New Lost Generation

A HOUSE ON THE RHINE (255 pp.) -Frances Faviell -Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).

If Europe has a new lost generation, it is the children who were born and brought up during World War II. Author Faviell, whose The Dancing Bear (TIME, Oct. 4, 1954) was a warmhearted, nonfictional account of a hard-pressed German family's struggle for survival in the immediate postwar period, here offers a fictional study of a German family falling apart after a half-decade or more of peace and growing prosperity. The brawling, sprawling, 15-member clan that occupies the first two floors of a Ruhr Valley tenement house is known to its neighbors only as "the bunker family." This is a snide reference to the family's having lived 4 1/2 years in a bunker (bomb shelter) under the Cologne Cathedral.

Joseph, the father, is a common factory worker, and at 50 he is passive and dizzy from having punched too many time clocks in peace and war. The mother, Margarethe (Moe for short), is openly carrying on an illicit affair with a boarder young enough to be her son, and all the older children know it. Daughter Katie has the instincts, if not the business acumen, of a prostitute -and a two-year-old illegitimate son to show for it. But it is Hank, a Neanderthal 18-year-old, around whom the family and its impending tragedy pivot. A stint in his father's boots as the family's wartime disciplinarian, plus the lure of easy money, has turned Hank into a small-time mobster. He wields a mean cosh in a gang that includes sister Katie and two of his brothers. On one night's prowl he kills an old caretaker. From that moment on, the life of the bunker family disintegrates with melodramatic velocity.

Unfortunately, A House on the Rhine is termite-ridden with bygone cliches ("Don't bring her into this vile business. She's made of other clay"). But Author Faviell's dramatic documentation of the lawless legacy of the war and "the clash of old and new values in the mind of young Germany has the authority of her seven years of on-the-spot observation as the wife of a British official. Read simply as social prophecy, this novel disturbs with the suggestion that the seeds of a whole generation may already have been planted in the subsoil of neo-Naziism -bad soil, even if not bad seed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.