There is no native American but the redskin; we others are something else at a slight remove, which cannot be changed; our names and looks and surely some complexion of the corpuscles themselves are to some old line peculiar, else we should blow away without identity. So Reinhart believed.¹

To praise a novel as national or universal in its appeal is, of course, the conventional way to make a claim for the range and endurance of its meanings; whereas to call it by some regional or ethnic name constitutes just as obviously a smaller estimate of its significance. So I preface my reading of Thomas Berger’s first novel as the richly comic extension of a German-American literary tradition that includes Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and Ruth Suckow’s Country People (1924) with a few distinctions meant to suspend, at least for the space of my reading, so arbitrary and overly simple a judgment of ethnic writing.

Crazy in Berlin (1958) is not by another of the Jewish-American writers who gained prominence in the 1950s, although some of its early readers may have supposed that it was; it is the work of a German-American. Berger’s unmistakably deep sense of compound nationality doubtless has behind it a long and complicated history of feeling foreign in America and Germany—and yet somehow at home in both places as well. In its general outlines, such a life is common to all hyphenated Americans; but the qualia of each ethnic community’s experience come to embody something like species of a generic foreignness, making each immigrant tradition unique in important respects. Such lives contain resonances that will elude even the most acutely sensible of outside observers. Despite their ethnic subject matter, neither G. W. Cable’s Old Creole Days (1879) nor Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918) is really ethnic literature. In both it is place that matters most and is so brilliantly evoked, not a specifically ethnic sensibility through which events are given their special character. Clearly, good books about an ethnic-group experience in America have been written by non-group members like Cather and Cable; and writers from the immigrant communities have sometimes written non-ethnic books. Nevertheless, a useful distinction may be drawn between the author of a novel about a German-American who is what he writes about and the author who is not, although it cannot be assumed that the book issuing from ethnic experience

itself—as opposed to observation of it—will be the better one. Further, any labeling of a writer’s work must be partial, must be qualified and expanded when measured against all that it purports to describe. Shifts in a writer’s public and fictive lives, motives, and contemplated readership inevitably alter his style and angle of vision. Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt derive ultimately from related events in Dreiser’s early life, but only the latter took the form of an ethnic novel through Dreiser’s detailed emphasis upon the deficits accruing to Jennie from her membership in an impoverished, fragmented, and socially inferior immigrant family. Similarly, Crazy in Berlin and Neighbors (1980) proceed alike from a moral intelligence continually at war with most of human nature and nearly all of modernity; but the label "black humorist" so often applied to Berger is more applicable to the author of Neighbors than it is to the muted idealist who has faithfully summoned Carlo Reinhart into being. Like Dreiser before him, Berger is an ethnic American who has written both ethnic and non-ethnic stories, as well as stories only incidentally or impurely ethnic.

If certain of Berger’s comedies have not been generally perceived as ethnic literature, that is surely not because he has masked their ethnicity. It is the case, rather, that German-American writing seems not to be one of the commanding or urgent categories of American ethnic literature, if one may judge from contemporary anthologies and scholarship. With the exception of Dreiser’s humorous dialect story "Old Rogaum and His Theresa," I find no German-American writing in the ethnic anthologies. And Wayne C. Miller’s Comprehensive Bibliography for the Study of American Minorities (1976) mystifyingly omits from its short list of German-American writers any reference to such valuable work as the Jacoby’s Corners pastorals of Jake Falstaff and the popular dialect verses of Kurt M. Stein. Since the Germans were among the largest and most literate of America’s immigrant communities and possessed the most extensive immigrant press, it seems odd that more attention has not been given to the German-American literary tradition.

