SOURCE: Hatch, Ronald. “Mavis Gallant and the Fascism of Everyday Life.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 42 (winter 1990): 9-40.

Mavis Gallant has commented that the most difficult yet necessary task of the postwar period is to reach an understanding of Fascism (“An Interview” 39-41). Although she treats this issue directly in relatively few of her stories, her fiction as a whole presents aspects of human nature that indicate the vulnerability of individuals and societies to potentially fascistic systems of thought. The crucial event leading to her concern with fascism may well have occurred while Gallant was a reporter for the Montreal Standard at the end of the war, and was shown the first pictures to be released of the concentration camps. Her reaction was disbelief. In an interview with Geoff Hancock, she recalls saying to her editor: “We're dreaming. This isn't real. We're in a nightmare” (“An Interview” 39). Gallant was asked to write the captions for the pictures and a short covering article: “Now, imagine being twenty-two,” she says,

being the intensely left-wing political romantic I was, passionately anti-fascist, having believed that a new kind of civilization was going to grow out of the ruins of the war—out of victory over fascism—and having to write the explanation of something I did not myself understand.

(“An Interview” 39)

For Gallant, the major question was how a culture as rich and brilliant as Germany's could fall to such depths. To obtain an answer, she felt it essential to ask the Germans. Yet when she mentioned this in her newspaper copy, she found that for the first time in her career with the Standard her material was rejected. In its place, the Standard used an article that “was a prototype for all the cliches we've been bludgeoned with ever since.” When she asked why her copy had been rejected, she was told that the editors had thought her references to German culture absurd. One of her colleagues commented: “All the Germans are bastards and that's that.” Yet as Gallant saw, such an attitude merely placed a label on an entire people and did not even begin to explain why the Germans had embraced fascism. As Gallant says, at this time: “The why was desperately important to people like myself who were twenty-two and had to live with this shambles” (“An Interview” 40).

In 1950, five years after the end of World War II, her interests and her decision to make her living as a fiction writer led Gallant to leave the Montreal Standard and go to Europe, where she travelled widely and lived for a time in many different countries—England, Spain, Austria, France—finally choosing Paris as her writing base. When Gallant left Canada, she already spoke French fluently and possessed a passing knowledge of German. In Spain, she quickly learned Spanish, her facility with languages allowing her to integrate quickly into European culture. Gallant discovered that being in a culture but not of it gave her the ideal perspective to explore the different social layerings of the postwar period. She found at once that the old European civilization had been shattered by the war and the experience of fascism. The Yalta Conference had created, not one Europe, but two, with Germany divided and Poland abandoned. The end of World War II brought yet another conflict, the Cold War, and a period of affluence and consumer culture that was widely believed to be the millennium (Leuchtenburg 4-5). As Gallant quickly realized, neither the Cold War nor the new affluence created an atmosphere in which the analysis of fascism could take place as a precondition for human development.

In a different writer, Gallant's need to answer the “why” of fascism might well have led to fictional reconstructions of the 1920s and 1930s, historical documentary of the type recently undertaken by Sylvia Fraser about the Third Reich. But Gallant has always felt strongly that she must write about her own time, about what she has seen and experienced, for only in this way can she penetrate to the small but crucial moments in people's lives during which the relationship between thought and behaviour is made manifest. While acknowledging that the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler arose from specific economic and political conditions, she saw also that these dictatorships were made possible by a state of mind that allowed people to embrace fascist ideals. As Gallant has commented, while discussing her German stories of the 1960s, she did not want to write about “the historical causes of Fascism—just its small possibilities in people” (“An Interview” 41). Thus, when Gallant comes to portray actual Fascists, she does not isolate them as mutants outside the mainstream of humanity. Rather, she portrays how fascism can captivate ordinary people everywhere. Gallant's stories reveal that the “small possibilities” that brought the Fascists to power in the 1920s and 1930s were not peculiar to a few European states, but were, and still are, a powerful fact of Western consciousness.

Although Gallant does not tackle fascism head-on in her European stories of the 1950s, her interest in the interaction between the psychological and the social is already evident. The conservative impulse to reify the world into known and conventional patterns particularly fascinates her, for such conservatism denies the randomness and uncertainty of what Joan Didion has termed the “dailiness of life” (121). In “The Other Paris,” for example, Gallant portrays the young American, Carol, passionately searching for new directions. But Carol brings to Europe the surface optimism and affluence of the Eisenhower years, and adamantly refuses to see Paris in all its postwar economic chaos. While Carol wants a larger ideal to give shape and form to her energy, she identifies this ideal with a preconceived image of Paris: an artistic Montparnasse that died in the Depression.

Throughout “The Other Paris,” Gallant suggests that Carol's need for a sustaining vision can be met only by facing the chaotic reality of postwar Europe, with its rubble and refugees. The real beginning for both Europe and America rests with Carol's acknowledging “her unshared confusion” (30), and moving outwards to take account of the decay and loss. Yet, as Gallant shows, this proves too much for Carol, who takes refuge from the dissolution of Europe in marriage with a mindless American. Together they will at least be able to live self-sufficiently: “No one could point to them, or criticize them, or humiliate them by offering to help” (29). Self-sufficiency is by no means a bad ideal, as Gallant fully appreciates in her own life as an artist, but in Carol's case, the ideal becomes a means of ignoring or bypassing present experience. Carol is thrown back into an antiquated subjective universe, which demands that she forget her European experience or “remember it and describe it and finally believe it as it had never been at all” (30). Here the prose, with phrase layering upon phrase, replicates the layers of memory that isolate the individual from the present, creating a past that offers protection against a world without direction.

This sense of people erecting walls against the present appears also in “A Day Like Any Other,” which portrays a wealthy American family, the Kennedys, who have successfully insulated themselves from anything disturbing in the past or present. Mr. Kennedy lives in a series of European spas, searching for a cure for his nonexistent illness. His wife and two young daughters trail around Europe after him, Mrs. Kennedy living in a dreamworld of good marriages for her two children. The Kennedys have completely ignored the fact of Nazism and World War II by recreating the expatriate spa life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the life captured in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Yet this sheltered world, insulated from the present, is unwittingly disrupted when Mrs. Kennedy hires a Czechoslovakian “Volksdeutsch” as the children's new governess. By way of entertaining them, Frau Stengel tells the children stories about Hitler and the ungrateful Czechs.

The opening situation of “A Day Like Any Other” seems a classic case of weak liberalism about to be undermined by the darkness of fascism. Yet to portray Frau Stengel as a kind of fifth column within the home of the Kennedys would emphasize the effect of ideas and opinions, creating the kinds of situations in which intellectuals talk about their problems—something Gallant abhors. Gallant, in fact, chooses the opposite tack. Her portrait shows the Kennedy children enjoying Frau Stengel's Hitler stories, not because Hitler appeals to them, but because the repetitiveness of the stories provides the permanence they crave. The Kennedy girls even enjoy Frau Stengel's stories about little children “who had been killed in bombardments or separated forever from their parents” (226). Gallant points out that any system of ideas, any pattern of the mind, offers comfort so long as it can be sustained. But such worlds, she suggests, inevitably break down when challenged by the onslaught of the changing present.

When this breakdown occurs in the relationship between Frau Stengel and the Kennedy children, the little girls are plunged into terror so great that they dare not speak of it. Gallant intensifies the effect by refusing to allow the reader into the children's minds, presenting only the evidence of their fear—they lie huddled together in bed, asleep, with the windows sealed against the terrors outside. They look to Mrs. Kennedy like “two question marks” (239). She can see the form of the questions embodied by the children, but not the terror concealed therein. So powerful are the mind-numbing patterns of her adult conventional thought, that she continues to interpret the children as symbols of innocence, and turns away from the questions they provoke about the security of her own mental constructs. The story's ending proves extraordinarily powerful. Gallant leaves us not only with the children's absolute fear, but also with their isolation from even the most fundamental source of reassurance—their mother. They are left alone with no hope, save the building of barricades against reality—the uncertain night.

