The Heart of Darkness

HOUSE UPON THE SAND by Jurgis Gliauda. 168 pages. Many/and. $3.95.

THE BIRTHDAY KING by Gabriel Fielding. 383 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Neither the French Revolution nor the Napoleonic Wars, not even the American Civil War, has obsessed novelists as much as the Third Reich. There human nature hit rock bottom, and it has been an irresistible temptation to novelists to try to tell why. Twenty years after the event, there are more novels than ever on the Nazi era--as if crime of such magnitude takes years to digest.

House Upon the Sand, a novel of savage ironies, belongs with the best of the literature on Nazidom. Written by a Lithuanian novelist who spent the war in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, it tells of a decent German aristocrat who turns into a Nazi killer with chilling ease. Messkirch, narrating the story of his own fall, is a well-to-do landowner in rural Germany. He takes pride in being a skeptic, a cut above the fanatical urban upstarts who are running the country. But in countless small ways, he betrays the weaknesses of character --the obtuseness, the occasional coarseness, the racism--that the Nazis know so well how to exploit.

Blood for Blood. Though Messkirch is kind to the French and Russian war prisoners who work on his estate, he frankly considers them inferiors who rely on "temperament" instead of "temperance." He is contemptuous of the local party hack, who spouts Nazi cliches, but he has also a sneaking admiration for him: "In his round eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, I saw the extinct race of ancient Rome, which had marched intrepidly over the whole expanse of the ancient world and conquered it." He admits his isolation from the mainstream of European life: "The most worthless German parvenu was closer and more understandable to me than an educated foreigner."

Messkirch is thus easy prey for the Nazis. Indifferent for most of the war, he suddenly gets word that his only son, Otto, has been killed in ambush in France. In his anguish, he turns for guidance to the only philosophy he knows--the Nibelungen lore. "Only blood could atone for the blood of my son," he concludes from his primitive reading, and this judgment is confirmed by the Nazis: "The principle of revenge permeated every aspect of our collective struggle in the Third Reich. Vengeance was the reason why our flying bombs thundered over the enemy's territory. Our whole community fed on the ideas of revenge and retribution. These ideas were offered like a narcotic to the masses."

For revenge, Messkirch decides to murder a French prisoner. He chooses Mollendruz, a young man of intelligence and character, as a worthy countersacrifice for his son. No sooner has he committed the murder than he learns that his daughter is carrying Mollendruz' child. True to his newfound Nazi standards, Messkirch disowns his daughter, who kills herself. He becomes a local hero, because "the father had yielded to the German in me." Ultimately, he sardonically observes, the Nazis "would have raised me to a legendary figure; my deed would have graced the pages of school primers; it would have been celebrated in literature and on the stage."

Messkirch expects to savor his revenge when Mollendruz' father comes to see his son's grave. But his revenge goes sour. He learns that Otto was not killed by the enemy but by the Nazis, for plotting against the regime. Utterly broken, Messkirch can only stammer a few words of bogus comfort to the Frenchman, his enemy. "I had forgotten the skepticism of which I was so proud," he concludes. "I had abandoned myself to darkness, and darkness ruled over me."

Caricature, Not Character. For all his crimes, Messkirch is a sympathetic character. Not so the chief character of The Birthday King, by British Novelist Gabriel Fielding. Ruprecht Weidmann is the scion of a wealthy manufacturing family that has a slight admixture of Jewish blood and is trying desperately to get into Hitler's good graces. A cold opportunist, Ruprecht commits his anti-Nazi brother to a concentration camp, drowns a companion, betrays a business associate who is plotting against Hitler, sends off a dozen of his factory workers to serve as medical guinea pigs. Ruprecht is a kind of lago beyond the reach of life--and the credibility of the reader. If he is meant to represent all those people who were corrupted by making an accommodation with the Nazis, his motivation is too simple. Pure greed does not sufficiently account for all of Ruprecht's vices.

Fielding is more at home with caricature, in which he at times brilliantly conveys what he calls the "innocent malevolence of the Nordic mind." In prison, Ruprecht's brother Alfried is tortured with exquisite science. His torturers, wearing rubber gloves, use surgical instruments to make delicate incisions about his body, taking care not to injure his face. "The cell," Alfried marvels, "was pervaded by a sense of conviction similar to that which fills a hospital theater during a prolonged and difficult operation." But he also notices with dismay that the chief torturer always has cuts on his face from vigorous shaving. Finally the torturer wearies of finesse, grabs a seltzer bottle and, bursting into party song, starts beating Alfried in the groin with it.

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