Word: maternity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Eddie Amsel is fat, clever, half-Jewish. Walter Matern is lean, brooding, half-heartedly Aryan. Matern protects Amsel when other schoolboys mock his fatness or yell "sheeny." He cannot tell why he does this, nor why sometimes he squirms away from his obligation to protect and yells "sheeny" himself. The unbreakable and intolerable bond between the two friends-one not wholly a Jew or admirable, the other not wholly an Aryan or despicable-gives the book its symbolic structure...
Lost Teeth. Amsel's hobby is to make satirical scarecrows. To obtain some Nazi uniforms for his creations, he persuades Matern to join the Storm Troopers. Matern joins and then gets caught up in the group spirit; he perversely leads a gang of troopers to Amsel's house, knocks out all his teeth and leaves him senseless...
Amsel survives, takes on another name and 32 gold teeth and lives through the war. Matern also survives, much diminished in spirit by his awareness of the guilt of other Germans. He becomes a fanatically vengeful de-Nazifier, whose method is to spread his own gonorrhea among the wives of men on his private list of war criminals. But two diseases cannot beget health, and this does not ease his soul. Can he himself be guilty of something? He is harassed by a dog who has begun to follow him like a conscience-a magnificent black German shepherd who once...
...last Matern is reunited with Amsel, who smiles at him in implacable friendship with his 32 gold teeth. The reader now becomes aware of increased and complicated cranking from the novel's symbolic machinery. Amsel, the suffering half-Jew, has grown rich by developing his childish scarecrows into elaborate mechanical puppets that are programmed to act out scenes of German guilt. They are much in demand among guilt-ridden Germans, and Amsel employs a large force of workers to build their elaborate machinery and package them in an abandoned potash mine. In a grotesque parody of that old literary...