These early stories about the innocent American abroad in Europe reflect how Gallant's fiction, in its largest dimension, explores an aspect of what Marx called “false consciousness,” in which patterns of thought remain “alienated” from the individual's “social being” (Berger 6). These early stories express a continual battle between concept and percept, what a character thinks he knows about the world and what he actually perceives. Carol and the Kennedys employ conservative patterns of thought from an idealized past to fend off the shambles of postwar Europe. The Kennedy children, ignorant of the past, robbed of familiar patterns in the present, can only hide behind the flimsy shelter of blankets and curtains. These conservative impulses serve for self-protection, but at the price of sequestering individuals from the world. Moreover, both stories convey the fear that gives rise to the walls of convention, and indicate that the characters may well spend their lives searching for ever-stronger walls of custom to shut out that fear.

At the farthest boundary of the mind's conservative impulse lies fascism. Although fascism is often seen today as an event, or series of events, that occurred at a particular time in the past, it is far more insidious than that: it is conservatism of the mind that endeavours to resolve the confusion of everyday life by imposing a doctrine that gives total and unbreakable shape to all relationships. Gallant first offers a portrait of a Fascist in “Señor Pinedo” (1954), a story of postwar Spain that arose from her two-year stay in Madrid. It was not, however, until the early 1960s that she finally managed to overcome her repugnance for the German past, and travelled to Germany itself to begin her analysis in earnest. For Gallant it was particularly important to see Germany firsthand before she wrote about it, since she was convinced that she must understand the German motives for embracing fascism. She has commented that “the victims, the survivors that is, would probably not be able to tell us anything, except for the description of life at point zero.” She felt convinced, however, that if she could penetrate the nuances of “every day living” in Germany, she would find “the origin of the worm—the worm that had destroyed the structure” (“An Interview” 39, 40).

Gallant has mentioned that the crucial events that finally allowed her to travel to Germany were “The colonial wars of the fifties and sixties.” Living much of the time in France, Gallant had ready access to news of the wars in both Indochina and Algeria. These reports showed that the Nazis held no monopoly on barbarism, that “civilization was no barrier anywhere” (“An Interview” 40). Thus, when Gallant finally began visiting Germany after de Gaulle ended the Algerian War, it was possible for her to write about the German situation with some detachment.

As a result of her travels in Germany, Gallant realized that after the war a large proportion of the nation's people had chosen to forget Germany's past and begin life afresh. Even today it is possible to find Germans who fought in World War II behaving as if the Hitler period had never existed. According to such people, the way things are at present is the way they have always been. While this mass amnesia helped produce the German economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, since it allowed people to concentrate on rebuilding the nation, it also permitted unexorcized ghosts and demons from the time of the Third Reich to haunt the collective psyche. In stories such as “The Latehomecomer,” Gallant explores a virtual state of national schizophrenia by juxtaposing past and present, allowing the reader to watch as people in the present unwittingly renew past fascist forms.¹

During the 1960s and 1970s, Gallant wrote nine stories centring on the German question. Since it is impossible to do justice to all nine in the space available, the two related stories, “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” and “Willi” (both published in 1963), have been chosen as paradigms.² These two stories hold particular interest because they deal with soldiers who served under the führer, and who must come to terms with their experience of having fought for the ideals of the Third Reich. “Willi” and “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” also offer us an excellent opportunity to study Gallant's evolving technique. “Willi,” the first of Gallant's German stories, rarely departs from the straightforward, linear style of her early European fiction. Although published less than a year after “Willi,” “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” is an example of Gallant's most mature work; it shows us how the seemingly solid surfaces of the present are wormed into and convulsed by the German past.

Both stories develop the same basic situation: two German ex-soldiers, Willi and Ernst, find themselves, in the 1960s, living in France, rootless, and somehow unattached to the present. Taken prisoner at the end of the war, they do not return immediately to Germany, and do not, therefore, participate in the postwar “unlearning” of the fascist past.

The advantages of this “latehomecomer” situation to a writer involved in social exploration should be obvious.³ As Gallant learned at the end of the war when she was a reporter for the Montreal Standard, most people saw fascism as brutish, repressive terror. Yet such a view makes it virtually impossible to understand why a large proportion of the German population would flock to the fascist cause. In “Willi,” however, Gallant portrays events from the point of view of a “latehomecomer” who has kept his old national socialist ideals alive. Looking through Willi's eyes, the reader learns with some astonishment that it is possible to prefer the Third Reich to the new federal republic. The French keep Willi a prisoner of war until 1948. On his return to Germany, he grows increasingly contemptuous of his countrymen for relinquishing all ideals for the sake of affluence. One of his sisters has an American boyfriend, and over the years the entire family becomes as “happy as seals around a rich new brother-in-law, a builder in Stuttgart.” Disgusted with Germany's new obsession with surfaces, Willi has returned to live in France: “He doesn't like the French better than he does the Germans; he just despises them less” (29).

Through Willi, Gallant brings out the features of fascism that made it so appealing to German youth in the 1930s. Willi has been, and still is, attracted to fascism because of its ideals of health, beauty, and loyalty—its belief that humanity should live for something beyond mere material gain.⁴ Everything about Willi belies the conventional film version of the German soldier. A kind, gentle man, he has gone out of his way to help his friend Ernst, supplying him with a new suit of clothing and allowing Ernst to stay in his apartment. Gallant is not, of course, attempting to deny the repression and violence inherent in Nazism, but to show that any picture of the Third Reich that emphasizes only its brutality must be profoundly misleading. Such a picture fails to show how national socialism could attract the many idealistic young people, such as Willi, who thronged to its banner as a way of creating a better life. Willi finds that accepted opinion condemns the Third Reich and all it stood for, while applauding Germany's new economic success. Yet Willi finds life empty in a society lacking national socialist ideals. The new Germany, with its emphasis on money and success, appears to him as vulgarity and greed incarnate.

Having convinced the reader of the fascination of fascism for Willi, an idealistic young man, Gallant proceeds to show the effect of fascist idealism on his life. Realizing that most people learn about fascism through films, she portrays Willi in Paris working as a consultant, providing details about the German army for directors shooting French films about the war. Willi teaches the young extras, often German students, how to sing and march, how to wear their uniforms, how to be German in the old tradition. He approaches his film job with the same kind of zeal he gave to his soldiering. When the students do not take their jobs seriously, laughing and clowning, Willi shouts in exasperation: “When I think I was ready to die for you!” (29). The effect is a double exposure. We see Willi on the film set teaching students to act like good Nazis with all the zeal he formerly gave to being a good Nazi soldier himself. Then he did not question Hitler's ideal; now he does not question its applicability to the film. He never stops to think about the new generation's casual attitude to work, its tendency to turn jobs into play. He simply dismisses it as irresponsible. In fact, he enters into the illusion of the film. He is treating postwar German students, in Paris, as though they were recruits for the Third Reich's Wehrmacht. Willi's life, we come to realize, has been a perpetual training program to work on a film set. Willi can never be himself; he always acts for a larger end, never realizing that his life thereby becomes theatre: an abstraction from life.

Because Willi can devote himself equally well to the war effort and to the making of films, one might think that Gallant is hinting at opportunism. Yet, to assume that would be to miss the point. Willi still believes that national socialism stood for simple moral ideals. For Willi, those ideals were not propaganda, but truth. He still does not smoke or drink, and delights in recollecting the old days, when “health was glory and he was taught something decent about girls” (29). Yet this kind of abstract idealism leaves the individual separated from everyday events, and completely unable to deal with life. For example, Willi has never married. In fact he cannot even bring himself to talk about the subject openly: “He sometimes meets a girl and hopes something will come of it—he is still looking for that—but he has never been sure he had the right girl” (29). Willi does not say that he wants sex or romance or a companion or marriage or a home, but refers to the entire subject as “it” and “that.” In Willi, Gallant gives a comic-pathetic turn to the quality of naïve heroism associated with sculpture and painting in the Third Reich.⁵

To demonstrate how such pristine idealism can be easily perverted, as it was into the actual violence of police arrests and torture in the Third Reich, Gallant shows us a further development in Willi's filmmaking. When an acting job as an SS officer becomes available, Willi obtains it for his friend Ernst. This is by no means easy, since Ernst is “brown-haired and slight”; he does not at all conform to the film image of a member of the German military elite. How, then, do image and reality coincide? At first only in a lie, for Willi gains the job for Ernst by falsely representing him as a former German officer.

