Word: buchheim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Boat, Buchheim...
MacDonald (6) 10-The Boat, Buchheim...
Literary Gimbals. Lothar-Günther Buchheim served on U-boats as a documentary journalist working for the Nazi government. Now the author resurrects that darkly romantic image in a novel that two years ago was a controversial bestseller in Germany. Whatever Buchheim's intention, his commander, a dour 30-year-old invariably referred to as the Old Man, comes off as the foreman of a band of master plumbers who seem to spend most of their time wrapped around greasy tubing talking about their alley-cat sex lives...
...soldier as a morally lobotomized professional is a familiar 20th century item. Indeed, pride in professionalism has too often become the true refuge of the scoundrel. Yet Buchheim skillfully dodges these issues by casting his book as documentary, fly-on-the-wall fiction. Its amount of factual authenticity about the 220-ft. submarine and its innards is mesmerizing. Technical data about pressure hulls, diesel engines, electric motors, torpedoes and underwater navigation form a web of fascinating distraction. The incessant diving, ogling of manometers and Papenberg gauges, and the flooding and blowing of ballast tanks run like a litany throughout...
...Writes Buchheim: "Attack so as not to be destroyed. 'Submit to the inevitable,' seems to be his motto." In truth, the Old Man's fatalism seems more than a bit ersatz. He never talks politics, but he openly derides the martial rhetoric of his Nazi superiors. The impression left is that if the stuff turned out by Jo seph Goebbels' propaganda ministry read more like Joseph Conrad, the Old Man would have more happily embraced the inevitable...