Perhaps this virtual disappearance of the Germans from contemporary surveys of American ethnic writing reflects the fact that, like other participants in the pre-1880 "older" emigration from Western Europe, they have been sufficiently assimilated into mainstream working-class and middle-class culture to no longer register convincingly as an ethnic community. For example,

Reinhart’s parents (in Reinhart in Love [1962] and Vital Parts [1970]) and Dolph Beeler (in The Feud [1983]) betray in a steady flow of malapropisms not the confusions of their German-speaking parents or grandparents but the semi-literacy of rural midwestern tradesmen and mechanics. German only in their names and in vague family memories, they are by all outward signs small-town American proletarians. Moreover, the diligence, thrift, and formidable intellectual traditions of the Germans surely earned them prompt acceptance as successful American farmers, businessmen, and professionals.

But even this "older" immigration achieved something less than the full assimilation early envisioned by American nativists. Ethnicity survives the loss of distinctive language, customs, and culture in the second and third immigrant generations; for, as Glazer and Moynihan have noted, ethnic groups "are continually recreated by new experiences in America."² For example, the wartime hatred of Germans, which reached one climax in the hysteria of 1917–1918 and another with the concentration-camp discoveries of 1945, brought the experience of being a German-American closer to that of the "newer" immigrants, the Southern and Eastern Europeans and the Asians whose vast admissions beginning about 1880 aroused so many misgivings about foreigners in America.³

Reinhart has grown up between the wars, when "nobody, least of all the boys of German stem, served willingly on the Kaiser’s side in war games" (p. 31). An imaginative boy, he finds in his grandfather’s German origins—preserved only in a letter from Berlin and a book of Nuremberg scenes redolent of medieval times—a desirable alternative to "ugly-dull" suburban Ohio. He sadly finds nothing to appropriate from his parents’ vacant and defeated lives, nothing of value transmitted through them to him. Thus, he is culturally starved and anomic, a classical third-generation product of assimilation in his sense of loss and consequent reaching back to an ancestral tradition. Fair and blonde, his size and strength are also—by association with his grandfather—confirmations of his older nationality. He chooses the more European weightlifting over American football as his high school sport, and dreamily pursues the study of German at college. When he reaches Berlin as a twenty-one-year-old corporal in the Army of Occupation, Reinhart is overwhelmed by "the sheer grandeur of his geographical position" and concludes that "if he had any structure beneath the meretricious American

veneer, it was one he shared with" his German relatives (pp. 5, 66).

However, if at home he is not a genuine American but, rather, "a good, sturdy German type (as evidenced by his consumption of German potato salad with vinegar, German cole slaw with bacon grease, German coffee cake with butter-lakes, residence in a German bill-paying home, and the observation that he was going to be a big German like his grandfather), Reinhart soon recognizes that in his "ancient homeland" too he is "something different" (p. 15). Accordingly, he acquires a singularly complicated awareness of what it means to be a reflective third-generation German-American in the aftermath of the second World War. He knows that one may be a native-born, English-speaking American citizen and yet be despised as a German; and he learns that one may be German in physical attributes and ancestry and yet remain an ineluctably American outsider fatally incapable of distinguishing the fake from the real in Berlin.

"Something different" in Germany as well as in America, Reinhart nevertheless cleaves to both. Although he is at home "as nowhere else" in the "splendid, dear, degrading society" of U.S. Army billets, a community "grounded on common inconvenience" (p. 304) and therefore suitably emblematic of social intermingling throughout America, he feels no less at home in the Bachs’ damp cellar apartment where decency obscurely survives in over-civilized, ingeniously oblique arguments whose "every word, every nuance" Reinhart felt he understood, although in his Ohio college he had "almost flunked German 2" (p. 345). Holding fast to both worlds, he can be surprisingly tolerant even of their representative scoundrels. Through an ionized mixture of sympathy and satire, Reinhart acknowledges the shallowness of such American dreams as Lieutenant Harry Pound’s vision of a used-car dealership as the key to a golden post-war life in Los Angeles. Similarly, with every allowable charity, and a final qualified acceptance, he depicts an infinitely more dangerous German survival artist, the metamorphic Schatzi.