Even after shooting for the film begins, image and reality refuse to converge. When Ernst is supposed to push the actor playing the part of the Jewish professor, he has so much respect for the idea of a professor that he apologizes with each shove. By confusing the film with reality, Ernst reveals himself as a genuinely kind, respectful person who would have great difficulty in hurting anyone: “Ernst has too much respect for the professor. Ernst wouldn't hurt a fly. Somebody must have hurt a fly once, or they wouldn't keep on making these movies. But it wasn't Willi or Ernst” (30). Only when Willi worries that Ernst will lose the job, and urges him on with the thought that a good performance might expedite his long-awaited pension, does Ernst take courage and give the actor playing the professor a hard push. In fact, the push proves so effective that the actor stumbles and drops the loaf of bread he carries as a prop. Suddenly the scene becomes real: the “professor” is startled, his “wife” cries out, and they both struggle to retrieve the bread, which has been dropped “on the dirty pavement” (30).

The incident has suddenly taken on reality because Ernst has finally managed to play his role properly. He has become capable of cruelty. Indeed, a disagreement ensues between the director and his staff over whether the scene may not be “overdone” (30). The quickness with which Ernst succeeds in playing an SS officer reveals what might have happened under national socialism had Ernst been compelled to do something his gentle nature rejected. While it is true that Willi encourages Ernst with the thought of his pension, this makes the scene even more similar to what happened under the Third Reich, where people such as Ernst quickly learned the conduct required to survive.

Although the film scene suggests the way in which gentle idealism can be twisted into brutality, Gallant does not end the story with Ernst's successful push. To do so would only be to suggest that human beings contain a hidden reservoir of animal instincts that flows out when the restraints of civilization are loosened. This is certainly a common enough explanation of fascism, and Gallant offers a glimpse of latent brutality in Ernst. But she goes a step further to show that the dehumanized conditions necessary for the unleashing of such brutality are implicit in the apparently pure ideals themselves.

As we saw earlier, Willi's idealism leads him to treat women as abstractions rather than as people. In the final scene, Gallant develops the consequences of this idea when she portrays Willi attempting to win a young woman. Still steeped in his fascist ideals, Willi wants the unnamed girl to personify virginal purity: “it is always the same girl, the one they told him once he was going to have to defend” (30). But the girl does not want to be treated as a figure of purity. When Willi arrives at her parents' house, she brings him “ice and whiskey on a tray.” She is “proud to be entertaining a man,” and clearly wants Willi to play the part of the worldly male. When Willi, who does not drink, proves unable to fulfil these expectations, the girl begins to sulk, and this leads Willi to ask a “stupid” question: “Don't you like me?” The question is not stupid in itself; the stupidity lies in its timing: “He always asks too soon, and the failure begins there.” By showing his vulnerability, he lets the girl know that “she could be cruel” (30). Willi's idealism has failed to take account of the sexual politics involved in male-female relationships, the fact that sexuality involves power. His naïvety permits cruelty to surface.

What Gallant outlines briefly in “Willi” about sexual politics, she develops more fully in her later German stories, especially “The Latehomecomer.” As Gallant sees it, the sexual and marital relations between men and women act as an engine of social relations in the larger political sphere. Women serve men, but expect in return a share in the benefits of male economic power and security. Men expect to find in women servants and paragons of virtue. Not only does this create a class structure that divides men and women, it also tends to polarize power and virtue. When the two forces become separated, people are left unable to deal with everyday events, except in terms of absolute ideals. The result is that power tends towards tyranny and virtue towards passivity, the ideal conditions for an authoritarian state.

Gallant underlines the role of power in sexuality when Willi inadvertently mentions that his brother-in-law “has a bathroom tiled” with “lapis lazuli.” The cost of the precious stone so impresses the girl that she immediately assumes that anyone so rich must be a “gangster” (30, 31). This misconception makes Willi appear mysterious and dangerous to the girl, and thus romantically appealing. Once again, the situation becomes charged with energy, and Willi recognizes that he has been given “the upper hand” (31). The ex-Wehrmacht German has been given power, has been invited to act the part of a gangster. The incident shows the dialectic at the heart of an abstract idealism such as fascism. Where Willi wants the girl to be pure goodness, the girl wants Willi to embody darkness and evil; Gallant suggests that on one level, the search for absolute purity gives rise to its opposite—corruption. Were Willi to accept the power being offered to him as the sexual complement to his idealism, he would be well on his way to playing the part of tyrant in a personal relationship.

His rejection of power, however, contains implications that prove equally dangerous—if not more so, because they are more subtle and consistent with Willi's high-mindedness. When he discovers that the girl finds him attractive because of his supposed relation to a gangster, he simply rejects her. He remains faithful to his ideal, refusing to engage in the game of life: “He has waited so long he must be certain; he has waited too long to afford a mistake.” Unable to make the ideal incarnate, Willi walks away from life altogether. Towards the story's conclusion, we are told: “He didn't see the girl again” (31).⁶ The decent, comic-pathetic little hero is as unable to respond to real human relationships as the superficial, money-grabbing kin of whom he complains, or the ordinary postwar girl who can find him attractive only as a gangster.

The gangster reference points to the larger, more public dimension of the destructive compartmentalization attendant upon a conservative idealism such as Willi's. As Hannah Arendt argues in her study of Adolf Eichmann and “the banality of evil,” people all too often oversimplify fascism when they claim that Eichmann was a brutal gangster (41-42). They miss the point of Eichmann's idealism, and fail to see that his idealism made it possible for him to detach himself from the world, thereby authorizing the deaths of millions. One cannot help seeing similarities between Eichmann's banal idealism and Willi's, although Gallant is not, of course, dealing with public figures such as Eichmann. Willi lacks the force of character to administer genocide. He is the “willee” rather than the “willer.” But his actions indicate how events on the larger political field were made possible by the desire of ordinary people to see their lives, and those of others, in terms of ideals. Indeed, our witnessing the effects of fascist ideals in domestic situations where they do not trigger immediate moral revulsion allows us to see both their appeal and their hazards for people everywhere.

As Gallant's metaphor of the cinema reveals, the purity of Willi's need to see people in terms of ideals results in the transformation of people into celluloid abstractions. When people resist such a use, as inevitably they must, he cannot reevaluate the ideals; he cannot rise to the challenge by engaging in the give-and-take of ordinary relationships. Instead, he walks away from real life, all the while desperately wanting the ideal film to continue playing. He is profoundly disappointed and lonely, but only because those who are unworthy in his scheme of things cease to exist for him as real people as surely as did the victims of Hitler's “final solution.” The ease with which all this occurs in everyday situations makes it evident that everyday life could in fact assume the features of cinematic nightmare, or holocaust, under the direction of a suitably demagogic leader. In the end, then, Willi's idealism, which appears positive on the surface, proves damaging to himself and, given the right circumstances, could be even more damaging to others.

