[In the following review of The Linden Trees, Cooper praises Levi's poignant and insightful observations on post-World War II Germany.]

The poet Umberto Saba has said, “After Maidenek all men have in some way been diminished. All of us—executioners and victims—are, and for many more centuries to come will be, much less than we were before.” In The Linden Trees, his narrative of travel in Germany, Carlo Levi agrees with that judgment, but postulates that “even at the extreme edge of the dehumanized a new human moment can come to birth.” It is for that “human moment” that Levi searched in Germany. He is not sure that the absurd violence of the past may not be “in some mysterious and necessary fashion also in ourselves.” The Germany of today represents to him the most important mystery of our time. Is the new Germany different? “Our very life,” he says, “depends on this.”

Carlo Levi did not go to Germany as a hunter of facts, incidents, or news items. He spent only two short weeks there. It was his first visit to the country and he admits that what he offers are the hurried impressions of a humanist. He has none the less written with greater insight on the German reality than have most experts or experienced travelers since the end of the war. He does not attempt to answer all questions, nor pretend to be able to do so. The German reality, he admits, does not allow an easy definition, but he was struck by the contradictions of Germany and by her ambivalence. The difficulty he encountered in attempting to analyze the German reality he attributes to the fact that “Germany is hiding.” She is not hiding from Carlo Levi or from others, but from herself, from Nazism, which the author terms a “trauma of immeasurable magnitude.” He sees the Germans undergoing a natural process of repression which enables them to go on living while hiding the Nazi past. There is, he says, “a deep inner censorship at work throughout the entire country.” He likens this Germany in the center of Europe to “the eye of a cyclone, the calm center in which the air is unnaturally still.” Levi persistently speaks of Germany as “sleeping” with eyes “stubbornly shut.” Just as sick people try to get well by sleeping, so Germany is trying to recover by refusing to face reality.

Levi's impressions are drawn from hurried visits to several Bavarian cities and the two Berlins. In Munich he stayed at the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten (the Four Seasons Hotel), where twenty-five years ago the Munich Pact was signed. Now all that is noteworthy about the place is the massed presence of gluttonous women and fat gentlemen consuming the “intestinal” wealth that blankets Germany. Several blocks away, at a beer hall, a bereaved father poured out his soul to Carlo Levi. “Whose fault is it?” the old man asked, and answering his own question he said, “It's God's fault—because God is Jewish.” At another place a young architect told the author, “My brother is a doctor. I design houses for small families—and let's not talk about wars.” Are such chance encounters enough, one may ask, to form an impression of so vast a country as Germany? They do not suffice if one is looking for statistical verification of a proposed phenomenon. But an impression is valid when one encounters the same readiness to defend the new Germany and the same reluctance to speak of the past on the part of derelicts, refugees, anti-Nazi exiles returned home, prosperous businessmen, waiters, farmers, engineers and university professors.

Levi found Germany a land of contradictions. There is Dachau, filled with new inhabitants—disconcerted refugees from East Germany—and there is the medieval harmony in the workers' homes that belong to the ancient Fugger company complex in Augsburg. There is modern, shiny, industrial Stuttgart (“This desert of busy, hardworking, painstaking, persistent men, their eyes so firmly riveted on the object of their labor, or on money, its equivalent and symbol, that they cannot look either to right or to left”), and serene Tübigen where Hegel, Schelling and Hölderin were students together.

Most visitors to Berlin are quick to notice the contrasts between the two halves of the city. The familiar story tells of brightness, wealth, the absence of ruins as reminders of the past death and inhumanity, and the freedom of thought and economic opportunity in West Berlin; as opposed to the drabness, poverty, the numerous bombed-out dwellings, the suppression of the spirit and the egalitarianism in East Berlin. To Carlo Levi, the humanist, these are only first impressions. They did not escape him, but he writes: “… I felt that the contrasting things I had seen in my first look at the two Germanys sprang, albeit in contrary fashion, from the same entity—as though they were but two faces of the same coin, on one side a human face, on the other an eagle, both stamped by the same die.” To Levi, the two Berlins, and the two Germanys, are identified in their opposition. Each half carries to extremes the principles of the world that governs it. But the Berliners, despite the tenacity they display for these opposing ideals, do not really believe or hold to them. It seems “as if in both camps the two roads now being traveled—moving farther apart with each passing day until the distance between them might seem unbridgeable—were nothing but a means of action.” Champions of separate causes, they are none the less champions of the same mold. They are like one flock of sheep arbitrarily divided, and distant trumpets can cause them to stampede in an unpredictable direction.

Whether the new Germany is different or not is a question that Levi never answers. What he has done more poignantly than any other observer is to portray a unique historical process at work in Germany—a mass repression of the recent national past. This refusal to thrash out the Nazi past on all levels of society, including the intelligentsia, is certainly dangerous. It facilitates the cry of “Deutschland erwache!” to be started up again, and “like a sleep-walker abruptly aroused [Germany] will open its eyes with a mortal shriek of violent madness.” This central theme is captured more vividly in the original Italian title of the book, La Doppia Notte Dei Tigli, which is taken from two lines in Goethe's Faust (“Fiery glances see I flashing through the lindens' double night.”). Joseph M. Bernstein's translation is otherwise excellent.