Heil Horlacher!

THE GENERAL (191 pp.)--Karlludwig Opitz--John Day ($3).

The art of satire does not grow readily from Germany's heavy soil. One notable postwar exception is Forward, Gunner Asch! (TIME, Oct. 29), which aimed its laughter mostly at the petty tyrannies and tribulations of noncoms. Now another German satire boldly advances to spoof the other end of the Wehrmacht hierarchy. To General von Puckhammer, peace is a prelude to war, life a dress rehearsal for death. He regards a soldier's calling as holy, for he believes that God is a fellow Prussian. When his monocle glints, junior officers blanch. But just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no general is a demigod to his driver. Sergeant Major Horlacher is as common as dirt, and plays an ironic Sancho Panza to Von Puckhammer's Don Quixote.

The Western Front is collapsing under the blows of the Normandy invasion forces, but Von Puckhammer shores up his own dwindling sector as if he were the Fuehrer's one-man secret weapon. When he rounds up a few Maquis and has them shot beside open graves, the general touches his hat and murmurs: "May God have mercy on them, the mercy which we could not show them." "He's got nice manners," thinks Horlacher drily.

With the general's pretty daughter, the driver is more Panzer than Panza. Defeat puts the general behind bars, and his daughter and the driver in business. They start out as bootleggers, save enough to reopen a bombed-out manufacturing plant where they turn steel helmets into saucepans. Within a year they are beating plowshares back into steel helmets. The author's debatable but haunting notion that history may be repeating itself in postwar Germany is enhanced when the general is released and delivers an impassioned blood-and-iron speech at a reunion of his ex-comrades-inarms. As he raises his arms to his Prussian god and furiously demands, "Give me back my career!". Von Puckhammer goes completely, if implausibly, mad--"manic-depressive insanity,'' according to the asylum doctor, being "the occupational malady of military men."

Novelist Karlludwig Opitz, 42, is not immune to the occupational malady of satirists, a sneaking fondness for the subject satirized. As a longtime professional soldier who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion at 17 and saw action with the Wehrmacht in France and Africa during World War II. he gives full marks to courage, loyalty and military skill. Turned blind, these virtues become the "Furor teutonicus," a vice at which Author Opitz takes wry derisive aim, proving that a laugh can be deadlier than a Luger.

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