Although Ernst plays a relatively small role in the story “Willi,” Gallant recognized the potential inherent in his chameleon character, and devoted her next-published German story, “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” to his history. In doing so, she retains a minor role for Willi in “Ernst in Civilian Clothes.” Yet the new story possesses a far more complex narrative structure, with the histories of Ernst and Willi crossing and recrossing, allowing Gallant to develop the two ex-soldiers as opposing poles of the same conservative impulse. With “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” she also overcomes one of the main weaknesses of “Willi.” Despite its theme of fascism in ordinary life, the linear narrative style of “Willi” distances the reader from the past, and leaves the impression that the fascist era is something that can now be discussed and labelled as over. Although “Willi” shows clearly enough the potential dangers that fascist idealism holds for society, by the story's end, the reader could be excused for believing that the Third Reich had been safely buried in history. In “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” however, the narrative moves the reader continually between past and present, its fluidity deconstructing our normal sense of a present firmly situated in the here and now. Once the seemingly stable present crumbles, it becomes apparent that fascism cannot simply be seen as a series of events locked away in the past, but must be recognized, with frightening teleological immediacy, as a pattern of habits and assumptions that continue into the present. As Gallant shows, no one, not even the reader, can entirely escape the insidious influence of fascism's small possibilities in people.

Although the idea of deconstruction might seem to link Gallant to the American postmodernist fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s, in fact Gallant never intrudes as narrator to break the illusion that the story is an objective record.⁷ Her notion of demystification has more in common with the style of Continental writers, and in particular Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdung devices. As will be recalled, Brecht did not want his audience either to lose themselves in the reality behind the proscenium arch, or to remain completely detached, alienated. His audiences were meant to enjoy the alternative reality, but also to find it unfamiliar—unsettling—so that they might return, changed, to their daily lives. To achieve this double effect, Brecht created “a representation … which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (88).

Gallant takes this idea of defamiliarization one stage further when she begins “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” by immersing both her principal character and the reader in a version of everyday life that appears altogether unfamiliar. Having been in the military, cut off from civilian life for some 30 years, Ernst now finds himself in no-man's-land, and must make his way over to the other side where daily life seems normal and familiar. Gallant begins with a filmic pan around one of Paris's more dilapidated apartment courtyards. Ernst opens a window onto a world that is there in all its physicality, but that lies out of reach, dislocated. Life behind the other windows is “implicit in its privacy.” Ernst does not see neighbours, even people, but “Forms … poised at stove and table, before mirrors, insolently unconcerned with Ernst.” The familiar has become abstract. Time has frozen: “the afternoon sky has not changed since he last glanced at it a day or two ago” (131). Like Willi in the earlier story, Ernst is also alienated. But where Willi clings to an idealist identity, Ernst's identity “dissolve[s]” in existential experience. Gallant's metaphors of solidity give way to the fluid: Ernst's trouser bottoms “slide to his calf” when he sits down, and he remains tenuously “afloat” in the stream of events (132). Homeless, he lives in Willi's room, wearing clothes borrowed for him by Willi. The only things that make him seem “anchored” are his military boots, which have been “unsuccessfully camouflaged” to look civilian (132). Ernst is clearly unsettled, and the effect on the reader is likewise unsettling.

From the story's outset, Gallant establishes the unease of a military presence masquerading in civilian dress, and thus leads the reader to look beneath the surfaces of everyday life. As the story unrolls, we learn that Ernst has lived virtually his entire life in the military: first in the Hitler Jugend, then the German Army, and finally the French foreign legion. The military, which gave structure to his life, has suddenly dismissed him, and he finds himself in a watery present where objects lack their normal solidity and outlines. In Martin Heidegger's term, he is geworfen, or thrown, into the present.

Gallant has commented that she began the story after learning that the French foreign legion had, in the interest of economy, discharged a large number of its men at the end of the Algerian War (personal interview).⁸ This move was disastrous for most of the legionnaires, since it left them homeless. In Ernst's case, the legion fails even to supply the promised pension. As Gallant saw the situation, it was outrageously shabby treatment on France's part. Yet as she began to develop Ernst, the ex-German soldier, it became evident that the telling of his story could reveal not only the callousness of the legion (which figures as one of many betrayals), but could also open up the present for the reader, revealing its sources in a dark and monstrous past. Instead of seeing the present as something organically whole, ineluctably given, Ernst, the man of dissolved identity, sees things disjointedly as he emerges from one reality—the military—into another—civilian life. His perspective acts as a solvent upon the surfaces of the seemingly solid postwar world.

To emphasize the extent to which Ernst stands outside the reality assumed by civilian society, Gallant underlines the metaphysical implications of his dilemma as an ex-legionnaire. He possesses no self as such, except that given by his identity papers:

The document has it that he is Ernst Zimmermann, born in 1927, in Mainz. If he were to lose that paper, he would not expect any normal policeman to accept his word of honor. He is not likely to forget his own name, but he could, if cornered, forget the connection between an uncertified name and himself. Fortunately, his identification is given substance by a round purple stamp on which one can read Préfecture de Police.

(132-33)

Having as his only “substance” the purple police stamp, and finding it easy to forget the connections between his name and himself, Ernst, a latehomecomer, discovers not only society but his own self to be alien and unpredictable. In a sense, then, “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” emerges as an ironic version of the conventional bildungsroman. Ernst begins with no identity of his own save that stamped on him by society. From this point he must create a new self by learning about the world. Yet Gallant gives a savage twist to the genre when she portrays Ernst, not as an intense and sensitive youth, but as an ex-soldier who wants only to learn the rules of the game in order to survive. As such, he stands in direct contrast to puritan, idealist Willi.

What Ernst does, in a rather stumbling way, throughout the few hours covered in the story, reflects what all of Europe did after 1945, when it took upon itself the task of rebuilding civilization and finding a new rationale for itself. But Ernst's search for a new self in the early 1960s does not merely reflect the route taken by Europe in 1945, it also offers a critique of that route. Released unwillingly from the military in 1963, 18 years after the end of World War II, Ernst finds a new society already intact, one that he must try to join. Yet every step he takes to answer the question “What is Ernst?” leads to the conclusion that the social world is precariously hollow and unable to give him substance.

In reconstructing himself as a civilian, Ernst must first decide on a nationality. Normally, of course, nationality is a given, but when Ernst reflects on his nationality he faces the same problem faced by Europeans in 1945 when boundaries shifted: “He does not know if he is German or Austrian. His mother was Austrian and his stepfather was German. He was born before Austria became Germany, but when he was taken prisoner by the Americans in April, 1945, Austria and Germany were one” (133). Ernst's confusion reminds us that what now appear to be stable, enduring boundaries are of very recent making. More than that, however, as he attempts to fulfil his need to choose a nation, the inherent absurdity of nationalism in the postwar situation is revealed:

He looks at the railway posters with which Willi has decorated the room, and in a resolution that must bear a date (January 28, 1963) he decides, My Country. A new patriotism, drained from the Legion, flows over a field of daffodils, the casino at Baden-Baden, a gingerbread house, part of the harbor at Hamburg, and a couple of sea gulls.

(133)

In pledging allegiance to vapid railway posters, Ernst brings out the lack of substance in German nationalism. After the war, almost everyone agreed that nationalism was an evil. The very name national socialism made it impossible to speak of nationalism in positive terms. Ashamed of their past, most Germans declared themselves finished with nationalism. By the time Ernst leaves the legion in 1963, moreover, Germany has been split into the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic, with the West Germans refusing to admit the East's separate political reality, and being forced to build their own national identity from innocuous images.⁹

When Ernst says to himself “My Country,” he sees the nation's heraldry in terms of a “field of daffodils” resplendent with touristic images, such as Bavarian houses, and even “a couple of sea gulls”—perhaps an unwitting recognition of the scavenging impulse that has gone into creating the new national identity. Thus, in choosing such a nation, Ernst gains not substance, but pretty images served up for commercial purposes. Its reduction to slick tourism does not, however, make nationalism any the less important—or dangerous. If Ernst makes the wrong choice he could find himself in jeopardy: “Austrians are not allowed to join the Foreign Legion. If he were Austrian now and tried to live in Austria, he might be in serious trouble” (133). As Ernst discovers, postwar nationalism may offer no real substance but it still carries all the punitive divisiveness of former nationalisms.

