Death of a City

BERLIN (446 pp.)--Theodor Pllevier--Doubleday ($4.50).

As Hitler's Germany went to its doom in Berlin 1945, it was still dominated by the Fiihrer, who issued orders for mad and bloody victories, moving nonexistent ghost battalions across the map, while the bombers and Russian artillery destroyed his city and people above his bunker. It is in terms of this "Bunker-God" that German Novelist Theodor Plievier tells the story of the end. To that story he has brought a method somewhat reminiscent of Tolstoy's War and Peace--a combination of imagination and public record--that he applied to Stalingrad and Moscow. The third and last in this trilogy of war (Plievier died in 1955 at 63) is a terrible and very nearly brilliant book.

In the avenues of nightmare, Europe's newest and ugliest capital shows its awesome perspectives--the eyeless houses, a deserter hanged from a lamppost, people who crawl out of their cellars only to get water. Among the welter of vignettes is the unforgettable scene in which a smalltime German Communist organizes a reception committee of half a dozen women for the "liberating" Red army, only to have the women with their proffered coffee and cigarettes dashed to the floor. So one tyranny gives way to another, and the already self-degraded people of Berlin are deprived of their last shreds of power and honor by the raping, drunken Russians.

Insane Postman. The story is most memorable in the passages where Germanism is horribly mocked by events, as Plievier evokes those last, insane days when thoroughness turned into madness, tables of organization into the outlines of farce. All command was dispersed and put under the orders of an SS commander named Steiner. Faithful to the last, the doomed men on the end of Hitler's telephone in the Fuehrer Bunker tried to obey his orders. But who was Steiner? Where was Steiner? Nobody knew.

Plievier, playing heavily on the vox inhnmana of military reminiscence, records Hitler's last barking voice, and his last appearance in the world he had tried to make his theater. Soldiers from conquered countries, convicts newly sprung from jail, old men and children were all that were left to defend Hitler's capital. Yet, in the garden of the Reich Chancellery (where Hitler was dug in), a group of Hitler youths was presented to the Fuehrer. "The magnificent, the adored, the pretentious fool, now so horribly broken, walked down the line . . . Aged, half-deaf, he seemed in his plain coat more like a pensioned bus driver, a retired postman . . . yet a monster, product of the dark forests of the Bohemian frontier, product of a soil which has brought forth bigots and fools, cranks and madmen . . ."

Death Dance. Against the shifting documentary background of the city, with no hallucinatory detail spared, Novelist

Plievier loosely marshals not so much a plot as a death dance of minor characters --officials real and fictional, deserting officers, despairing women, stenographers guzzling champagne in the ruins--and throughout, the disembodied voice of the radio alternating hit songs with futile apocalyptic rantings.

If there is a central character other than the city itself, it is Colonel Zecke, who at the outset of the debacle is ordered from a quiet staff job in Prague to Berlin. His final humiliation and disillusion mirror Plievier's own. Captured, interrogated by a Russian Red army veteran named Yegorov, he listens to the echo of his own cynicism. But with a flicker of conscience, Major General Yegorov lets Zecke escape.

As the German colonel walks through the city streets, it is only in the indestructible prostitutes of Berlin, and in its beer and schnapps, that he sees some kind of continuity.

Berlin is free of the Germans' all-too-frequent self-pity; it tells not only the death agonies of a city but the final ironic defeat of its philosophy of power. It is a book easily read, not easily forgotten.

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