This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, popular German-language authors were experiencing a resurgence: Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Hans Fallada, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ernst Junger — even the old stager Erich Maria Remarque — were all active and writing books which are still remembered and probably still read now.
But one author outsold them all during this time. Hans Helmut Kirst had his books regularly in the German best-seller lists, with sales of his forty-eight titles usually hitting around half a million copies each in the domestic market and with over twelve million copies in total worldwide. Yet today Kirst is largely forgotten.
Kirst’s output of fiction was prodigious but he was driven. He was also scriptwriter for eight films produced for the German market (six of which were from his own books); a documentary film-maker; and, on at least one occasion, an actor in a tv series. One of his books was made into a (not very good) big-budget film: The Night of the Generals starred Peter O’Toole, fresh from his success in Lawrence of Arabia. (The script had many notable contributors, including Gore Vidal, Paul Dehn and Joseph Kessel; O’Toole was apparently reluctant to take the part but felt an obligation to the producer Sam Spiegel, because of Lawrence).
Despite all this work, if he is remembered at all, Kirst‘s name is usually linked with his creation, Gunner Asch. In a series of four books, the adventures of the titular hero picked up on the literary exploration of the absurdity of military life that has accompanied conflict, from Alphonse de Vigny in the Bourbon restoration through good soldier Schweik’s adventures in the Great War to Hawkeye and Trapper in M*A*S*H.
His books (twenty-four of which were translated into English) fall into four broad categories. First, there are the humorously cynical army novels (like the 08/15 series about the misadventures of Gunner Asch), written from 1955 onwards. Then the historical thrillers, usually based in a military context (Night of the Generals, which appeared in 1963; Officer Factory, also 1963; The 20th of July, 1966; Night of the Long Knives, 1976) which are more serious explorations of the brutalising effects of military life. Then come the later novels, set in contemporary Germany and often crime-based in some way to reveal the seamy side of the post-war German ‘economic miracle’ (Undercover Man, 1970; A Time for Scandal, 1973; A Time for Truth, 1974; A Time for Payment, 1976). Finally, the outliers: the apocalyptic No One Will Escape, 1959 — like Shute’s On the Beach but grimmer; and The Fox of Maulen (published in the U.S. as The Wolves), 1968 – a bit like Fallada’s Alone in Berlin but a little less bleak.
This last title is undeservedly forgotten not least because it can stand as an archetype for Kirst’s “anti-war” books. It also has a timelessness as a fable of the corrupting effects of power.
The story revolves around what happens in the (fictitious) village of Maulen in the (real) region of Pomerania between 1932 and 1945. It follows the rise, fall and collapse of the local Nazi party seen through the eyes of one man, Alfons Materna, who is a shrewd, self-reliant and independent local farmer.
The plot is simple, although there are numerous characters. Written in four parts, the story follows the path of Materna’s political awakening. The first two parts deal with his transition from disinterested hostility to active opposition to the bumptious and malign leaders of the local Nazi party. Then through the third section, the period of the Nazi’s grip on the village, Materna has to wriggle ethically to survive. In the final section, the collapse of the village’s existence is traced as Russian tanks roll across the Pomeranian farmlands.
Materna is intrinsically hostile – but initially passively so – to the discipline that the local Nazis want to impose on the villagers and merely wants to get on with his life without interference – and (initially) without interfering in the lives of anyone else. Since the death of his wife, Materna has been used to being left alone to live his life, unmoved by the swirls of political argument, local or national.
His passivity disappears when his younger son is killed in a bungled weapons practice run by the local SA. Seeking some adventure as an alternative to their dull rural existence, both of Materna’s sons had joined the local party for the opportunities it offered for supposed comradeship, possible whoring, and certain excessive drinking. Then, when the effects of the Nazi’s racially-inspired policies begin to encroach upon the farm that Materna’s forefathers have owned for generations, his world is threatened and he feels forced to act.
Spurred by personal dislike of the strutting local Nazi leaders, Materna moves from passivity to individuals to outright opposition to the Nazi party in the village – brought about mostly by a mix of his grief, an innate contrariness to authority, and a streak of basic decency. His weapon (initially) is not sustained political argument (for he has no articulated opposition to what is going on) or even overt violence but barbed flattery, pricking the pomposity and incompetence of the local Nazi functionaries.
Later, as Materna’s contempt for the individual members of the local party grows, he increases the tempo of his campaign and progresses to using ridicule, blackmail and jealousy. Based on marital discord and prompted by unfounded rumour, he tries to wreck the relationships inside the structure of the SA. The story is told to show how Materna (always with his own interests at the forefront) brings down the ambitions of individuals with less guile, cunning or foresight. Materna is no saint. He is both greedy and generous, hard and sentimental, morally upright and debased at the same time.