The search for employment proves as unhelpful as the search for nationalism in providing Ernst with a solid social structure of identity. In “Willi,” Gallant introduces the idea of a work ethic without moral value. In “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” she develops this idea further, through the character of Willi's brother-in-law, the vulgar capitalist, when she has Willi write to him to obtain a job for Ernst. Naturally enough, Willi gives assurances that Ernst has not deserted, that his papers are in order. But in the 1960s, Germany's economic miracle is in full bloom, and Willi's brother-in-law, a builder, needs all the workers he can obtain. He replies that “even if Ernst is a deserter he will take him on” (133).¹⁰ Gallant suggests here that in the booming 1960s, Germany finds it unnecessary to search the past for moral certitude. Bottom-line materialism brooks no unsettling questions. Everyone in Germany has begun again, bringing the nation riches, the implication being that Ernst should forget about his wartime service to Germany and France, and take whatever shape the economic climate demands.¹¹ (The recent case of Kurt Waldheim, former secretary-general of the United Nations, testifies to the accuracy of Gallant's insight.)

As can be seen, the assumptions behind Ernst's first job offer are not conducive to a sense of security and a solid identity. The brother-in-law's letter perplexes Ernst: “What use are papers if the first person you deal with as a civilian does not ask to see even copies of them?” (133). An economic system that does not ask any questions during a period of prosperity is not likely to offer aid and comfort when the prosperity ends. The situation described differs little from that of the 1920s, a point Gallant underlines when she mentions that Ernst “looks shabby and unemployed, like the pictures of men in German street crowds before the Hitler time” (135). In fact, the main thing that joining the Hitler Jugend meant to him and his family was “a great saving in clothes” (135). While Germany wants to forget its past, Ernst's very presence reminds one of the lack of individual security and firm public direction that, after 1929, led Germans to flock to the promises of national socialism.

Ernst's late return to civilian life, his dismissal from the legion with no profession, no skills—“nothing” (135)—offers a fugitive's perspective on the state of modern Europe and the plight of all Europeans who, for one reason or another, lost their place in the order of things after the Second World War. By setting the story on the rue de Lille, Gallant revisits with heightened intensity the broad social base established in some of her earlier stories, such as “The Other Paris” and “Autumn Day.” “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” includes not only the two German ex-soldiers, who have been left homeless after the war, but also the French poor who are virtually prisoners in their own country. Ironically, their lives resemble those of Willi and Ernst, the enemy war veterans. Indeed, the story's setting suggests that parts of Paris are more like prisoner-of-war camps than the havens of love and laughter suggested by sentimental clichés. It is a hard winter, “the coldest since 1880,” and the poor are to be given “fifty kilos of free coal” as well as some free gas for cooking and heating “until March 31st” (142). That the poor receive free coal and gas says something about the government's largess, but more about the economic plight of the have-nots.¹² The poor also have trouble getting food, and Willi finds that “The only vegetables on public sale that morning were frozen Brussels sprouts” (140)—sprouts being one of the common wartime foodstuffs.

Through the lives of Ernst and Willi, Gallant brings out the vast difference between high and low cultures, illuminating some of the irreducible ambiguities of postwar existence, where Willi's neighbour can first complain about the lack of food, and then invite a friend down to watch “L'Homme du xxe Siècle” on television (138). In the course of the story, we see more and more clearly the wide gap between the culture of France and the actual living conditions of many of the people. More important still is Gallant's perception that the people themselves do not recognize the differences. Strangely enough, the poor even manage to identify with the image of twentieth-century man produced by high culture, and do not see that the difficulties of their own lives contradict such media images. The Germans, one is reminded, looked to Hitler's version of the Superman as a means of escaping their difficulties.

As has been noted, Gallant's technique extends the deconstruction of conventional views from the present into the past. This allows the reader to reexamine assumptions about World War II. By the 1960s, World War II has, for most people, settled into memory, with fascist Germany seen as an aberration. But as Ernst sits idly in Willi's Paris apartment waiting to return to Germany, he finds the past surfacing in image and anecdote to confute such assumptions. For example, when Ernst and Willi are captured by the armies of liberation, they are told they are uniquely evil, that they will have to pay for the rest of their lives. Their guards tell them: “You have lost the war. You are not ordinary prisoners. You may never go home again” (141). In other words, the liberators assume the Germans will be kept as conscript workers forever. Willi “says to this day that the Americans sold their prisoners at one thousand five hundred francs a head.” Although such sales were not officially sanctioned, they still occurred, the Americans wanting the money, the French wanting the workers.¹³ “Ernst finds such suppositions taxing” (134), and chooses not to think about them, for, if they are true, then the allies bought and sold Germans just as the Germans bought and sold Jews. In this respect, “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” reminds one of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, in which the character of Milo Minderbinder is used to dismantle comfortable assumptions about the United States's moral superiority in World War II.

Gallant's deconstruction may be less flamboyant than Heller's, but it is also more extensive, since it forces the reader to see the war as continuing into the present. Officially the war ended in 1945, but Ernst is finally demobbed only in the 1960s, and during this interval he has been fighting continuously—for France. From Ernst's standpoint, it matters little which nation he chooses: “He has fought for Germany and for France and, according to what he has been told each time, for civilization” (135). For the reader, it comes as a shock to find France's colonial wars placed in the same category as Germany's war. The popular wisdom maintains that the Germans were evil and the French good. Yet Ernst's experience in fighting for both Germany and France provides a different set of contours to modern history. Both the Germans and the French told their soldiers that their wars were “for civilization.” In times of war, such slogans often seem to make perfectly good sense. But Ernst, attempting to find a place for himself in the civilization for which he has fought, shows that whether or not one ends on the winning side of any given war, civilization does not extend very far among the disadvantaged.

Ernst's sudden appearance in civilian clothes also brings to light the processes by which people distance themselves from, and rewrite the past in order to make their present safe. Ernst discovers, while reading a newspaper, that it is the twentieth anniversary of the end of the struggle for Stalingrad. The newspaper “is full of it,” with the battle being treated in such a way that “it seems a defeat all around, and a man with a dull memory, like Ernst, can easily think that France and Germany fought on the same side twenty years ago” (143). The battle for Stalingrad was of course a major defeat for Germany, a victory for the Russians, and a crucial turning point in the war. In 1963, however, in the middle of the Cold War, the West is no longer allied to Russia, but to Germany. In order to bring the past into line with the present, French newspapers distort history so that the Soviets as well as the Germans appear to have lost the battle. Whether by conscious distortion or not, the past is rewritten to bring it into accord with what the journalists think constitutes the present.¹⁴ The grip of the present proves so strong that the general populace, many of whom lived through the war, willingly accept public distortion of their own experience.

Because Ernst does not yet exist as part of the communally established present, his mind can bring to the surface a wholly different image of Stalingrad to disprove the accepted interpretation: “On an uncrowded screen a line of ghosts shuffles in snow, limps through the triumphant city, and a water cart cleans the pavement their feet have touched” (144). Gallant does not say whether Ernst was present at Stalingrad (this is unlikely, given his age), and in fact the image seems to hang in the air, a glimpse into Europe's collective unconscious. Indeed, Gallant's refusal to offer a logical explanation for the appearance of Ernst's image of Stalingrad gives it a kind of visionary validity. The image simply appears when Ernst hears a song sung over the radio by Charles Aznavour, and is moved by it. Aznavour's love song, dwelling as the genre will on the inextricable mingling of pain and joy, provides the emotional trigger for this evocative image of Stalingrad. The beauty and power of the image shatter the newspaper's prosy revisionism. In place of “defeat all around” at Stalingrad, we have the almost sacramental moment of linked joy and suffering as the Russians cleanse their city of limping German ghosts. The image of the real past demands to be dealt with.

However, even though Ernst continually causes us, as readers, to reorient ourselves both to the present and the past, Gallant never allows her central character to become an ordering consciousness for the story. The image of Stalingrad may surface, but Ernst cannot use it to develop a historical narrative. Embodying the principle of radical change, Ernst survives by continually forgetting the past. For example, Willi has procured Ernst's civilian clothes and expects him to return them when Ernst begins working in Germany. But Ernst will forget everything: “His debts and obligations dissolve in his tears. Ernst's warm tears, his good health, and his poor memory are what keep him afloat” (132). Ernst can know things about the past, but his character does not allow him to organize such knowledge or see it as important. Ernst has “met young girls in Paris who think Dien Bien Phu was a French victory, and he has let them go on thinking it, because it is of no importance. Ernst was in Indo-China and knows it was a defeat” (144). Since Ernst's priority remains daily survival on an ad hoc basis, he proves incapable of shaping his experiences into a coherent historical picture.

