The Survivor

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD by Thomas Wiseman. 442 pages. Viking. $6.95.

Any novel concerning a. Nazi and a Jew would seem to offer about as much chance for originality these days as a cowboy-and-Indian movie. Nonetheless, the Austrian-born English author of Czar and Journey of a Man has managed to produce an extraordinary book about that very relationship. Thomas Wiseman's study of two Austrians--Stefan Kazakh, a half-Jew, and Konrad Wirthof, a wholehearted Nazi--is a brilliant tour de force of rare psychological depth and complexity.

The novel begins in 1967 with Kazakh, a rich London-based survivor of World War II and of three wives, obeying a powerful compulsion to return to Vienna. There, memories of his youth and early manhood torment him, providing the narrative structure for the book. A more predictable story might have emphasized the Nazis' victimization of the Jews. Instead, Wiseman focuses on Kazakh's metaphysical obsession with Wirthof, an SS officer with grand passions and grandiose ideas. Though the two are totally disparate in personality and background, Kazakh feels that his own identity has somehow been submerged in Wirthof s (to an extent reversing the situation in Remain Gary's 1968 comic novel, The Dance of Genghis Cohri). Says Kazakh: "Wirthof still glitters in me, on my energy, in my time: that mica glitter of his: that is the source of my exhaustion; if only he would glitter less I would not have to despise him so much, and how much time and energy I spend on despising him, but there seems to have been a bargain struck between us, and I don't know how to get out of it, surely it cannot hold forever."

Outrageous Demands. The two first meet in a magician's tent in 1925 as ten-year-old boys. Wirthof, a rich, aristocratic Aryan and the son of a crippled World War I general, is already arrogant and glib despite his pale blond fragility. Kazakh, son of an Aryan mother and a Jewish father who is killed as a heroic leader of the Social Democrat uprising in 1934, is a shy, sensitive boy, but stronger and taller than Wirthof. Kazakh easily wins the foot race that follows their initial encounter; yet he is able to realize even then that Wirthof dominates him psychologically if not physically.

That domination determines both their fates. When they meet again accidentally after the Anschluss, Wirthof has joined the SS and become an unthinking mouthpiece for Nazi ideology. Kazakh, a purposeless intellectual uncertain about his future or his feelings, has turned from engineering to become a hypnotist and a pioneer in advertising with nouveau riche connections. Curiously, it is Kazakh who comes closest to being a callous cynic. Wirthof, despite his crass behavior in bordellos, his egotistic mistreatment of acquaintances and his sensual brutality, is actually the overemotional romantic.

Despising each other, both men subconsciously need and complement each other. Wirthof, while continually humiliating the half-Jew, needs Kazakh to listen to his incredible ideas (including a theory that the earth might well have jam for its core). He uses Kazakh as a hypnotist to cure his frequent headaches, as an entree to the rich society of Vienna's Jews, and as a conspirator in the seduction of the Baroness Leonie Koeppler--the wife of a rich Jewish industrialist and a close friend of Kazakh's. Though Kazakh finds Wirthofs demands ludicrous or despicable, he is always compelled to comply, hating himself for doing so and continually wondering at his reasons:

"He was so pale and demanding, his needs, however outrageous, were so compelling, and his assumption that they would be met so unshakable, that, indeed, it seemed to me he could not be refused. Whatever he demanded was the absolute minimum life could afford him; to be satisfied with less was inconceivable; he would rather die."

Empty Vehicle. Perhaps it is Wirthofs willingness to give up his life, while Kazakh believes only in his own survival, that so compels Kazakh to yield in every instance, even though the result is the betrayal of everything he wants or would normally honor. Why, for example, does Kazakh help Wirthof to seduce the baroness, when he desires her himself and when the seduction is a betrayal of his friend the baron? That unanswered question hounds Kazakh to the very end, particularly because the love affair determines much of Kazakh's and Wirthofs future.

Wirthofs career as the favored adjutant to a powerful SS officer named Ludenscheid is ruined because of the romance. While negotiating for the Baron Koeppler's life after his arrest by Luedenscheid, Kazakh becomes trapped in an agreement to cure Luedenscheid of chronic constipation through hypnosis. As a result of this deal--two Jews freed for every bowel movement Kazakh induces--Kazakh becomes obsessed with killing Luedenscheid.

Despite this obsession, Kazakh is paralyzed, Hamlet-like, by his own rationalizations and instinct for survival. It is Wirthof who, with all of his illusions destroyed, is again the man of action. He assassinates Luedenscheid, thereby pre-empting Kazakh's opportunity to determine his own destiny by means of one violent but necessary act. Wirthof is summarily executed for the murder. Kazakh survives--or has he become merely an empty vehicle for the glittering spiritual survival of Wirthof? After all, Kazakh is much like John Marcher in Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle, who so feared the monstrous fate predicted for him that he lived a ludicrously overprotected life. Only on his deathbed did he discover that the monstrous fate that he perpetually tried to escape was to have nothing happen in his vacant life.

Confused Fragmentation. Kazakh muses of himself: "Your life has been a quest for life, and what did you ever find that was not another form of dying?" In the end, he can no longer remember, in his confused fragmentation, what of his life belonged to him and what belonged to Wirthof. "Was that Wirthofs dream, or mine?" he asks. "Where are you to find yourself, Kazakh? Since you were so infrequently yourself, since you have deposited yourself all over the place."

It is a sentiment worthy of Hamlet. In The Quick and the Dead, Thomas Wiseman has constructed a superb picture of Vienna before and during World War II, of the Baroness Leonie Koeppler and her society and of the Nazi ideology as it infects Wirthof and Luedenscheid. He has also created a brilliant psychological study of how two very different men can become so unwittingly entwined that each fatally determines the course of the other's life.

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