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Alfred Neumann

Six of Them, by Alfred Neumann

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments

· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


Cover of the first U.S. edition of 'Six of Them'The barber at Stadelheim prison is called Adam, and most people don’t know if it his given name or his surname. He is not an independent businessman, but a state employee with the title of Surgical Assistant and a certificate attesting to his competence. He lives in the prison. Until 1935 he lived in the same capacity in the surgical clinic, and shaved the hairy parts of bodies before they were submitted to the surgeon’s knife. He is a master of his trade, but his trade has nothing in common with the gay, loquacious beautification work of a Figaro. For he does not shave faces. Adam is grave and taciturn and emaciated like a fakir. His office, his appearance and the late hour of the night at which he usually goes into action, spread terror, deadly terror. He is used to it and pays no attention to it. Sometimes it happens that his clients must be tied to their cots face down and cut hair in any position and has never yet nicked anyone. That is his pride.

“Adam, work!” the prison’s executive secretary speaks over the house wire.

“Cell number,” Adam requests.

“There are six.”

“Six,” says Adam. It is not an exclamation of astonishment, but only a repetition of the number. He hangs up, and dons his work coat. Every barber in the world wears a white jacket, Adam wears a black one. He is no worldly barber.

Editor’s Comments

Six of Them is a remarkable feat of imagination. An exile from Germany, writer Alfred Neumann wrote the book, a fictionalized account of the 1943 White Rose protest against Hitler and Nazism, and the subsequent arrest, trial, and execution of the six organizers, with little more than hearsay accounts published in Time magazine and circulated among the emigre community. Yet he managed to convey with considerable accuracy both the particulars and the atmosphere of the event.

The book opens with the six in jail, awaiting their questioning by a Nazi Peoples’ Court. Although the narrative thread runs a short course from here to their conviction and execution, Neumann provides for each of the accused a flashback that shows how he or she came to the decision to publically oppose Hitler, with all the obvious risks that involved. Hans and Sophie Moeller (brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl in the real protest), university professor Karl von Hennings and his wife Dora (Karl Huber and his wife), and their comrades, Christopher Sauer and Alexander Welte, each arrived at his or her choice through different experiences and motivations. Sophie had watched as her best friend, a Jewish girl, was hounded out of school, then hemmed in by increasingly restrictive measures, and finally shipped off to a concentration camp. Karl von Hennings’ objection was an ethical one; Christopher Sauer’s a religious one. Dora went along out of love for Karl; Alexander out of loyalty to Hans, whom he befriended on the Eastern Front.

Neumann contrasts these six with the judges on the Peoples’ Court. They, too, have reached their destination through different paths.One is an dilettante nobleman who disdains his Nazi colleagues but lacks the personal strength to find any faith of his own to follow. Another is a fat, smug butcher who gloats at the rise in his fortune and standing resulting from his decision to join the Nazi Party early in its existence. Where the six accused took risks to voice and defend their beliefs, Neumann shows the judges as compromised, corrupt, or opportunistic.The political power may be theirs, but the moral strength of the six protesters is greater.

The book suffers somewhat from Neumann’s awkward style and his tendency to rely too much on conveying his characters’ thoughts rather than their actions, but it remains a strong story. He often shows a cinematic flair for scene-setting: at the time he wrote Six of Them, he had just finished the screenplay for None Shall Escape, another tale of Nazism for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. Neumann may not have intended to turn Six of Them into a screenplay, but it wouldn’t have taken much effort.

The real story has itself been filmed several times, most recently in the 2005 film, Sophie Scholl, and the facts have also been well-documented in numerous books. Neumann wrote his novel to show Americans that a simple stereotype would not suffice to understand tthe German people, but perhaps there is little remaining reason for anyone to pick up Six of Them and read it. That does not mean, however, that the genuine merits of this book deserve to be forgotten.

Other Comments

F. C. Weiskopf, Saturday Review of Literature, 28 July 1945

A craftsman of great experience and skill, Mr. Neumann masterfully combines economy in the use of his artistic means with richness of imagination and narrative power…. Many passages of this sincere and passionate novel will long be remembered by its readers, especially the weird picture of Christopher Sauer; the fine character sketch of the “destroyed destroyer of life,” member of the Peoples’ Court, Baron Freyberg; and the moving story of the married love of Karl von Hennings and Dora.

Virgilia Sapieha (Peterson), Weekly Book Review, 29 July 1945

The six lives are both credible and intensely moving. Bright shafts of reason in the Nazi night, they show up the grotesque crooks and cranks and fools around them. If this book, Six of Them, could be filmed for Germany it might help to melt the frozen youth and quicken the hearts that a century of militarism has stilled.