Through Ernst, Gallant dramatizes the principle of extreme relativism that characterizes much of the post-Nietzschean age.¹⁵ In one sense, he can be thought of as embodying the inchoate impulse of life to manifest itself in protean forms. As he copes with the present, various ways of ordering the world—through nationalism and the work ethic, or in a complete disjunction from the past—offer themselves as structuring principles. Their very number, however, breaks down the correctness of any particular view, and betrays their origins in ideology or propaganda.

In this chaos, Ernst's friend Willi continues to exemplify the conservative impulse to turn patterns of the mind into objective truths. In small, he echoes the central Hitlerian abuse of Nietzsche's notion of the Übermensch. Where Ernst is swamped with sensations, Willi attempts to turn lived experience into a kind of absolute Apollonian order: “Willi is always reading about the last war” and continually collects “evidence” in a series of scrapbooks. But no matter how hard he tries, Willi cannot arrive at a final judgement. He must wait for an authority, “the lucid, the wide-awake, and above all the rational person who will come out of the past and say with authority, ‘This was true,’ and ‘This was not’” (143). Yet even as Willi waits in the present for the supreme judge to arrive, Gallant reveals the folly of such assumptions about history through the disjunctions of her story line. With no warning to the reader, Gallant suddenly announces that the story's one set of “attested facts”—the place and date of Ernst's birth as given on his identity papers—is false. Ernst was not born in Mainz as his papers indicate, but in the Voralberg. He has forgotten his exact age, and may be “either thirty-four or thirty-six.” “Only his mother, if she is still living, and still cares, could make the essential corrections” (134). With such reversals, the narrative line convincingly undermines Willi's attempt to find absolute truths that exist independently of the biases inherent in any historical system.¹⁶

Throughout the course of the story, the reader has been urged to look behind such things as Ernst's purple police stamp to find the genuine crucible of present-day experience. In Ernst's case, it proves necessary to replace empirical and positivistic assumptions with a mythic vision:

During one of the long, inexplicable halts on the mysterious voyage, where arrival and travelling were equally dreaded, another lad in man's uniform, standing crushed against Ernst, said, “We're in Mainz.” “Well?” “Mainz is finished. There's nothing left.” “How do you know? We can't see out,” said Ernst. “There is nothing left anywhere for us,” said the boy. “My father says this is the Apocalypse.” What an idiot, Ernst felt; but later on, when he was asked where he came from, he said, without hesitating, and without remembering why, “Mainz.”

(134)

Having repressed the implications of what it means to name Mainz as his place of birth, Ernst carries with him a past that he fails to understand, perhaps chooses deliberately not to understand. He accepts the city of Mainz as mere geography, when it actually represents the Apocalypse. Consequently, he carries with him “attested facts” imbued with a meaning about which he knows nothing.

At about the same time Gallant published “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” Theodor Adorno cautioned that West Germany, the Bundesrepublik, would never possess its own future if it continued to accept superficial assumptions about its origins: “Aufgearbeitet wäre die Vergangenheit erst dann, wenn die Ursachen des Vergangenen beseitigt wären” (29). Adorno argues that not until Germany begins to understand the causes of the past will the past become accessible and the nation achieve maturity. Where the Willies of the world assume that such an understanding of the past will be a straightforward search for facts, from a position of neutrality, Gallant shows that all positions in the present are irrevocably involved with, and tainted by, the fascism that is supposedly under investigation.

Because of the story's continual process of deconstruction, the reader often feels understandably disturbed by its atmosphere of hidden menace. In the postwar years, many travellers to Germany commented that the landscape itself seemed haunted by the ghosts of fascism. Gallant herself, as has been mentioned, found it impossible to travel in Germany for many years after the war, because of her feelings of repugnance for German fascism. In this regard, Ernst, as a soldier masquerading in civilian clothes, evokes brilliantly the sense of a wartime spirit only partially transformed in the present. Monstrous shapes appear to lurk about him, and many of his comments and actions are charged with the menace of an unexorcized past. One has the impression that a terrible revelation is at hand. This feeling appears to be confirmed when Ernst reflects that, since the time he put on his Hitler Jugend uniform at age seven, he can recall only two occasions when he wore civilian clothes: when he was confirmed, and when he was “created a Werewolf” (135). This brief reference to a werewolf immediately conjures up images of animality, of a man transformed into a wolf. When Gallant then mentions that Ernst has followed a mother and child who live in a neighbouring apartment and take afternoon strolls together in the Jardin des Tuileries, the reader probably expects the worst. Ernst's reasoning is brutally pragmatic and wholly sexual: “Ernst followed this woman because she was fit for his attention. He would have sought a meeting somewhere, but the weather was against it” (138). Given the story's implication that it contains a hidden mystery about the dark past of fascism, it appears that Ernst will now appear as Nazi beast.

Yet even in the earlier story, “Willi,” Gallant has shown the assumptions behind such a view to be simplistic. The implication here is that Ernst, as a latehomecomer, brings his animality from the Nazi past into the present, which is assumed to be entirely civilized. Gallant allows the reader to make these conventional assumptions and then undermines them completely. Ernst's pursuit of the mother and child on their afternoon walk appears at first as a journey into the darkest period of the past, with Ernst as the werewolf at the centre of the labyrinth. The trees in the park metamorphose into statues; the “smoke of the blue charcoal fire was darker than the sky”; a “brave old maniac of a woman” rises out of “a sea of feeding pigeons” (136). Yet when the revelation arrives, Ernst does not himself metamorphose into a werewolf from the past. Instead, all of Paris in the present is transformed:

The mother and child are engulfed and nearly trampled suddenly by released civil servants running away from their offices behind the Gare d'Orsay. They run as if there were lions behind them. It has never been as cold as this in Paris. … There are two policemen here to protect them, and there are traffic lights to be obeyed, but every person and every thing is submerged by the dark and the cold and the torrent of motorcars and a fear like a fear of lions.

(137)

Where one expected to find only the particular instance of a woman and child fleeing before Ernst, one discovers all of Paris in flight. The image of darkness has been transferred from an individual to an entire society. The ordinary restraints of a civil society, policemen, and traffic lights, have proven insufficient to protect the people from immersion in darkness and fear—“a fear like a fear of lions.”

Through her image of flight, Gallant reveals the dark, hidden side of contemporary life, which so resembles the period during the 1930s when the fear of hidden forces caused people to flee to the apparent safety of national socialism. In literal terms, the scene shows Paris in the 1960s terrorized by uncontrolled automobile traffic, the lion rampant being the logo of the Peugeot automobile. The lions also recall the lions of the Roman spectacles, the implication being that Paris citizens feel themselves victims, trapped and overwhelmed by the modern world. The flight, the fear, proves most effective in evoking the violent and exploitative side of supposedly civilized French society.

That this image of public fear should surface even while Ernst as werewolf stalks the woman, appears altogether appropriate. Yet Gallant once again forces the reader to look behind the apparent reality of the situation. Far from infusing the vision of nightmare with any notion of individual viciousness or evil, Ernst remains indifferent to the darkness. When he grows tired of watching, he simply leaves the “child and the woman trembling on the curb,” and returns to Willi's apartment (137). In Ernst we see no hatred, no fear, no emotion of any kind. He does not speculate about the situation; he simply immerses himself in it. In this case, he actually enters the traffic, and becomes part of it. He “threads his way across, against the light” (137). His attitude—that it does not matter, that it is of no importance—embodies powerfully the sense that everything has been reduced to a posture of survival. For Ernst it no longer makes sense to attempt to bestow meaning on the present.

