Seduction by the State

THE PARTY (418 pp.)--Rudolph von Abele--Houghton Mifflin ($4.95).

Colonel Steinbaum is a humanitarian. He works for the Third Reich, but he hates it. For one thing, his Jewish mistress has been hauled off to prison. For another, he is sickened by the brutality at the concentration camp where he is stationed. Steinbaum is on the verge of joining an anti-Nazi conspiracy when he makes the mistake of going to a party held by a high Nazi official in an elegant chateau. The symbol of Nazi Germany, Author von Abele suggests, is not an armed camp or an insane asylum but this grand, lurid party in which decent men lose their bearings and capitulate to monsters.

At the party, Steinbaum starts off strong, determined to resist any blandishments. When he meets his host, the German air marshal, he complains about the treatment of prisoners. The big, bluff marshal half admonishes, half humors the colonel, above all takes him into his confidence. The marshal, a kind of Hermann Goering character, exudes animal vitality, lives lustily and apologizes for nothing. He is engagingly frank with Steinbaum: "I don't see anything but beasts, scrapping and clawing each other from the beginning of time. I neither invent another world that isn't there, nor do I go whining to my mother because the world is harder and nastier than I expected. I do my best to be harder and nastier than anybody else." While other Nazis have appeared "mad, bureaucratic or spineless" to Steinbaum, the marshal seems "gross, humorous, shrewd, generous and free."

Steinbaum is too fascinated with the marshal to tear himself away from the party. Can the marshal be as bad as he is pictured? Can he be held responsible for the concentration camp? Steinbaum craves reassurance from the marshal, as if he cannot attack the marshal without asking his permission. By the evening's end, Steinbaum is hopelessly in bondage to a personality much stronger than his own.

When the marshal wanders off to bed, Steinbaum tries to salvage some self-esteem by seducing the marshal's 22-year-old mistress. But it is she who brutally seduces him. "Now here you are," she tells him, "and you aren't Papa, and I don't need to be afraid of my position with you, so I use you a little, I play with you." Just so has she played with all the marshal's flunkies, as if she were the marshal's accomplice in debasing them. In the grey, foggy dawn, Steinbaum staggers out of the chateau "like a hooligan drunkenly stumbling homeward after a nocturnal orgy." The humanitarian has been had.

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