Locate a Copy

Six of Them, by Alfred Neumann, translated by Anatol Murad
New York: Macmillan, 1945

Strange Conquest, by Alfred Neumann

Excerpt

They pushed through the roadblock and ran along the houses in two columns without losing a single man. They received fire, but it was irregular, inaccurate, and seemingly hesitant. Two men were lost at the next roadblock and here it became apparent that the enemy took poor aim, fired too high, and couldn’t face a frontal attack, especially when the attackers yelled. The Falange got through.


But then there was yelling behind them in their own tongue, terrible in its agony. Now they knew that one of the two who had gone down before the roadblock had not been dead, but would be soon. They wanted to go back.

“Keep going!” roared Kewen, brandishing his pistol.

They got a few paces further, then drew fire from every window, and behind them the road block closed like a cattle gate.

“Keep going!” Kewen yelled, and they snarled at him like angry dogs. He dropped his pistol, stunned by their mutiny.

They crawled into the two nearest houses on their right and left and, roaring with rage, cleaned them of five snipers each. They cleaned them out with their bayonets.

They didn’t budge from those holes. Five of them now lay outside, between the two houses, and two lay back by the roadblock. That made seven. Jonny Felice lay in the outskirts of the town. That made eight. In Tola under the rattling coconuts lay Crocker. That made nine.

Achilles Kewen was still around. He popped back and forth between the two houses, made speeches, insulted the troops, wasted his luxuriant stock of Kentucky curses on them. They didn”t budge from their holes. Every time he skipped across the street, he was fired on, and finally it got too much for him, or he lost his head. He planted himself in the middle of the street and yelled: “You yellow bastards! You yellow bastards!” He yelled it only twice. Then he ripped his mouth wide open as for a huge laugh, and only when he pitched forward did anyone see the hole in his forehead. Now there were ten gone.

Comments

This is one of the few books discussed on this site whose publisher seems to have deliberately set out to keep it neglected. First published in German in 1949 as Der Pakt, it was translated by Ransom Taylor and published by Hutchinson in 1950 as Look Upon This Man. Unable to find a major publisher in the U.S. for the book, Alfred Neumann settled for its release by the fledgling paperback publisher, Ballantine Books. Ballantine sat on the book for several years, at a loss for how to market this fictional account of William Walker’s invasion and takeover of Nicaragua in 1855, decided to treat it as a Western. That any serious reader ever discovered the book after that was close to miraculous, and any fan of Westerns would have given up after finding it had nothing to do with sheriffs and cowboys.

Neumann himself faded from critical and popular attention even before the book was published. Once considered an equal of Arnold Zweig and Hermann Broch, Neumann saw his star peak in the late 1920s. His medieval tale of courtly intrigue, The Devil, was a best-seller in the U.S. and Ernst Lubitsch directed an Oscar-nominated film of his play, “The Patriot”.

Within a few years, however, he found himself worse off than when he started. His magnum opus, a trilogy about the life of Napoleon III, was panned by most critics as overwritten and tedious. His books were among the first to be banned by the Nazis, who also pressured Mussolini to force Neumann to leave Italy, where he had settled in the 1920s. Like Brecht, Mann, and other less famous German writers, he eventually found refuge in Hollywood, where he got occasional work as a screenwriter. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Story for “None Shall Escape” and his novel, The Six of Them, the earliest account of the White Rose resistance movement in Germany, was well received. But Neumann had little luck finding work or publishers from then on, and he died in 1952, a self-exile in Switzerland like Mann.

Influenced by Laurence Greene’s 1937 biography of Walker, The Filibuster, Neumann wrote Der Pakt quickly, hoping to regain his former popularity with German readers. While the novel failed to win more than passable sales, its narrative and style clearly benefits from Neumann’s haste. In contrast to his rather verbose historical novels of the late 1920s and 1930s, in Strange Conquest Neumann’s writing is lean, fast-moving, and, at points, almost telegraphic in its brevity.

Yet he manages to squeeze an almost panoramic view of Walker’s career into less than 200 pages. Much of the novel is related in vignettes of three to five pages, most of them dramatic set-pieces like the retreat of Walker and his 36 men from their abortive attempt to form an abolitionist republic in Baja and Sonora, Mexico in 1853, or the destruction of Granada as Walker’s rule in Nicaragua collapses. Walker himself remains something of an enigma, yet Neumann manages to suggest how the appeal of power ultimately led Walker to turn from abolitionist to dictator, even reinstating slavery in an attempt to maintain his power.

Neumann also sketches in a wide cast of supporting players, from his officers–an idealistic socialite from San Francisco, a gambler of murky French origin, a Prussian baron–to the scoundrels and saintly figures he encounters in Nicaragua. One might go so far as to argue than Strange Conquest prefigures the magical realist style of later Latin American novelists such as Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa. Take the author’s name and date of publication off Strange Conquest and it could easily be taken as the work of one of their contemporaries. Whatever the case, it certainly deserves a better fate than to be lost forever in mouldering stacks of Westerns in a few scattered bookstores in the U.S..

In Print?

Strange Conquest, by Alfred Neumann
New York: Ballantine Books, 1954