Books: Common Murderer

A CHILD OF OUR TIME—Odon von Horvath—Dial ($2).

When Odon von Horvath was killed in Paris last year—a falling chestnut tree struck him as he sauntered along the Champs Elysees—he had written a prize play, two short novels, The Age of the Fish and A Child of Our Time. These had given him a European reputation as one of the most gifted German writers of his generation. That reputation was confirmed by most U. S. critics last February with the English translation of The Age of the Fish, a poetic, Dostoevskian Goodbye, Mr. Chips, in which a young German schoolmaster discovers the maggots in Nazi morality.

A Child of Our Time tells a no less timely story. Central character is a young Nazi lance-corporal, for whom the Nazi slogan, “The individual doesn’t count,” is not merely a slogan but a true observation based on his pre-Hitler, threadbare misery. “With love, a man may reach heaven,” he quotes. “With hatred,” he adds, “we shall go farther.”

Over the rest of the story hangs a question mark that may decide von Horvath’s insight as a novelist of his time: How prophetic is the lance-corporal’s gradual disillusionment with the Nazi creed? First crack in his faith comes during an undeclared war on “a weak, incompetent nation, with a deplorable system of government.” Wounded and permanently disabled while trying to save his captain under machine-gun fire, he discovers that the captain deliberately committed suicide in preference to looting, shooting prisoners, bombing women, children, wounded. When Nazi indifference to individuals robs him of a girl, his mind is coldly, bitterly lucid: murder comes easy. Afterwards he slumps to a park bench, a “funny little sentence” running through his head: “At the beginning of a new age, angels stand in the silent darkness—angels with dim eyes and fiery swords.” He wakes to find himself covered with snow, and a child runs up crying that he is a snowman. Thinks he: “And you’ll grow up, and you’ll remember the soldier. . . . Your children will tell you that this soldier was a common murderer —but don’t revile him. Just think, how could he help himself? He was a child of his time.”