Ernst's refusal of meaning, or at least indifference to it, will seem to many even more monstrous than the kind of violence and brutality that might earlier have been thought to be a part of Ernst's supposed werewolf personality. Humankind, the philosophers have repeatedly told us, achieves its humanity by imbuing the raw stratum of existence with meaning, not by immersing itself in it, uncaringly. Yet at this crucial moment, Gallant opens a window onto Ernst's werewolf past, enlarging and clarifying the very meaning of the word. She reveals that Ernst is not uncaring because he is a monster, but because monstrous things happened to him in his wartime youth. In a sense Ernst is a monster, for he “lay on the ground vomiting grass, bark, and other foods he had eaten” (142). But he is also a frightened adolescent who, at the end of the war, attempts to return to his mother:

He walked all one night to the town where his mother and stepfather were. The door was locked, because the forced-labor camps were open now and ghosts in rags were abroad and people were frightened of them. His mother opened the door a crack when she recognized the Werewolf's voice (but not his face or his disguise) and she said, “You can't stay here.” There was a smell of burning. They were burning his stepfather's S.S. uniform in the cellar. Ernst's mother kissed him, but he had already turned away. The missed embrace was a salute to the frightening night, and she shut the door on her son and went back to her husband. Even if she had offered him food, he could not have swallowed. His throat closed on his breath. He could not swallow his own spit. He cannot now remember his own age or what she was like. He is either thirty-four or thirty-six, and born in Mainz.

(142-43)

As the past comes into focus, it becomes apparent that Ernst is not the mythical werewolf of medieval times, but a former member of a guerrilla force, the Werewolves, organized by Himmler at the end of the war when defeat was certain. Armed young boys were told to put on civilian clothes, destroy their identification papers, and then sabotage the approaching allied armies. A Werewolf he might be, but at age 16 Ernst follows his human instincts to return to his mother for help. Ironically, his mother and stepfather are too deeply implicated in the SS, and too frightened, to help him. Being left with no regiment, uniform, papers, or parents, Ernst is effectively robbed of everything that might give his world form. In choosing to live for the present only, intent upon fulfilling his animal needs for food, shelter, and sex, Ernst behaves as honestly as possible in the aftermath of his apocalypse.

Gallant's introduction of material about the Werewolves illustrates, through the story line, how easy it has become—even for the reader—to accept propagandistic legends about the war as truth. It is comforting to think that Nazis were literally capable of becoming wild animals, for if that is true, then civilized people cannot become Nazis. This type of thinking did in fact occur during and immediately after the end of the war. The need to explain away the evil enemy was so great that Nazi propaganda was accepted at face value. H. R. Trevor-Roper mentions that “The usurpation of Radio Werewolf by Goebbels is responsible for many of the popular misconceptions about the Werewolves …” (46). Clearly the propaganda was believed because it fulfilled existing expectations about Nazi soldiers.

Near the story's end, Gallant gives a final twist to her development of the Werewolf material as illustration of the process by which the complexity of past and present is reduced to a single barbaric image. Having allowed readers to dupe themselves into thinking Nazi soldiers were man-beasts, Gallant returns to the subject (permitting embarrassed readers some comfort) by showing a supposed authority on the subject making the same error. In leafing through one of Willi's scrapbooks about the war, Ernst finds an article by an “eminent author” in which “it is claimed that young Werewolves were animals. Their training had lowered the barrier between wolves and men. Witnesses heard them howling in the night” (145). Recognizing that this information is false, Ernst smiles, but Gallant notes that such a smile on the face of a German ex-soldier will simply be taken as further proof of the existence of Werewolves:

He grins, suddenly, reading, without knowing he has shown his teeth. If he were seen at this moment, an element of folklore would begin to seep through Europe, where history becomes folklore in a generation: “On the rue de Lille, a man of either thirty-six or thirty-four, masquerading in civilian clothes, became a wolf.” He reads: “Witnesses saw them eating babies and tearing live chickens apart.”

(145)

Taking their cue from eminent authorities and propagandists, the general public continues to manufacture horror stories about Werewolves, turning history into folklore before our eyes.

To the reader newly humbled by Gallant's stratagems, Ernst may still appear dangerous, but no more dangerous than the ordinary people who misinterpret the past to keep the present safe. Ernst, we realize, has been seeking security ever since he was made a Werewolf. He seeks it, not because he is a monster, but because, when his officers ordered him to become a Werewolf in civilian clothes, he lost his identity, lost everything that would entitle him to be treated as a prisoner of war. Now that he is again in civilian clothes, this time in Paris, he experiences the unsettling realization that those civilian clothes still offer him no form and meaning. France and Germany are once again civilized, as that term is commonly understood, but so-called civilization still regards itself as able to dismiss people such as Ernst who were called on to fight for its survival. That Ernst could fight for the Third Reich and present-day France and be left destitute by both indicates that the entire concept of civilization is suspect. It is no longer enough to ask why civilization, in its traditional forms of philosophy, art, and religion, failed to hold fast against the Nazis. Gallant now asks if civilization itself is not the culprit.

To this end, Gallant turns inwards to everyday family life in Paris. Through walls thin as paper, Ernst overhears everything that occurs in the neighbouring apartment, and learns that the daily ritual itself causes violence. Family life begins ordinarily enough in the morning, with the husband going off to work, the mother preparing the meals, and the child leaving for school. However, as the daily cycle continues, a tone of aggression soon creeps into the mother's voice. No particular problem appears, but love has clearly been replaced by a sense of imprisonment in the daily round of shopping, cooking, and child care. By noon, the endless boredom of this routine has the mother screaming at the child, demanding that he obey. By afternoon the beatings have begun:

In the evening the voice climbs still higher. “You will see, when your father comes home!” It is a bird shrieking. Whatever the child has done or said is so monstrously disobedient that she cannot wait for the father to arrive. She has to chase the child and catch him before she can beat him. There is the noise of running, a chair knocked down, something like marbles, perhaps the chestnuts, rolling on the floor. “You will obey me!” It is a promise of the future now. The caught child screams. If the house were burning, if there were lions on the stairs, he could not scream more. All round the court the neighbours stay well away from their windows. It is no one's concern. When his mother beats him, the child calls for help, and calls “Maman.” His true mother will surely arrive and take him away from his mother transformed. Who else can he appeal to? It makes sense. Ernst has heard grown men call for their mothers.

(138-39)

Caught in a terrifying situation where his own mother has turned against him, the child has no recourse but to appeal to the very person beating him. It is nonsense but, as Ernst admits, it also makes sense, for the child has no one else. The alternative is to stop crying for help altogether, accept the mother's unjust authority, and become totally obedient. This is Ernst's own solution: “He did not learn a trade in the Foreign Legion, but he did learn to obey” (139). One is reminded here of the Kennedy children in “A Day Like Any Other,” left by their mother to their individual nightmares of eternal retribution.

In “Ernst in Civilian Clothes,” the child's crying could conceivably draw help from Ernst or one of the neighbours, or from society as a whole, but everyone around assumes the rightness of such punishment. Ernst shows no compassion; his experience in the legion makes it easy for him to rationalize the situation: “He knows about submission and punishment and justice and power. He knows what the child does not know—that the screaming will stop, that everything ends” (139). While Ernst's response may be that of the so-called realist, in fact Gallant questions the conventional wisdom that says “everything ends” when, at the story's conclusion, she portrays Ernst during one of his recurrent dreams—a soldier making a search of a flooded cellar:

There is another victim in the cellar, calling “Mutti,” and it is his duty to find him and rescue him and drag him up to the light of day. He wades forward in the dark, and knows, in sleep, where it is no help to him, that the voice is his own.

