Word: steinbaum
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...party, Steinbaum starts off strong, determined to resist any blandishments. When he meets his host, the German air marshal, he complains about the treatment of prisoners. The big, bluff marshal half admonishes, half humors the colonel, above all takes him into his confidence. The marshal, a kind of Hermann Göring character, exudes animal vitality, lives lustily and apologizes for nothing. He is engagingly frank with Steinbaum: "I don't see anything but beasts, scrapping and clawing each other from the beginning of time. I neither invent another world that isn't there...
...Colonel Steinbaum is a humanitarian. He works for the Third Reich, but he hates it. For one thing, his Jewish mistress has been hauled off to prison. For another, he is sickened by the brutality at the concentration camp where he is stationed. Steinbaum is on the verge of joining an anti-Nazi conspiracy when he makes the mistake of going to a party held by a high Nazi official in an elegant château. The symbol of Nazi Germany, Author von Abele suggests, is not an armed camp or an insane asylum but this grand, lurid party...
...Steinbaum is too fascinated with the marshal to tear himself away from the party. Can the marshal be as bad as he is pictured? Can he be held responsible for the concentration camp? Steinbaum craves reassurance from the marshal, as if he cannot attack the marshal without asking his permission. By the evening's end, Steinbaum is hopelessly in bondage to a personality much stronger than...
When the marshal wanders off to bed, Steinbaum tries to salvage some self-esteem by seducing the marshal's 22-year-old mistress. But it is she who brutally seduces him. "Now here you are," she tells him, "and you aren't Papa, and I don't need to be afraid of my position with you, so I use you a little, I play with you." Just so has she played with all the marshal's flunkies, as if she were the marshal's accomplice in debasing them. In the grey, foggy dawn, Steinbaum staggers...
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