a result adds up to a dwarfs-eye view of the Third Reich.