Dark Deep Myth

THE LIFE OF MY MOTHER--Oskar Maria Graf--Howell, Soskin ($2.75).

Soon after Hitler came to power, Joseph Paul Goebbels, Ph.D., asked best-selling Oskar Maria Graf to become his official Nazi novelist. Replied Graf: "What have I done to deserve this disgrace? Burn my books! I would consider it an undying mark of shame if my books were not burned by you." Burned they were, and homeless Novelist Graf has wandered ever since--Austria, Czechoslovakia, Russia, the U. S. In The Life of My Mother, "a biographical novel," Outcast Oskar Maria Graf seeks a way back to his spiritual verities.

Graf's mother, Tessa Heimrath, was born among Catholic Bavarian peasants who all their lives tilled, milked and spun from long before dawn to long after sunset. Like animals, they "observed without surprise or emotion the eternal cycle of budding, maturing, and deteriorating; year in, year out, their eyes and senses noted the uniformity of change." These peasants "always knew the names of the bishop and the ruling Pope, but rarely that of the temporal ruler." With deep misgivings they watched the war against Napoleon III, Bismarck's new Empire, the ascendancy of Protestant Prussia over Catholic Bavaria, the visiting officers and nobles who profaned rustic Masses by singing Deutschland ueber alles before the Te Deum.

Back from the Franco-Prussian War came ambitious Max Graf. Amid much barter and little romance, he and stolid, pious Tessa were married. She bore eleven children, worked stubbornly until her legs, like many peasant women's, became horribly varicose. Her husband's bakery flourished as the region became a resort for Wagner, Liszt, the mad King Ludwig.

Young Oskar Graf was neither peasant like his mother nor petty merchant like his father. So he ran away from home to the arty and radical circles of Munich's Bohemia, where "nothing was so taboo as sentimentality," where anarchism, drunkenness and futurism foretold coming decades of disintegration. They came: the World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, inflation, hunger, humiliation, the Nazis. Oskar Graf thought more & more of his mother. He identified her with the masses, "the blameless German people . . . already behind the plow, in the workshops, factories, and offices, working as hard as ever, without particularly concerning themselves about the forces that were waiting to mislead and deceive them anew." At 70 his widowed mother was still wrapping her sore legs in herbs, tending her chickens, praying for her fallen-away son.

Then exiled Oskar Graf went to the U. S. S. R., where he found "incomparable social institutions . . . almost like a fairy tale." But the primitive, polyglot city of Tiflis again reminded him of his mother. "Napoleon wasn't worth anything, and Hitler certainly isn't. They think they change the world, but in the last analysis everything remains as it was. . . . The human instinct for self-preservation is tough and ineradicable. Its patient, long-suffering force seems to keep pace with any historical change, and finally to outlast it." This statement of faith comes easy to Novelist Graf. It comes easier than does facing his own errant, Bohemian part in bringing on the desperate need for this "myth from the dark deep past."

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