GERMANS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 668, 24 April 1952, Page 13

GERMANS

FOLLOW MY LEADER, by Louis Hagen; Allan Wingate; 15/-. ROAST PIGEON, by James Cadell; McGibbon and Kee. English price, 10/6. FrOLLOW MY LEADER consists of nine case histories of pseudonymous inhabitants of post-war Germany. It is concerned with the problem how far they were implicated in the guilt of the Nazi Government. Various moderately interesting details of life in Germany emerge laboriously from its pages but it cannot be said to be particularly readable and certainly the author, or editor, when he comes to sum up his material finds himself with only platitudinous conclusions. The root of the trouble seems to lie in the method of putting down the stories of "representative" Germans as presented by themselves without making the necessary imaginative effort to get at the truth of their situations. This becomes clear when the book is compared with James Cadell’s novel Roast Pigeon which tells the story of a concentration camp victim who returns to wage a vendetta with two leading citizens of his town who had railroaded him to Dachau in 1941 and are now working their way back to political as well as economic power. ("Roast Pigeon" is the German idiom for the deceptively satisfactory situation which the man (continued on next page)

BOOKS

(continued from previous page) finds on his return). It is not only a pleasure instead of a hardship to read this book but one has at least the impression that it has said something important about its subject. Cadell writes as if he could perceive what was going on in front of him and find the right images to fix it on the page. He has published two thrillers under another name but this is his first serious

novel,

Hubert

Witheford