Books: The Quality of Her Truth

THE GIFT HORSE by Hildegard Knef. Translated from the German by David Cameron Palastanga. 384 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

Huge kudu eyes, wide, hungry mouth, bullfrog-in-a-barrel baritone: Hildegard Knef came sauntering out of rubbled Berlin to become an international star —for the U.S. a sexy fraulein figure renamed Hildegarde Neff, for Germany a second and more controversial Dietrich. And here it is: the expectable show biz autobiography. But not the predictable boredom: The Gift Horse sold 300,000 copies in Germany. Like Puccini’s Tosca, Hilde Knef has lived for art and love, but like Brecht’s Ginny Jenny she now casts a cold eye on her follies and grandeur. Don’t expect gossip, though. Knef writes as she acts, with reckless vitality, and her book has all the choke-ups, flounderings and magnificent surprises of a great tirade.

In the first hundred pages. Author Knef has a Hitlerian horror story to tell. At 19, politically no more sophisticated than any other shoemaker’s daughter, the little cow jumped over the moon for an all-out Nazi film director named Ewald von Demandowsky. When the Russians reached Berlin, Hilde wangled a machine gun and some grenades and followed him to the front disguised as a soldier. Her account of what happened is a phantasmagoric exercise in battle reportage.

Driven back steadily from cellar to shed to ditch to ruin, her unit was chopped from 30 to five. She heard women screaming just across the road as the Russians raped them during the height of the battle, saw an arm floating magically through the air with no person attached to it, watched in horror as a chicken cautiously circled the corpse of a child and prepared to peck the eyes out. A bullet nicked her; an exploding shell blasted her senseless. Von Demandowsky was a married man, but as the world broke up around them, the lovers in a final grand romantic gesture persuaded an officer to marry them. After they were captured by the Russians, Hilde escaped at the insistence of her “husband” (he survived, but she never saw him again) and arrived in Berlin just in time to assist at the rebirth of the German theater. The costumes were so makeshift they fell off on the stage, the actors so ill the director had to call an intermission for vomiting. Hilde then starred in The Murderers Are Among Us, Germany’s first postwar film, and the same recklessness that had hurled her at the Russians propelled her across the sea to Hollywood.

She hated Locustland. Hated the habit of hype (“You’re gonna be the new Garbo”), the cult of cute (they tried to change her name to Gilda Christian) and the geniuses in silver ties. Her pages are blistered with portraits in epithet. Zanuck has his “beaver’s teeth pronged into a cigar.” Skouras is merely an “oxlike package, voice like a child’s rattle.” Louella Parsons is kissed off as “The Queen Mother at Toad Hall.” Marilyn Monroe, “a child with short legs and a fat bottom,” wonders innocently: “Who is Thomas Mann?”

What Else? Back in Germany, Hilde attained scarlet celebrity when she appeared briefly nude in The Sinner. Pulpits denounced her; restaurants emptied at her entrance; fetishists stole her underwear. In a crazed crowd a young man opened his trench coat and implored: “Please touch it just once, it’s my birthday.” Whipsawed by praise and blame, Hilde ran from film to film, affair to affair. But in 1962 she made a lasting marriage, and at 45 lives with her husband (David Cameron Palastanga, who translated her book into English) and their three-year-old daughter near Salzburg, Austria.

“Talent is a stipulation, it’s uninteresting,” a friend once told Author Knef. “The question must be: What else [have you] got?” Hilde Knef seems to have more of almost everything than a body needs in this world. More passion, more wit, more guts, more hate, more need. “The great film stars,” she writes, “rape their characters, requisition them and . . . reach the people with the extraordinary quality of their truth.” In this same fierce spirit Knef writes of her own life; often, in fact, the drubbing energy of her literary performance overwhelms her subject. But the extraordinary quality of her truth comes through. Under her mink she still carries that machine gun.

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