A Journalist in Naziland

Monday, Apr. 08, 1946
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CONFESSIONS OF A EUROPEAN INTELLECTUAL (315 pp.)—Franz Schoenberner—Macmillan ($2.75).

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In the city of Munich, a few days after the Reichstag Fire, six grave men held a meeting. They were the owners of, and chief contributors to, Germany's famous political-satirical magazine—the weekly Simplicissimus, whose biting, brilliant cartoons had ridiculed human stupidity since 1896. Now, the owners of ' Simpl" had met to find an answer to the gravest question human stupidity had ever put to them: "What shall we do when here, too, the Nazis take over?" Simplicissimus' founder, stalwart Thomas Theodor Heine, put the reply calmly: "One simply has to go into exile—pauper fashion."

Into exile, pauper fashion (first in France; later, in the U.S.), went spare, spry Simplicissimus Editor Franz Schoenberner. Confessions of a European Intellectual is the witty, intelligent story of his life—a story whose capacity for hard sense and an all too rare humor gives it a distinct place in refugee literature. As befits the outlook of an editor of satire, it contains no awed descriptions of intimate meetings with famous people; as an intellectual confession it confesses nothing but disrespect for overintellectualized confessions.

Franz Schoenberner, who now lives in New York City and is working on another book, was reared in the rarest air of German intellectualism. Son of a Berlin pas tor, he was subject to spasms of brattish rage, until his adoring mother taught him how much safer it was to hurl abstract arguments instead of "all kinds of physical objects." By the time he was 13, sharp-witted Franz had logically argued his sisters into incurable neuroses, and ruled the household with an "intellectual regime of terror [that] would have been impossible in any other atmosphere than that of the German intellectual middle class." After his university career—which included lectures on subjects such as "The use of the comma by Lessing"—Franz had progressed so far into the abstract that the philosophy of Immanuel Kant appeared to him to be "escape literature." Suicide was the only logical next step. With the aid of a world-weary student of Sanskrit, young Schoenberner plotted a chain of thought of such intellectual intensity that it "would . . . dissolve even the body ... by pure force of thinking." When his body remained undissolved, Schoenberner decided to surrender to the "irrational force" of staying alive.