Mournful strains from Germany between wars

A Novel of Pre-War Germany

By Lucy Beckett

Ignatius. 520 pp. $19.95 paper

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Reviewed by Frank Wilson

This is a peculiarly sad book. Its theme may be faith, but definitely not the Hallelujah-I-am-saved, Jesus-loves-me, everything's-just-wonderful variety.

No, this is faith lost and found and (maybe) found again in a very dark time, and the God who comes up in these pages remains (largely) hidden.

Though mostly set between 1914 and 1933, and mostly in a part of Germany that is now part of Poland, it begins in England in 1961.

Music teacher Max Hofmann is dying. He is only 55. His favorite pupil, when she comes for what turns out to be her final lesson, tells him, "You're too young to die."

"No," Max replies. "There you are wrong. I am too old already to die. By many years I have outlived my life."

He tells her that he wants her to have his violin, and he asks her to take something out of his dresser. It is a postcard. On it is a list of seven names. The one name lacking a date and place of death is Max's own: "Max Ernst, Count von Hofmannswaldau, born Waldau, Silesia, March 1905."

Max tells his student: "That's what you have to start from. Don't worry. Forget about it now. But don't lose it. When the right time is arrived, that postcard is all you will need."

Nine days later Max is dead.

What follows, presumably, is what his student eventually finds out.

Born on an estate in Silesia outside what was then Breslau, Max is 9 when World War I breaks out. His father regrets that he is too old to return to active duty, but Max's two much older brothers are just the right age, and his oldest brother is soon a fatality on the Eastern front.

Max is clearly his mother's son. They play chamber music together: Max's tutor, Dr. Mendel, is a gifted violinist and Max a talented pupil.

Eventually, Max moves to Breslau and lives with his maternal grandfather, a retired professor of medicine, while attending the Gymnasium. That is where he meets Adam Zapolski, a Vienna-born Polish nobleman. Adam is handsome, blond, and brilliant. Though born a Catholic, he has become intoxicated on Nietzsche. Their friendship is probably the most important relationship of Max's life. Understand that these are highly cultivated young men, raised on Bach and Mozart, Goethe and Schiller. Ideas that might seem highfalutin' to the rest of us are the passions that bind them:

Max and Adam spent most of each day out of the house, walking. . . . They walked till it was time to find the shade of a tree, near the river or a hill stream, to unpack bread and cheese and sausage and beer, and then read. . . . Always they fell asleep under their tree long before they had completed the agreed number of pages. Often, because he so much wanted to, Max woke first and sat, with his arms around his knees and his Plato - open, a pencil between the pages - balanced on them, looking at Adam and hoping he wouldn't wake for a long, long time. Once they sat on a ledge of grass close to the water, an ancient oak a long way above them on the bank. . . . Three times, as Max watched Adam's sleeping face, the shadow of a swift, a perfect swift-shaped shadow, crossed his face more quickly and silently than the beat of a wing.

The horses of the soul, he thought, the light and the dark, pulling for once exactly together. Passion and love not fighting each other but the same thing.

When Max's grandfather dies, Max inherits his apartment, and when he and Adam enter university, Adam rents a room from him, as does a medical student named Joachim von Treuburg. Joachim's girlfriend is Eva Grossmann, a glamorous young Jewish woman whose father is a prominent medical professor. Treuburg is also a fine cellist, and they are soon joined by a young physician, Jakob Halpern, a violinist, and Halpern's sister Anna, a violist, for evenings playing string quartets (eventually, the clarinetist Adam will bring his talent to bear on the Brahms clarinet quintet). They are five of the other six people whose names are on the postcard. The seventh is that of Adam's and Max's favorite teacher, Dr. Alois Fischer.

Max has been raised a Protestant, but he learns from his grandfather that his mother's side of the family was originally Jewish. This makes his position in Germany increasingly perilous, and when the opportunity to emigrate to England presents itself, he takes advantage of it.

He had, sometime earlier, converted to Catholicism, but when his unnamed student attends his funeral, she overhears someone say to his widow, "I never knew Max was a Roman Catholic."

"Nor did I till a few days before he died," the widow replies. "He asked me to fetch a priest."

Of the names inscribed on the postcard Max had said: "Those names, they were people. They were alive. They died. And now there is no one to tell their stories, our story; how we were at one place at one time, from different countries, cities, ruined empires. It was partly for the music we made that we were friends. Friends, lovers, rivals, what have you. Then one way or the other, Hitler killed all of us. Or Stalin. Even me. I lived, but was I alive? From time to time perhaps."

The text of the postcard is reproduced at the very end of the book. One may be tempted to take a peek at it before one's finishes reading. It is a temptation one ought definitely to resist.