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Martin Walser. Finks Krieg. Frankfurt a.M. Suhrkamp. 1996. 310 pages. DM 42. ISBN 3-518-40791-0.
Few German authors have developed a tone as uniquely their own as has Martin Walser: whatever the story, we recognize his voice right away (see e.g. WLT 70:3, p. 685). Finks Krieg, Walser's newest novel, of course remains loyal to a seismograph's function, which is to register earthquakes; and he has been the German Federal Republic's seismograph of social and inner Befndlichkeiten ever since the fifties, when his stupendous career began.
His fiction, plays, and essays have demonstrated with greater clarity, honesty, and readability than most literature what has been going on in the German soul and mind. Relationships of all kinds, mainly between men and women and between underlings and their bosses, are most often at the core of his writing. Americans have John Updike; Germans have Martin Walser. He became, in this reviewer's mind, the master of description of impotence, not (just) the sexual affliction but rather the more tragic impotence of most people's social and private lives in general.
In 1991, with his magnum opus Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (see WLT 66:2, p. 334), Walser reached beyond the fictitiousness of fiction by documenting in narrative prose the doomed life of one unfortunate man who had truly lived and whose very fate reflected the deadly nearness yet distinct distance between the two Germanies until 1989. In Finks Krieg, his newest novel, according to rumors and widespread newspaper agitation, we are given once more the story of a "true event"-if such a term has any meaning in...