Books: Preposterous Preview

PHANTOM VICTORY—Erwin Lessner—Putnam ($2.50). “The curtain falls,” said the German chief of staff to the assembled generals, “but the play is not over. . . . The National Socialist era … was just an episode in the life of our nation. . . . You will discard your uniforms, [but] may I add that politics is a continuation of war by other means?”

How the Wehrmacht continued World War II by other means is the theme of this novel by Austrian-born Erwin Lessner. Author Lessner, 46, is an anti-Nazi from way back. For years he kept a jump ahead of the Gestapo in Berlin, Czechoslovakia and Denmark. Trapped in Norway in 1940, he was “questioned” by the Gestapo for 35 days; it was seven months before he was able to walk again. In 1941 he managed to reach the U.S. Phantom Victory is partly ferocious satire, partly deadly earnest foreboding, but throughout it proclaims Author Lessner’s ruthlessly simple conviction : “I say that Germany should be destroyed.”

As Lessner tells it, defeated Germany’s main weapon was confusion. Overnight the Wehrmacht was dissolved ; not a single officer remained to offer Germany’s “unconditional surrender.” But veterans popped up again in strange places, such as the Brandenburg Canoe Club and the Association of Prussian Stamp Collectors. Nazi leaders vanished. The result of the long-awaited trial of German war criminals was: five Germans convicted of rape, four of cruelty to animals, five of reckless driving in congested areas. Countries ravaged by Hitler demanded the return of their looted property. They got it promptly: Austria received 198,371 Tyrolean hats, Russia got 16 Ukrainian ikons, France 1,835 empty champagne bottles and a heap of silk stockings full of runs.

Meanwhile, the German populace played dumb, made life hell for A.M.G. by ignoring its directives. While Japan held out in the east, German statesmen played one Ally against another, set up stooge “agencies” in Spain and Argentina. They even got permission to manufacture arms—ostensibly for Allied use against Japan, for which they were paid in gold from Fort Knox. Finally, they united under the führership of a shepherd named Friedolin, who lived simply in the mountains with two canaries and no plumbing and swore to lead his German flock to salvation through penance. U.S. and British citizens were deeply touched.

Millions of Germans learned penitential drills and marches, made penitential trips abroad. Soon Chief Penitent Friedolin’s “Shepherd’s Council” included a “Shepherd for Aviation” and a number of “Shepherds Without Crooks” — all veterans of World War II. Penitent Hjalmar Schacht became “Shepherd for Finance” — and soon Russia went bankrupt and there was no gold left in Fort Knox.

By 1951 the German navy was as large as the U.S.’s. Shepherd Friedolin began to talk about “the extension of our pastures.” In 1955 continental Europe and Asia, including Russia, became German colonies. In 1960 Britain, charged with molesting a group of visiting penitents under 14 years of age, was quickly subjugated. The same year Friedolin (now revealed as a onetime general in the Wehrmacht) landed an irresistible flock in Manhattan, “this city which from today shall be named Greater Yorkville!”

Author Lessner is an angry man. His fate, is likely to be that the public, with a good deal of justification, will find him simply hilarious. Führer Friedolin and his penitents, in fact, are fully as preposterous as Adolf Hitler and his Brown Shirts seemed to sensible men a decade or so ago.