Walter Abish prefaces How German Is It with an epigraph from Jean-Luc Godard, "What is really at stake is one's image of oneself," a remark any novelist (or poet) might use to signal to the reader that the work in hand may be deeper than it appears. Thinking about it after completing Abish's ice-cold tour de force, his vision of contemporary Germany as the Air Conditioned Nightmare, is like finding a blank check signed with an unknown name: is it worth a small fortune, or a few dollars and change? That Godard's is not an unknown name doesn't help much; indeed, I think it's his name Abish is interested in more than his portentous remark, for How German Is It appears to be a homage to Godard, almost a Godard movie in prose, filled with distancing anti-illusionist devices: documentary passages, interviews, deadpan "readings" of still photographs, a police lecture on an antiterroist film. The narrative voice probes the characters, the action, Das Neue Deutschland itself, with a thousand questions, some of which it answers, some of which it leaves sardonically suspended: "The question remains, do the Germans still expect to be asked embarrassing questions about their past and about their present and what, if any, ideas they may have about their future?" Reality itself is under interrogation by a voice that only lets on what it knows when it's to its own political advantage, a voice that plays at will psychiatrist, historian, documentary film-maker or sophisticated police investigator, and that can bully when it doesn't get the answer it wants…. (pp. 303-04)

The immediate subjects of interrogation are the brothers Hargenau (once von Hargenau): Ulrich, a writer; Helmuth, a successful architect; and a widening circle of their wives, mistresses, friends, and business and political associates…. Ulrich has returned to Germany after a cooling-off period in France: he has testified in court against members of a radical Left terrorist group of which he was a half-hearted member, drawn into terrorist plotting by his now-estranged wife, Paula, who is still, somewhere, a dedicated Ultra. The terrorists are out to get him, and he fatalistically endures their threatening calls and letters (including a marvelously sinister doctored-up coloring book) and their sporadic attempts on his life. The nonpolitical Helmuth's career, too, is in danger, for the terrorists have taken to blowing up his buildings. Abish is at his best creating a sense of a society where paranoia is rational, a place in which one no longer knows what anyone else's political allegiances may be, nor whether those allegiances are to Left or to Neo-Nazi networks. The girl who moves into the vacant apartment upstairs; the old family retainer who turns up as a waiter in an expensive restaurant one frequents; a surly book-seller; the photo-journalist who arrives to do a piece on you and hangs around to sleep over; a simple bridge-tender; any or all may have terrorist connections. And knowing who's who is made more difficult by the disguises and temptations of radical-chic. Even one's brother may have set one up for an assassination attempt. When Helmuth makes an alliance with a group of scruffy motorcyclists, are we to suspect his politics or a careerist move to protect the buildings he designs?

On the fringes of the action floats the figure of Brumhold, an old metaphysician whose former apologetics for the New Order everyone would like to forget (Heidegger?)—as Abish's Germany industriously forgets, or better, only selectively remembers its past…. Brumholdstein, the New City of which Helmuth Hargenau is leading architect, is a brilliantly realized landscape and metaphor, a savage epitome of Das Neue Deutschland: cleanliness, order, dependability, punctuality, culture organized in museums and concert halls, glass buildings, and mountains of luscious pastries. It is a site for deliberate forgetting, but the main point of Abish's novel appears to be a relentless refusal to allow Germany to forget. For Brumholdstein has been constructed over the site of a concentration camp; its sleek prosperity and numbed self-satisfaction are interrupted by the discovery of a mass grave beneath its main business thoroughfare. The tension of the novel, a taut novel indeed, is captured in that image—as Abish's merciless camera and sound equipment record the life of a whole people attempting to suppress a past that won't lie still, as they incorporate methodically the routinized violence of the present.

Abish is an artist of enormous resources and control, and How German Is It is a most readable book, not only for its bitter comic observation, but for a narrative drive propelled simultaneously by what's going to happen? and what did happen? The mercilessness of it spoils it for me, for there is a thesis guiding it, and that thesis demands that Abish rigorously suppress any extravagant energies, any complexities, any life within his characters, any sign that a German may have moments of sensibility (or folly) that don't support the thesis. We are familiar with this New Wave manner of observing slightly narcotized characters against "dehumanized" landscapes, but there is a difference between film and prose: in the movies there is the chance that the actor may supply some quirky and mysterious presence that may not be suggested in the desiccated script. But Abish has only his prose, and within that prose he won't (can't?) give his people or his "Germany" a chance. There is an unpleasant implied condemnation of a whole people which, not to press the point too hard, can't help reminding us of the very fault Abish won't let Germany forget, Engagé as all get-out, this deft writer (after a flashy coup de théâtre that would be "effective" in a film, but that belies the artistry on every other page) steps forward with his placard: "Is it possible for anyone in Germany, nowadays, to raise his right hand, for whatever the reason, and not be flooded by the memory of a dream to end all dreams?" What is really at stake is one's image of oneself and others. (pp. 304-06)