Books: German Conscience

UNQUIET NIGHT (122 pp.)—Albrechf Goes—Houghfon Mifflin ($2.25).

“Heil Hitler, padre! . . . Let’s skip all the phony piety, shall we? When a man deserts he’s asking for all he gets . . . The rest is up to the firing squad. Victory will go to the strong, and the Fiihrer has no time for yellowbellies.”

To the troubled Protestant army chaplain, hard-bitten Major Kartuschke’s bluster, meant only one thing—another German had chloroformed his conscience. In twelve hours, one of Major Kartuschke’s prisoners—21-year-old Lance Corporal Fedor Baranowski—would be shot by a firing squad. Curiosity and compassion impelled the chaplain to find out why. Through a long, anguished night, he wrestled with a stack of court-martial papers.

Corporal Baranowski was guilty enough, but the crime he should have been tried for, as the chaplain saw it, was love. Stationed in the Ukraine, the lonely corporal had become passionately fond of a young Russian widow, Liuba, innocently tipped her off on the moves his outfit made. Condemned to a penal company, he had given his guards the slip, been recaptured and sentenced to death.

While the chaplain puzzles out his last words of comfort to Baranowski, he feels prickles of remorse tingling in the moral numbness around him. A cell guard speaks to the condemned man in kindly words, a clerk smothers an obscene joke, finally the lieutenant in charge of the firing squad offers to disobey his orders. The result, the chaplain sadly reminds him, would be the same: a more inhumane officer would take his place. “Do evil in order to avoid greater evil, is that what you’re getting at?” asks the lieutenant. “Are we any better than the Kartuschkes and their like?” “Perhaps,” the chaplain answers, “the difference lies in this, that we never, not. even for a single hour, call evil good.”

As execution time nears, the chaplain writes a letter to Liuba for the quivering Baranowski. He assures the deserter “that eternal love does not refuse him whom this world thrusts out,” helps him stumble awkwardly through the Lord’s Prayer, gives him the courage to stand erect until the firing squad cuts him down.

A German of obvious good will, author and clergyman Albrecht Goes (himself a chaplain in World War II) seems more at home with a podium under foot than a pen in hand. His “good German” chaplain is a preachy bore who loves Beethoven and quotes Goethe, thrills to the “knightly shimmer” of a dashing captain headed for certain death at Stalingrad. But if Hitler’s Germany had had the same ratio of soul-searching Hamlets as Unquiet Night, the Fiihrer’s Wehrmacht would have been reduced to a hard core of about a platoon.