284 Reviews ofCoffee (I941), though now almost forgotten, she enjoyed a very successful writing career. Lilo Linke also had a successful professional career, though her best-seller Restless Flags: A German Girl's Story (1935) iSnow also virtually forgotten.To a certain extent Georg Tabori's firstEnglish-language novel, the thrillerBeneath the Stone theScorpion (I945), has also faded from literary memory and it ishis contro versial plays, such as The Cannibals (i 968), which are remembered. Brunnhuber rounds offher studywith thoughts on the adoption by thesewriters in exile of theEnglish language and popular literaryforms such as thedetective storyand the romance. Clearly language-switching occurred not simply because publication in German was virtually impossible or because thewriters wished to demonstrate a pro-British and anti-Fascist stance. German-language writers found theycould com municate their positive and negative feelings about exile and theirhost land in their English-language novels.What they riskedwas being written out ofmost literaryhis tories.Brunnhuber's study convinces one that these translinguals, male and female, deserve tobe remembered. This is a veryworthwhile rescue operation. INSTITUTE OF GERMANIC AND ROMANCE STUDIES, LONDON J.M. RITCHIE Kitsch & Kunst: Presentations of a Lost War. By MAGGIE SARGEANT. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2005. 275 PP. ?32; SwF 71; E48.90. ISBN 978-3-039IO 512-0. This book shows how West German novelists represented the Second World War, and explores the implications of their reception, highlighting complex issues still associated with Vergangenheitsbewdltigung.By bringing togetherworks byAlfred An dersch, Heinrich Bo11,Hans Hellmut Kirst, Heinz G. Konsalik, TheodorPlievier, and Erich Maria Remarque, the author emphasizes the importance of their classification as eitherKitsch or Kunst, yet in the concluding remarks she claims: 'The strategies which writers have developed toengage with thepast cannot be distinguished by their classification asKitsch orKunst' (p. 25 I). The reader deduces that a snappy titlehas been used toevaluate texts that in factare associated primarily by theirsubject-matter. Problems faced by theGerman soldier and officer,both at the frontand at home, and links between theNational Socialist regime and theGerman army,provide amainly sociological study, backed up by comments on the use of narrative techniques. The problems of guilt forwar emerge clearly on the different levels of the general, the victim soldier, and theNational Socialist regimewith itsprofessional murderers. Behind underlying critical voices about some of thebooks lurks theirown sense of guilt, and the author iskeen to assert the legacy of this in reactions to contemporary issues. Her reassessment of each individual writer provides new slants on theirwork, although Konsalik emerges again as different because of his crass alignment to the demands of the time ofwriting, a clear sign that awork's popularity may say nothing about its literaryvalue. There is much healthy cynicism in the analyses of theseworks, backed up by sensible awareness of thedevelopment of historical background in their reception. Situations in thenovels themselves, seen historically, also reveal incomplete awareness, sometimes deliberate, but often the result of limited perspectives. Where individual soldiers inwar can be excused theirmyopia, the blindness ofwriters and the reading public in retrospect needs correction. This study opens readers' eyes to such issues beyond superficial reception. Roderick Watt's article on B6ll is mentioned twice in thebibliography, but not Brian Murdoch's much-read edition ofRemarque's ImWesten nichts Neues (London: Methuen, I984). MELLEN UNIVERSITY, IOWA BRIAN KEITH-SMITH ...
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