Books: Germans Against the Wall

THE DANCING BEAR (246 pp.)—Frances Faviell—Norton ($3.50).

ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT (200 pp.) —Heinrlch Böll—Holt ($3).

For most West Germans, the struggle back to prosperity has been a dramatic success, though for all of them it was grim. Along the way, many despaired and died without lament. Two good new books on Germany, one fact, the other fiction, lament those Germans who went to the wall. The books share a common theme: courage and tragedy.

Resistance in Berlin. In The Dancing Bear, a warmhearted but coolheaded account of how Berlin rose from its ashes, Frances Faviell, wife of a British occupation officer, describes how the cold war tore one German family apart. The author met her heroine, Frau Maria Altmann, when the old German lady, who was pushing a handcart piled high with furniture, collapsed in the street. By her own admission, Author Faviell had gone to Germany “wanting vengeance,” but in Frau Altmann’s lined face she saw a quiet human courage that made vengeance seem irrelevant. For the next three years—through a nightmare of cold and hunger, riots, kidnapings and the ever-present Communist pressure—the Englishwoman played guardian angel to the Altmann family.

Herr Oskar Altmann, a stiff-backed Prussian of the old school, and his wife were prim and proper Berliners who suffered privation in silence but protested peevishly against such innovations as lipstick and slacks, which they thought “incorrect.” Elder son Kurt was dead or a prisoner in Russia; Fritz, the younger boy, was a good-for-nothing young Nazi who had once betrayed his parents to the Gestapo and who soon would betray them again. Author Faviell’s favorites were the two Altmann girls, as different as flesh and fire. Ursula, the pretty one, had been raped by a band of Russians, though it probably was not the first time; Lilli, fair and delicate (“probably the only virgin . . . in Berlin,” observed sister Ursula), was an exquisite little ballet dancer with eyes “almost violet blue.”

Through the winter of ’46, when babies were wrapped in newspapers and thousands of Berliners froze to death, the Altmanns survived (though they would not admit it even to themselves) on the proceeds of Fritz’s black-marketeering, on Frances Faviell’s charity and on Ursula’s sex appeal. Then Fritz fell afoul of the West Berlin police and fled to the Communists. Old Herr Altmann died, and shortly afterwards, Lilli collapsed while dancing. Though her mother would not believe it, frail little Lilli had had an abortion. She died murmuring “Vova,” the nickname of some unknown Russian.

When Ursula and her G.I. lover got married and sailed away, Frau Altmann refused to go with them, because “I belong in Berlin.” By her stubborn, unheroic courage, this old lady reduced the cold war to the commonplace. But in 1949 the best of the Altmanns died of lung cancer.

Ruins in the Ruhr. The strength—and the weakness—of Author Faviell’s book is that it is written by a sensitive foreigner who was touched by Berlin’s sorrow without fully sharing it. Heinrich Böll, by contrast, knows the inwardness of his people’s sorrow—and only the inwardness. In Acquainted with the Night, Author Böll plucks three days from the life of Fred Bogner, a switchboard operator who has been drifting through the ruins of the Ruhr, drinking and playing pinball ever since he returned from the Russian front.

Bogner, at 43, finds his home smashed (two babies died in a rat-infested cellar), his will to work gone sour. He leaves his wife and remaining children because there is literally no room for him in their miserable one-room apartment. But after 15 years of marriage, Fred and Kate Bogner have become a habit with each other. Against a backdrop of Rhineland prosperity, symbolized by a convention of German druggists, Fred borrows enough money to rent a cheap hotel room so that he and his wife can meet without the children seeing or the neighbors listening in.

Böll’s picture of the Ruhr reeks of human ruin. Its smells jar the senses; its sounds are grotesque. Böll writes with simple beauty, but often he treats despair with that detailed evenness that the dull st of The New Yorker writers apply to domestic crises in suburban Connecticut. And sometimes Author Böll’s sense of the macabre runs amuck. As Kate tells Fred that she is pregnant again, the druggists outside the hotel are applauding a flight of small planes that drop contraceptive ads followed by red rubber toy storks with broken necks.

Böll contrives what, for him, is a happy ending. Fred Bogner goes back to his cramped home. But there is no real relief, for, like his hero, Author Böll is apparently determined to go on suffering, even though the need for it may have passed.