At first, Materna’s low-key rebellion is purely a matter of self-interest. His farm workers – who often came from those parts of society that the Nazis wanted to eliminate – are crucially important to his business. But as they become demonised and persecuted, he begins to feel a sense of identification with the injustice, and organises a sort of underground railway foe the persecuted, which gradually comes to dominate his life. He reluctantly helps more and more people, often ones previously unknown to him, to escape to less dangerous places (in the mid-1930s even Poland seemed safer than turbulent Germany).
This underground railway becomes a business in itself and towards the middle of the book Materna has to realise that it is now longer possible to run it safely, together with the farm. And so he bargains with the local SA chief to authorize the travel of two “undesirables”: one of his trusted workers – a Jew – who will take charge of the other end of the railway; and a disabled woman he has come to love, whose life would be threatened were she to stay.
Although Materna could have left with the departing group, he chooses to stay to fulfil the economic terms of the bargain. He also explains that he wants to stay “to see what happens and have some fun,” a desire he explains is activated by both personal animosities and by a growing dislike of what is happening to his (specifically) local world.
Of course, as the book draws to a close Materna cannot escape his fate any more than can the other villagers of Maulen. Kirst’s ingenious ending is in keeping with the moral ambiguity of his characters.
But there is a deeper – and troubling — aspect to the book beyond the explication of the moral ambiguities and compromises in the story. The novel deals with moral choices, ethical dilemmas and personal deceits. A book about moral dilemmas cannot be judged without examining the moral record of the author himself. Here the evidence is not clear cut.
Kirst was born and grew up in the district of Masuren, a backwater of the then-German region of Pomerania. He joined the German Army in 1933, at the age of 19 and in the pit of the Great Depression. He became a member of the Nazi Party soon after. So, while it can be assumed that he bases the characters in his book on real-life acquaintances, it’s clear that Kirst was not describing his own experiences.
By the middle of the war, Kirst had risen from the ranks to the level of lieutenant in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. Although he never saw front-line action, he was appointed as the political instruction officer for his unit — entrusted with explaining, justifying and proselytising for Nazism and its policies.
After the war, Kirst claimed that he had confused the party of National Socialism with the country of Germany, and that he had been unaware that “one was in a club of murderers”. But can that really be so, given his record and position? Who can say from this distance whether Kirst repented and purged his guilt through writing or whether he just sublimated his experiences? Certainly, he went through a process of formal ‘de-Nazification’. Unlike others – Gunter Grass for instance — he never sought to conceal his past. But since Kirst never let a good idea have only one outing he employs the basic idea of subversion from The Fox of Maulen again in his later novel Party Games (1980), although this time with less poignancy and broader humour. The question then arises “Is the repetition evidence not of repentance but just commercial exploitation of experience?”
Kirst’s books were often criticised for subordinating the horror of events in Germany during the reign of the Nazis to a sequence of humorous incidents at a local level, which consequently glossed over the wider social and historical context. Some critics saw this as partly an act of self-exculpation. Kirst was writing — and his books were published — at a time when the problem of the recent past and the taint that had on the New Germany were matters of constant public discussion.
In one way or another, all of Kirst’s books deal with the effects on individuals as they shift from being members of a turbulent civil society prior to the rise of Hitler to followers of (or resisters against) doctrinaire Nazism and finally survivors or victims of the de-Nazification process .
Coincidentally — deliberately? ironically? – The Fox of Maulen was first published in Germany as Die Wolfe (the US edition carries the original title, The Wolves) in 1967, a year after Kurt Kiessinger became Chancellor of West Germany. Kiessinger was the first prominent former member of the Nazi party to achieve a high office in the West German government, having been a lawyer in the Kammergericht, the highest state court, for the city-state of Berlin, between 1935 and 1940, and having joined the Nazis in 1933).
Regardless of the motive, by reducing the focus to the local and personal, Kirst was able to show the impact of huge events on the individual lives of those who were “ordinary” – often resentful of the hand life had dealt them, not usually particularly active politically, not especially well-educated and not influential. He could take characters who, despite their handicaps of class or status or lack of wealth, saw opportunities to achieve their ambitions when their society developed in a different political direction. His stories thus became fables of lasting relevance, illuminating with mordant humour the havoc created by flawed characters placed by chance in positions to become agents of influence. His novels entertain and instruct (for those who are alert to the parallels). Change the names and the contexts and the basic stories in many of Kirst’s novels (and especially The Fox) can be applied to many other political events of the years of this century – never mind the events of 70 years ago. This, to me, is the mark of a novel of lasting value.
The Fox of Maulen is both the high water mark of Kirst’s writing and the high water mark of his examination of the morality of resisting or rejecting — making accommodations to survive in a world where moral choices cannot be resolved into simply black or white.
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.