Fatherland Remembered

THE BLACK OBELISK (434 pp.)--Erich Maria Remarque -- Harcourt, Brace ($4.50).

"I am no longer German." said Novelist Erich Maria (All Quiet on the Western Front) Remarque twelve years ago. "Even when I dream, it is about America." Remarque, now a U.S. citizen, may have American dreams, but his memories are still German. After several books on the Nazi-World War II era, he has now returned to the scene of his earlier. post-Versailles trips among the ruins (The Road Back, Three Comrades). The quality of the new book and of its time is simply --almost too simply--defined by its central situation: the hero works for a tombstone firm, and the girl he loves is a schizophrenic at the local insane asylum.

Germany, in 1923, is in the grip of dizzy inflation, so Ludwig plays the organ for church services at the asylum for a good Sunday dinner and yearns for enough billions of marks to buy a new suit. Because his mother was constantly ill, the girls at a local brothel had seen to it that he did his schoolwork. At 18, when he was about to be shipped off to the trenches, he presented himself as a customer, and the sentimental, motherly prostitutes packed him off to the front a virgin. He is welcome now, but he seldom has the price.

Author Remarque admits that he had to invent little of his story because so much of it happened to him. Hero Ludwig's town of Werdenbruek is like Remarque's Osnabrueck in Lower Saxony. Remarque too wanted to be a poet and pianist and wound up with a tombstone firm; he too recited his lessons to prostitutes. These hard times remembered in tranquillity result in a strange sort of book. The atmosphere is as febrile as a manic ward on the upbeat. The poor and aged commit suicide every day, but the tombstone firm does not prosper because the monuments are worth more than they are sold for. The characters in Obelisk are not especially odd, but the times make everyone seem to be living off the top of his head. Ludwig divides his time between beautiful Genevieve at the insane asylum and a levelheaded, strong-bodied girl acrobat who wants a man able to buy some groceries. In the end, he loses both.

Amidst starvation life persists. Lovers keep dates among the gravestones, old drunkards find their schnapps no matter what, the butcher's wife makes hay with Ludwig's boss, and already a man named

Hitler has begun to shout in beer gardens. The book has many moments of Rabelaisian vulgarity, including a hilarious bordello scene, but they seem deliberately injected for shock value. As for the symbolism and the irony (though Remarque says no symbolism was intended), they could scarcely be more obvious--the most valuable stone, a black obelisk, winds up as the marker over a prostitute's grave, and in a post-World War II epilogue, only the madhouse and the maternity hospital are left undamaged. Remarque has long ago mastered a direct, insistent style that keeps the pages turning even when he seems all but mesmerized by the sententious cliche. There is much in this book that is funny, rueful and sorrowfully true. But he has drained just about all there is from German disillusion.

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