Word: wehrmacht
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
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...
Died. Friedrich von Paulus, 66, onetime Wehrmacht field marshal who led the ill-fated German Sixth Army at the decisive World War II Battle of Stalingrad, sold out to the Russians after his capture; of a stroke; in Dresden, East Germany...
...Germany, it has seldom occurred to novelists that life in uniform is a laughing matter. But in 1954 a Prussian-born veteran of the Wehrmacht named Hans Hellmut Kirst wrote a book called Null-Acht-Fiinfzehn-the model number (0-8-15) of the Wehrmacht service pistol-which in Germany is a term roughly equivalent to G.I. The book snickered behind the officers' ramrod backs, put in a plea for the dignity of the individual in uniform, and demonstrated hilariously how a canny conscript like Gunner Asch could win at the old army game simply by hiding behind regulations...
Kirst's wry chronicle of the peacetime Wehrmacht was published in the U.S. as The Revolt of Gunner Asch (TIME, March 5). Forward, Gunner Asch! is sketched in the frame of the Russian front. But Author Kirst, who fought there, knows that a sense of the ridiculous is valid up to and including the front lines...