Word: kirst
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BROTHERS IN ARMS by Hans Hellmut Kirst. 384 pages. Harper...
...Gunner Asch tetralogy, West German Novelist Hans Hellmut Kirst explored the soldier's life in Hitler's Wehrmacht, in which he himself had served twelve years, and found a simple point: a dogface is a dogface, even under the sign of the swastika. Asch was a universal type, a latter-day Good Soldier Schweik, the goof-off who confounds every military system...
Having succeeded with satire, Kirst has now joined many of his fellow writers in the thriving literary guilt business. He lectures his German readers on their inexpiable wartime sins. His psychological thriller, The Night of the Generals, made into a poor movie (TIME, Feb. 10), was sharpened with moral indignation at the Nazi officer class, which served as Kirst's human symbol for German inhumanity during World War II. Like the earlier book, the present Brothers in Arms also has two levels, one occupied by Kirst's story, the other by his sermon...
...Night of the Generals is a murky mystery story of Nazi Germany. Based on a novel by Hans Hellmut Kirst, the film focuses on three officers who were involved in the abortive 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. One of them is also a latter-day Hans the Ripper who murders and mutilates a prostitute. After the three comes Major Grau (Omar Sharif), an intelligence officer whose magnificent obsession is justice. Outranked by the generals and outflanked by the Allies, he is determined that in the midst of the war's mass murders the wanton killing of one innocent woman...
...survive in Hitler's army, as Hans Hellmut Kirst explained in his Gunner Asch trilogy, was to play the old army game. Now he explains how to survive in the new German army. Same way, but with a difference. Readers of the trilogy were amused to discover that Hitler's Wehrmacht had a silly side. The Bundeswehr, on the other hand, seems distant and dull...