There is a beast, however, that haunts these explorations of the German in the American, the American in the German manqué. Whether at home or in Berlin, Reinhart cannot escape the nearly universal identification of the word German with "a kind of foulness" (p. 15). Characteristically reluctant to injure anyone himself, he is hurt by the use of the word German as

a synonym for unfeeling brutality. "I’m sick of being made to feel a swine because I’m of German descent," he angrily responds to his inimical friend, the Jewish-American Nathan Schild (p. 365). And he is obviously bothered by the unhesitating "liberal" opinion that Germans are inherently tyrannical, militaristic, suicidal, irresponsible, and mad (pp. 46–48). Such categorical hatred, no matter how over-generalized, obliges Reinhart to confront more truthfully the identity he seeks to repossess, the identity lodged perhaps in the very complexion of his corpuscles. A large part of Reinhart’s "craziness" in Berlin is provoked by his awakening from an adolescent dream of German history "to see the terrible landscape of actuality" (p. 47).

In Berlin, he "at last understood that the complement to his long self-identification with Germanness had been a resolve never to know the German actuality" (p. 176). Here Reinhart learns to feel intermittent loathing for his German self but, simultaneously, to hate the experience of being stupidly hated as a brutal Kraut. The cruelly unfair experience of being hated abstractly, without regard either to his personal deserts or to that humanely Enlightened part of the German mind embodied in Frederick the Great and in Goethe, gives Reinhart his special relation to other ethnics similarly burdened. His attraction to Nathan Schild and, later in the "Reinhart" tetralogy, to Black-American Splendor Mainwaring and his son, does not arise from "liberal" piety, for which he feels only contempt. It comes from a suffering not the same as theirs but proximate, and it is expressed not guiltily but unsentimentally and sometimes comically.

In the densely plotted and sub-plotted Crazy in Berlin, the central pairing is Reinhart with the Communist "traitor" Schild. Given the novel’s publication in 1958 when Jewish-American sensitivity to criticism was especially high (owing, for example, to the trial of the Rosenbergs and the resulting linkage of Jewish political liberalism with treason), Berger could hardly have assumed a greater risk of being misunderstood than he did in having the story turn ironically upon his searching comparison of a thoroughly decent German-American "mensch" and an arrogantly ineffectual Jewish-American traitor. Contrary to the reader’s expectations, it is Schild who is the class-conscious officer demanding the respect due to rank, while Reinhart is the enlisted man with a strong instinct for democratic fellowship. They are both the children of foreigners in America and both speak German

(Schild far more fluently than Reinhart); but Reinhart sifts through the ruins of Berlin in order to confront the worst in his Germanness and to determine whether anything decent has survived the Reich, while Schild coldly denies his history to serve an abstract Communist future. Both are murderers; but the German has murdered with his bare hands to save a friend, the Jew by informing on a friend in a neurotic act of betrayal.

That they ultimately become friends tells us more about Reinhart than Schild. This German, ironically, is the man for whom Schild has been waiting all his life, the man who, knowing him Jewish, would be perfectly indifferent to the fact. It was an article of Schild’s Communist faith that in the future workers State "there will be no separation of one man from another" and that any means might justifiably be employed, any "decency violated to bring this new, undifferentiated man into being (pp. 201–204). Comically, when Lichenko enters Schild’s life as the first of these new men, he proves to be (as Schild early recognizes but cannot persuade himself to believe) a deserter from the Soviet army in flight from everything Russian Communism represents. He does not, in fact, treat Schild as a Jew; but his indifference, as Schild mordantly observes, is merely self-preoccupation:

In Lichenko’s egocentric vision he knew now that he had never been more, or less, than a host fat for the parasiting, a mere object, a thing to be used, not comrade nor ally, not even a man—and therefore not a Jew. (p. 202)

Reinhart, seemingly a parochial figure, is vastly more universal and catholic in outlook than Schild and other "liberal" intellectuals he encounters. His open fascination with the world in its full particularity is uncompromised by any ruling theory or impulse to exclude.

