Word: asch
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...RETURN OF GUNNER ASCH (310 pp.) _ Hans Hellmuf Kirst - Little, Brown...
...only the lucky who live. Some men, without being cowards, display an extraordinary knack for survival. Such a one is Gunner Herbert Asch, the fictional Wehrmacht veteran who for six years of World War II managed to escape the enemy's bullets and the stupidity of his own commanders. Asch survived, not as the anvil survives the hammer, but as a nimble, highly intelligent fly eludes the clumsy hand that would kill it. For Asch is a true operator, a hepcat of war who knows every nuance of the dance of death and leaves it to the squares...
Strummed Zither. This novel is the last of a fast-moving, often hilarious trilogy (The Revolt of Gunner Asch, TIME, March 5, 1956; Forward, Gunner Asch! TIME, Oct. 29) that carries its hero from his home town in Germany to the depths of Russia and back again. It opens in the war's last days as Germany is crushed between East and West. Asch, who has risen from the ranks to become a lieutenant of artillery, is part of a disorganized unit surrounded by U.S. troops. A stray Nazi colonel named Hauk and his sinister aide, Lieut. Greifer, order...
...follows is a competent black-market thriller which lacks only the zither-strumming of The Third Man. A secret is beaten out of a stubborn woman; a doublecrosser is shot dead in a forest; a valuable convoy of goods is lost, found, lost again. Throughout this tapestry of violence, Asch and his "good" operators -Kowalski, Stamm, Soeft-match wits with the "bad" operators, Hauk and Greifer. Both sides use the naive U.S. occupation forces for their own purposes, and Asch and company even capture a prisoner-of-war camp from its U.S. guards in order to kill the villainous Hauk...
...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...