Killing Time

From its unification in 1871 until its comprehensive defeat in 1945, Germany was the most bellicose and nationalistic of modern countries. Nowadays it seems just about the most reliably pacific and cosmopolitan. Yet the image of the German has hardly changed over a century and more. Aren't the Germans neat, correct, industrious, pedantic and a trifle over-respectful of authority? And doesn't their apparent humorlessness entitle us to laugh at them? Germany under Hitler indulged, to the point of genocide, a weakness for generalizing about other peoples. Our small revenge is to exempt the Germans from our usual strictures and to feel fine generalizing a little about them.

Besides, it's hard not to think about the Germans as such. The unequaled dimensions of the Second World War, the remarkable extent of both German culture and German barbarism, the special evil of the Holocaust, followed by the postwar economic miracle, and finally even the stupendous excellence of German cars and coffee makers--all of these make the Germans seem, against our better judgment, a kind of magical, symbolic people. We wonder what about them is unique, what if anything specifically German.

The question has preoccupied Walter Abish more than most. As a Jew who with his parents made a timely escape from Austria in the late 1930s, Abish has had his life shaped by a country he had, until mid-life, never visited. It was Germany that sent his family fleeing from Vienna to Nice to wartime Shanghai and then to Tel Aviv. In Double Vision, Abish alternates memories of this scattered exile with an account of his narrowing approach to Vienna, in 1982, by way of several German cities: As the narrative is structured, he gets closer and closer to home at the same time that he is getting farther and farther away. Abish would like to know who the Germans are or were to have had such a decisive effect on his life. He would also like to know who his parents were to have made him who he is. One effect of this scrupulous memoir is to suggest that the importance of these questions adds nothing to their answerability.

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