Sending up the Nazis

Press, 19 February 1983, Page 16

Sending up the Nazis

Party Games. By Hans Helmut Kirst. Fontana/Collins, 1982, 249 pp. $4.95. Kirst made his reputation outside West Germany with his novel "The Night of the Generals,” a murder novel set in the Nazi Empire. There, as in other books about the Second World War including the “Gunner Asch” series. Kirst set out to portray positive aspects of the German character, even amid the horrors of Nazidom. “Party Games" is less serious and rather funnier, if slighter, than the earlier books. The “party” is the Nazi Party in Hitler’s first year of power 50 years ago. The setting is East Prussia (now part of Poland), and the “games” are played by anti-Nazi citizens determined not to accept lightly the new arrogance of the strutting brown uniforms among them. The chosen weapon of what might be called a German national resistance to Nazification, is Hitler's own impenetrable book, “Mein Kampf.” Few Nazis (and few people anywhere) ever succeeded in reading or understanding it. By quoting it selectively to party leaders, the anti-Nazis quickly reduce the local party and their storm-trooper toughs to a state of drunken confusion. The technique is too good to last, but the citizens of Gilgenrode (and author Kirst) wring a good deal of diversion from the idea before events overwhelm them.—Naylor Hillary.