Unwilling Scepticism

JEDEM DAS SEINE by Werner Kleinhardt Suhrkamp, 1982. 234 pp. 9DM., paper

Jedm das Seine is a translation of the Latin suum quique, "to each his own." It was adopted from a saying of Cato to be the motto of the Prussian dukes and then cynically displayed by the Nazis over the entrance to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. It may also be the self-imposed motto for the life of Robert, the man whose life comes full circle in this novel.

Robert, whose other names we never learn, was born in northern Germany. As a boy, in 1945, he is taken to a Siberian Gulag, lives there for years, survives; he also survives Buchenwald, where he is taken when moved back west. It has been reinstated as a concentration camp, this time under Russian control. Set free at last, he is confronted with the West full force: he does not find the kind of freedom he had dreamed of and hoped for in the Gulags, and he realises that the horrors as well as the humanity which he has experienced there have forever set him apart. He is complicated, sensitive, and gifted, a writer and a sceptic who would rather not be sceptical. He studies in West Germany and France and comes to teach in the United States, in New Hampshire at a college which may not be entirely different from Dartmouth. He is critical, finding the West hardly easier to cope with, and the people different but not much more attractive than in the East. When, after 30 years in the West, he visits his dying mother in East Germany, he is put in prison for espionage. There he writes his life story as one long dialogue with himself, more or less at peace so long as he can sit and write. This time, he feels, he will not survive.

All this is well-written and gripping to read, although scenes do not follow chronologically and the jumps sometimes make demands upon the reader. The writer obviously is as sceptical as his hero, and many of the experiences are common to both.

The novel is published by one of the most respected of publishers in the Federal Republic, and was recently awarded the Andreas Gryphius Prize.

Freya von Moltke and her husband, who wasexecuted by the Nazis for his role in the GermanResistance, lived in what was formerly German, and is now Polish, Silesia. She now resides in Norwich, Vermont.