Word: asch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...RETURN OF GUNNER ASCH (310 pp.) _ Hans Hellmuf Kirst - Little, Brown...
...satire does not grow readily from Germany's heavy soil. One notable postwar exception is Forward, Gunner Asch! (TIME, Oct. 29), which aimed its laughter mostly at the petty tyrannies and tribulations of noncoms. Now another German satire boldly advances to spoof the other end of the Wehrmacht hierarchy. To General von Puckhammer, peace is a prelude to war, life a dress rehearsal for death. He regards a soldier's calling as holy, for he believes that God is a fellow Prussian. When his monocle glints, junior officers blanch. But just as no man is a hero...
Kirst's wry chronicle of the peacetime Wehrmacht was published in the U.S. as The Revolt of Gunner Asch (TIME, March 5). Forward, Gunner Asch! is sketched in the frame of the Russian front. But Author Kirst, who fought there, knows that a sense of the ridiculous is valid up to and including the front lines...
...Sergeant Asch never liked the army in peacetime, and he likes it even less in war. He is no hero, but he is something even better: an intelligent man who does his duty superlatively well. His instinctive dislike of Hitler and his works makes him no less the friend of his artillery unit commander, who stubbornly insists that the Fuhrer is infallible. When a martinet from the rear comes to take over the troop, Asch has a field day that a G.I. of any nationality can appreciate. It is the old story of the parade-ground perfectionist who simply cannot...
Forward, Gunner Asch! has its sententious anti-Hitlerism ("Yes, Lieutenant-a dishonorable war. Deliberately unleashed. Conducted with the methods of a pimp "), and a melodramatic love affair which features a class-C movie Russian Mata Hari who loves her German officer sincerely even as she betrays him. But its freewheeling candor is as engaging as it is un-Prussian. Even its most improbable episodes are edged with Soldier Kirst's knowledgeability, which consistently saves Novelist Kirst's neck...