To Begin Again

TIDINGS (302 pp.)--Ernst Wiechert--Macmillan ($4.50).

The late Ernst Emil Wiechert (1887-1950) was one of the last of a vanished breed of German writers--romantic in feeling, mystical in outlook, spendthrift in prose (in his 63 years he wrote 60 books, none of them very well known in the U.S.). When Hitler came to power, Wiechert backed one of the dictator's most detested internal enemies, Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, and paid for it with five months in Buchenwald concentration camp followed by years of enforced silence. Tidings, Wiechert's posthumous novel (first published in Germany in 1953) is the fruit of his musings during those brutal years. It is, in the publisher's words, "a Christian message for an age that is un-Christian and totalitarian."

Victory Means Nothing. Like wounded animals, three noble German brothers drag themselves home to their Hessian castle at the close of World War II. The eldest heals his wounds by charity, tending the displaced persons who occupy the castle. The second heals himself by husbandry, tending the displaced soil and its peasants. But the third brother, Amadeus, finds no panacea to hand. Years in a concentration camp have killed his trust in human beings. War and revolution have so sapped his faith in the earth itself that he can only sigh skeptically when a cheerful clergyman assures him that healing "always begins with the hands . . . Our Heavenly Father looks after the heart." But Amadeus seeks regeneration of a profounder sort, because he sees deeper and farther than his fellow men.

What Amadeus sees is, of course, precisely what Author Wiechert saw in his own closing years. Defeat or victory in battle means "nothing or next to nothing," because today both victors and defeated share equally "the appalling fear of the terrible loneliness of the human race." Man's tie with tradition has been cut through, nor can mere political poster slogans bring back what has been lost. Woman used to be superior to man in maintaining the "well-arranged paths." But now, even she has forgotten "the old order of nature" and enters maturity "marching instead of dancing, carrying a flag in her hand instead of a sunshade."

Return to Crucifixions. The pastor believes that the ancient times may not be gone irrevocably. "At any rate," he says, "crucifixions have come into fashion again, and they were always a sign of the ancient days." This suggests that "primitive Christianity may also return," not so much reuniting man with his immediate past as carrying him far back through the centuries, to begin again at Christendom's own beginning. And it is to this point of origin that Amadeus struggles to find his way--to be reborn in the idea of the Nativity itself and to stand, with his two brothers, in the same relation to the hope-bearing Child as did three wise men of the East 2.000 years before.

Wiechert uses modern characters to illustrate his old allegory and presses home his message with intense sincerity. His weakness is a mystified view of history that exaggerates both the stability of the past and the uniqueness of the present. His prose is filled with sentimental, turgid solemnity. But the book will please those who like their religious literature to be a little lower than the angels and a little higher than Lloyd Douglas.

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