Reinhart’s way of addressing the question of anti-Semitism is the same as his method of questioning the existence of Buchenwald—of dealing with those Germans who murdered and those who could be bribed not to murder: "Facts must be faced" without resort either to the simplifying rhetoric that divides humanity into good men and bad or to such historical abstractions as "German militarism" and "international Jewry" (p. 67). He perceives in Berlin that SS men are not necessarily cowards and bullies "who will fight only someone weaker" and that blackmailers may display "a strange, mad kind of courage" (p. 177). In confronting "the German actuality," he saw that "Here all the known qualities of humanity had been united with their

contradictions" and, consequently, that "guilt could be confessed to only in a lie of the guiltless," i.e., in the rhetoric and abstractions of the oppressed (p. 178).

Those who have been victimized come to enjoy a kind of moral leverage, so that in time they assume—in their very desolation— a commanding position. Although certain that he could break Schild in two, Reinhart feels "vaguely afraid of him" (p. 119). Moreover, while he is clearly offended by Trudchen’s anti-Semitic outburst against Schild, Reinhart still recognizes, somewhat resentfully, the advantage of a two-thousand-year grievance in allowing one to feel sure that the burden of guilt always rests somewhere else (p. 129). This too is a fact that must be faced.

Schild conforms perfectly to Reinhart’s observation that "Jews are sometimes know-it-alls and their manners could stand improvement, but that doesn’t have anything to do with decency and is anyway a proof of their freedom" (p. 364). That is, it is true that Schild is an arrogant, untidy sectarian; but it is also true—and, for Reinhart, of far greater moment—that he finally reclaims his humanity from the Party and that he dies because he has turned his back on his adversary to save a friend. In Berger’s comedy of reversals, the German is the survivor, not the Jew, who dies trying to help the German.

Such complications of perspective may seem outrageous in their implied exculpation of evil, but the omniscient narrative focus of Crazy in Berlin is that of a moralist steadily opposing himself to hatred and cruelty in their myriad forms and opposing himself equally to any rush to judgment. It is evident that Reinhart genuinely admires and likes the Jews as much as any person may be said to like and admire an entire community, but the facts must still be faced: the anomalies of human behavior make moral determinations difficult and unreliable when one proceeds, as any good observer will, case by case. Reinhart’s running commentary on Jewishness, together with Bach’s brilliant monologue on Jewish-Gentile relations, reflects an insider’s knowledge of Jewish behavior; and the Berger papers in the Boston University Library demonstrate that he had studied Jewish "liberals" exhaustively before creating Nathan Schild and, indeed, before creating Reinhart, an "unusually observant" (p. 119) third generation German-American with exceptional empathy for those who are instantly perceived as Jewish or German before they are perceived as anyone else. When Reinhart observes that Schild

is the kind of Jew who made him feel responsible for having done something nasty which he had forgotten but the Jew had not and when this perception reminds him that "the other thing about Jews" is that "when they weren’t eying you with suspicion, they never saw you at all" (p. 118), we are in the presence of life observed and understood with an accuracy that is uncanny.

Nor have these complicating details obscured Reinhart’s other, and to him more important, perception that Schild is a "decent" human being who "had buried his humanness so deep that one could bring it to the surface only by outraging him" (p. 217). Berger’s satire is directed not at Jewishness but at the corrosive side of "liberal" attitudes and behavior. Indeed, the Stalinist mentality has never been more subtly examined. Berger is so much more interested in and appreciative of human differences than ethnic predecessors of his like Dreiser and Mencken that there is no trace in his work of the anti-Semitic impulse which is to be found in theirs.