(147)

The parallel between Ernst and the small boy reveals that everything does not end, and that ordinary, civilized people carry the atmosphere or spirit of their society inside themselves to the ends of their lives. Ernst's disastrous life had its beginnings in circumstances similar to those of the unfortunate French boy. In the process of growing up, Ernst has repressed his need for Mutti's protection, but it still manifests itself in dreams and in his fear of a world without authority. In Gallant's depiction, the family becomes what Erich Fromm has called the “psychological agent of society,” teaching children lifelong attitudes that assure the permanence of authoritarianism (245). Gallant suggests that, without a change in the power structure of the conventional family, individuals will continue to mature by creating organizations like the ones Ernst willingly joins—the Hitler Jugend, the Wehrmacht, and the French Foreign Legion. Whether this cycle results in ordinary hopeless domestic woe, or the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, may well be a matter of time and circumstance.

While it is possible to conclude on a large social scale that nothing ends, that the past always informs the present, on the smaller scale the individual must of course make decisions, must move into the future. Even Ernst must begin to give himself shape, and, in the final lines of the story, Gallant shows Ernst making the crucial decision: “He will believe only what he knows. It is a great decision in an important day. Life begins with facts: he is Ernst Zimmermann, ex-Legionnaire” (147). It is a brave boast, reminiscent of Sartre in its existential quality, but the entire story has shown the extent to which Ernst remains unwittingly defined by larger forces. Moreover, only a few lines before, Ernst announces that if everyone is lying, “he will invent his own truth” (147). Which of the alternatives are we to take as correct? Perhaps both. Gallant implies that it will be the lot of people such as Ernst, who imagine they can make a wholly fresh start by scraping away all the lies and uncertainties of their culture, to continue contradicting themselves. Ernst remains both the soldier searching for the child and the child himself. In fact, even as he makes his grand decision to be himself, Gallant allows us to overhear, in the last line of the story, “the child beaten by his mother” calling “Maman, Maman” (147). The reader hears the connection between “Mutti” and “Maman,” but Ernst cannot. Ironically and pathetically, Ernst's striving to become an adult who believes only the facts leaves him in the condition of the child crying for protection.

It is a grim picture, not only of the fascism in everyday life, but of the difficulty of avoiding such oppression and beginning anew. Neither Willi in his absolutism nor Ernst in his relativism appears to offer a solution. Yet the story itself presents a third kind of intelligence, which goes beyond that of Ernst and Willi. As has been seen, “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” is by no means entirely nihilistic. Images such as those of Stalingrad and the Werewolf break through the veil of unknowing to connect past and present. In Gallant's narrative schema, the reader exists for moments in both the past and the present, and therefore perceives the past as it continues to exist unrecognized in the present—a perception for the most part unavailable to, or denied by the characters in the stories. Gallant's purpose is not to undermine the present with accounts of dark atrocities, but to make the past a part of the present, something real that must be declared and taken into account as individuals prepare to create the future. Her stories present themselves as archaeological encounters in which the seemingly fresh, ahistorical present is gradually stripped away to reveal layer upon layer of unrecognized past experience, all of which, Gallant suggests, recreates itself in daily life unless recognized and exposed.

This essay has considered only a few of Gallant's stories that depict the subversive influence of everyday fascism, a theme that has continued to interest her. Much of her recent collection, Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985), portrays the sense of disarray arising from a resurgence of right-wing politics in contemporary French society. Although these more recent stories indicate the need for basic reforms in the social structure, the solutions offered by her characters prove comically conservative and inadequate. The sense of a historical cycle from World War II to the present is brilliantly rendered, particularly in the four stories centering on Edouard and Magdalena, where Gallant shows how the mind turns away from individual and social reconstruction to pursue the trappings of power. Gallant leaves us with a picture of Western individuals refusing to look beyond their own constructions, imprisoned by their own minds.

Notes

1. “The Latehomecomer” appeared in the New Yorker, 8 July 1974—too late to be included in The Pegnitz Junction. It was collected in From the Fifteenth District (1979).

2. “Willi” remains uncollected. It appeared in the New Yorker (1963). Gallant collected “Ernst in Civilian Clothes” in The Pegnitz Junction (1973).

3. Stories about the “latehomecomer,” or Spätheimkehrer, form an important minor genre in German fiction. Wolfgang Borchert's Draussen vor der Tür is one of the better known.

4. Susan Sontag offers additional insights into the appeal of fascism in “Fascinating Fascism.”

5. For further information on the art of this period, see Berthold Hinz (156 ff.).

6. This struggle between Geist and Welt appears as a common theme in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature (Hamburger 87).

7. The term deconstruction is, nevertheless, worth retaining in connection with Gallant's fiction, since it points to her technique of unfolding apparently transparent ideas and language to reveal their highly ambiguous natures once the assumptions of a given cultural base stand revealed.

8. For further information on the moral impact of the Algerian war, see Dorothy Pickles (215).

9. Even now, many young Germans complain that they do not know what it means to be German.

10. One recalls that the industrialists in the early 1930s were willing to use anyone to help them gain their ends. Their most notorious employee was Hitler himself.

11. Ralf Dahrendorf quotes approvingly Schumpeter's phrase about capitalism in describing the whole of modern German society as “bathed in an economic light” (56).

12. John Ardagh describes the problems, many of which were economic, that led to the revolts of 1968 (31-95).

13. Information on this delicate subject of the sale of prisoners of war by Americans is difficult to find. One of the few articles on the subject is Arthur L. Smith, Jr.'s.

14. French radio and television are government controlled. Unlike most North American newspapers, which present their biases under the guise of objective reporting, French newspapers do not attempt neutral factual reporting, most articles being written from an openly editorial point of view.

15. It is not so well known that Nietzsche strongly opposed the growing nationalism and militarism in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. See The Gay Science (160-62; sec. 104). For further information, see Erich Heller.

16. Compare Hayden White's arguments in “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.”

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Erziehung zur Mündigkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963.

Ardagh, John. The New France: A Society in Transition 1945-1977. 3rd. ed. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1977.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1965.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NJ: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967.

Brecht, Bertolt. “A Short Organum for the Theatre.” Playwrights on Playwriting: The Meaning and Making of Modern Drama from Ibsen to Ionesco. Trans. John Willett. Ed. Toby Cole. New York: Hill, 1960. 72-105.

Dahrendorf, Ralf. “The New Germanies: Restoration, Revolution, Reconstruction” Encounter Apr. 1964: 50-58.

Didion, Joan. “Doris Lessing.” The White Album. New York: Washington Square-Pocket Books, 1980. 119-25.

Fromm, Erich. The Fear of Freedom. 1942. London: Routledge, 1960.

Gallant, Mavis. “A Day Like Any Other.” Gallant, The Other Paris. 217-40.

———. “Ernst in Civilian Clothes.” The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories. New York: Random, 1973. 131-47.

———. “An Interview with Mavis Gallant.” With Geoff Hancock. A Special Issue on Mavis Gallant. Ed. Hancock. Spec. issue of Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978): 18-67.

———. “The Latehomecomer.” From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979. 117-38.

———. The Other Paris. Boston: Houghton, 1956.

———. “The Other Paris.” Gallant, The Other Paris. 1-30.

———. Personal interview. Nov. 1979.

———. “Señor Pinedo.” Gallant, The Other Paris. 199-216.

———. “Willi.” New Yorker 5 Jan. 1963: 29-31.

Hamburger, Michael. From Prophecy to Exorcism: The Premises of Modern German Literature. London: Longmans, 1965.

Heller, Erich. “The Importance of Nietzsche: On the Modern German Mind.” Encounter Apr. 1964: 59-66.

Hinz, Berthold. Art in the Third Reich. Trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber. New York: Pantheon, 1979.

Leuchtenburg, William E. A Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945. Rev. ed. Boston: Little, 1983.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage-Random, 1974.

Pickles, Dorothy. The Fifth French Republic: Institutions and Politics. 1960. London: Methuen, 1965.

Smith, Arthur L., Jr. “Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen und Frankreich, 1945-1949.” Ed. K. D. Bracker and H. P. Schwarz. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 32 (1984): 103-21.

Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, 1980. 71-105.

Trevor-Roper, H. R. The Last Days of Hitler. New York: Macmillan, 1947.

White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. 41-62.