Blood and Irony

THE ARMS OF KRUPP by William Manchester. 976 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.

They were known as Schlotbarone, smokestack barons of the Ruhr. Bismarck treasured them, and used their shells to break the power of France in Europe. The Kaiser presided over their marriage plans, and misused their steel and submarines to lose the first World War. Hitler was awed by them. Deep in World War II, he took time out to write a special law (the Lex Krupp) to keep their family fortune intact. In the minds of many men in many lands, the Krupp name became synonymous with the cold pursuit of cash, steel and power, indeed, with the shame and fortune of Germany itself. Early in the century, H. G. Wells could place the dynasty "at the very core of evil." At Nuremberg in 1945, the judges condemned the head of the house of Krupp for "crimes against humanity."

Yet today, in Germany at least, the Krupps are remembered as a family of patriots. Munitions making is not really a lovable trade at best. Were the Krupps such ogres as they often appear?

Dwarfs and Dragons. Coming to grips with this question, William Manchester offers exhaustive answers. The product of seven years' research (with interruptions to write and wrangle over Death of a President), his book is the first full-scale account of the Krupps to appear in the U.S. Trying to cope with the complex history of one of the world's richest and strangest families, Manchester inevitably circles back to the origins of the German nation and finally weaves into his narrative much of the history of Germany from 1870 to the present.

The result is an often flawed, some times naive but largely fascinating chronicle whose inflated pretensions as a work of real scholarship are punctured by swarms of errors. As a work of history, the book is marred, too, by an overwrought style and an unbecomingly snide use of irony. Manchester is not fond of the Germans, and he caricatures them either as superefficient and slavishly obedient or as a folk barely removed from dwarfs and dragons, blood feuds and bags of tainted gold.

Efficiency and Eccentricity. Though the Krupp family goes back to the 16th century, its modern mold was cast about 150 years ago by Alfred Krupp (great-grandfather of the modern-day Alfried) who, at 14, inherited a nearly bankrupt little ironworks in Essen. By 1851, he had produced the world's largest cast-steel ingot, as well as the first seamless railway wheels, and was soon building a fortune out of the Industrial Revolution and the U.S. railway boom.

It was only as a brilliant sideline that he designed the first cast-steel, breech-loading cannon, which gave France, in the War of 1870, its first taste of Krupp-built firepower.