It is as fitting as comic that Crazy in Berlin should begin with its hero’s unwitting performance of a gross act—"taking a leak" on a statue of Frederick the Great—that he knows to be a violation of decency when he discovers what he is doing even as he does it, for "decent" is Berger’s often repeated key word. Like the hedgehog of Archilochus, Reinhart knows "one big thing." Decency is his "single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that [he is and says] has significance."⁴ Bach somewhat ironically refers to the Americans as "one-hundred thirty millions of decent chaps" (p. 144), but means by that only that Americans are superficially affable or agreeable. Reinhart, however, makes decency his summarizing term for a small body of specific injunctions: a decent person does not hurt others, a decent person responds generously to others in need of help even when it is not expedient to help, and so on. He is deeply suspicious of easy "liberal" schemes for the transformation of individuals and their societies because he judges the problems and deficiencies of humanity to be unsolvable and unsuppliable by utopian means. Together with his belief in the persistence of specific identities ("our names and looks and surely some complexion of the corpuscles themselves are to some old line peculiar"), Reinhart believes only in "an idea of the possibility of simple decency (p. 48). Himself a manifestly decent person, he is saddened and occasionally made indignant by the indecencies of Germans and

Americans. But he also finds in both signs that nourish his faith in the "possibility of a simple decency."

Berger’s minimalist ethics grow out of his conviction that when the mystery is great and the creature limited, its equipment for living must be unambiguous enough to be grasped and applied, for this is a world in which "People from different countries really don’t understand each other" (p. 418). Like Henry James, Berger shows us a world filled with people from different backgrounds and places talking endlessly at cross-purposes. So, as against dialectics and apologetics and prolegomena to future apocalypses, Berger proposes a vocabulary of moral actions as profound as they are simple and communicable by gentle ways. Reinhart remembers his grandfather as "kindly" (p. 32), and tells his father—an inappropriate father to him in so many other ways— that he is "unique" because he has never been "mean," "false," or "cruel."⁵ In specific. terms, therefore, Reinhart’s ancestry has supplied him with an aversion to cruelty and a disposition to kindness that make him seem a fool and bumbler at times but that make him a saving human presence as well, if only through his inherent incapacity to take advantage of or to injure others.

Separated by so much else, Reinhart and Schild are drawn together powerfully by the simple recognition of their concern for each other. When Schild says that he interferes in Reinhart’s life simply because of friendship; Reinhart "dared not admit to himself how deeply he was touched," for he believes friendship the only good reason "for doing anything in the world" (p. 318). Although Reinhart and Schild share a common decency, Reinhart’s decency operates as his single all-comprehending principle, whereas Schild’s is at best a mediate virtue until the convulsive release of his humanity in the final episodes of the novel. His failure to understand at once Reinhart’s motives in seeking an abortionist for Veronica effectively measures the moral distance between the two at that point (p. 319).

Reinhart is Berger’s German-American embodiment of a homely, particularized idealism that turns away from what Marcus Klein has called the "terror beyond evil"⁶ and from depersonalized, formulaic political remedies for it toward simple acts of humanity and refusals to act inhumanely. The ambiguous ending of Crazy in Berlin is prefigured in Reinhart’s feelings toward Schild when he angrily takes him to be Veronica’s irresponsible secret lover and the heartless exploiter of a wretched former concentration-camp

camp prisoner. His heart tells him that, even if Schild had "raped Veronica and murdered Schatzi," he could not raise his hand against him. "Man, man," Reinhart thought, "one cannot live without pity" (p. 308). From this vantage point, it is possible to understand Reinhart’s sense of kinship to the medical officer "whose face was manifestly German-American," an honest if naive man expressing wonderment that murderous Nazis and Communists alike are "just fellows, people like anybody else in the beginning." This reflection, with its refusal to be vindictive or to hate oneself by association, fortifies Reinhart’s slender faith in the possibility of refraining from harming others. Reinhart will join neither the liberals nor the reactionaries, for he perceives that partisan loyalties inescapably undermine "the precious quality of humanness." Reinhart stood, therefore, "with the doctor, two dense and heavy light-complexioned oafs who saw the mellow where the bright boys detected the sinister" (pp. 244–245).

Like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Ralph Ellison, Berger knows that, after the unprecedented inhumanities revealed in 1945, "we are all on the edge of dissolution" and that, accordingly, "plain necessity" dictates that the human community must be made at least a bare possibility. Klein argues that such a making, however radically qualified, moves beyond alienation to celebration, to an affirmation of the possibility of "restoration and love" in at least the small, domestic details of life: the hope of the individual must be "to make and preserve," at least tentatively, "a home in this world. . . for lack of any better present possibility." Klein rightly notes that the "technical term" for this "mood" is comedy because, in pursuing "accommodation," a person "exercises his wits and thereby lives within his dilemma, and managing to live within it he proposes the possibility of living."⁷

It is in precisely this high, philosophical sense that Crazy in Berlin is most transcendently comic. Berger’s comedy is, of course, most evidently on display in his indefatigably fertile wordplay, as in his subtle use of class dialect and his rendering of German-English linguistic confusions. It is also conspicuous in his mockery of American provincialism and in his yet more savage ridicule of human meanness and low cunning on both sides of the Atlantic. But, most affectingly, Berger broadly exposes Reinhart to the antics of humanity—from Trudchen to Lori, from Schatzi to Bach and Doctor Knebel, from Captain St. George to Schild. And he endows him with enough irony "to confront the ideal with the actual and not go mad" (pp. 247–248).

That is, Berger’s loftiest comedy arises from what Kenneth Burke describes as "the methodic view of human antics," a view poised always "on the verge of the most disastrous tragedy." In this view, we have the comic writer chastising fools and villains but humanly realizing "that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness." The heroic, triumphant aspect of comic action is its continuing study of man in society, its ongoing search—guided by realism and humility—for a perspective that is "charitable but not gullible."⁸ It is in this sense that Reinhart is most profoundly a comic character. Sometimes taken to be a fool or clown, he is neither. Sustained above all by decency, his own and his recognition of it in others who have never willingly hurt anybody, Reinhart wryly accepts and even celebrates the world through his material acts of pity and charity. Such a perspective lies behind the ambiguity of Crazy in Berlin’s ending. Reinhart has discovered the viciousness that has been so expertly masked by Schatzi’s many disguises, but Schatzi makes the imposition of justice more complicated by swiftly summarizing every conceivable mitigating factor. If, these arguments notwithstanding, Reinhart has "betrayed" Schatzi, the nature of the betrayal remains unclear, suspended. Nothing, then, is concluded; the celebration, a quiet one at best, continues.

Like those early American voices of democratic fellowship, Hawthorne and Melville, Berger observes that "all we have in this great ruined Berlin of existence, this damp cellar of life, this constant damage in need of repair, is single, lonely, absurd-and-serious selves; and the only villainy is to let them pass beyond earshot" (pp. 319-320). In his portrayal of a "lonely, absurd-and-serious" German-American clinging stubbornly to his humanity, Berger—like Ellison in Invisible Man (1952) and Malamud in The Assistant (1957)—has written one of the few truly indispensable ethnic novels in American literature.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

NOTES

  ¹Crazy in Berlin (New York, 1958), p. 48. All subsequent page references are to this edition
   ²Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, Second Edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 17.
   ³In German-Americans and the World War, Carl Wittke points out that "The war precipitated a violent, hysterical, concerted movement to eradicate everything German from American civilization. . . . practically everything that could be labeled with the hated German name, or could be traced to a German origin, came under the ban, as the passions aroused by the war threatened to divide the American population permanently into a pro- and an anti-German group. German-Americans suddenly suffered from the hatred and persecution of large numbers of their fellow Americans with whom they had once lived in harmony, good neighborliness, and mutual respect" (Columbus, Ohio, 1936), p. 163. See also John A. Hawgood, The Tragedy of German-America (New York, 1940), pp. 292–308.
   ⁴Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York, 1957), p. 7.
   ⁵Reinhart in Love (New York, 1962), pp. 11, 13.
   ⁶Marcus Klein, After Alienation (Cleveland, 1965), p. 295. First published in 1962.
   ⁷After Alienation, pp. 30, 276, 294–296.
   ⁸Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History, Second Edition (Los Altos, California, 1959), pp. xiii, 41, 106–107, 166–171. First published in 1937.