Scenes from the End: The Last Days of World War II in Europe

Covers the last weeks of World War II focusing on the social, cultural, and moral aspects of the conflict.

Interviewing prisoners of war as an intelligence officer during the closing days of WWII provided Manuel, a journalist and historian,with an unusual view of the conflict. Social, cultural and moral disintegration are the subjects here, not combat, and this account, based on excerpts from letters and notes Manuel wrote at the time, constitutes "a documentary record" of his feelings and observations. Whether during the Battle of the Bulge or in Alsace or Germany, the interviewees cling to beliefs that a new weapon will still bring victory. They alternately fend off or embrace responsibility, and express bitterness toward their leaders and relief that the Americans (and not the Russians) have finally arrived. Most often, the prisoners serve as illustrations that hunger and survival usually take precedence over dignity. Throughout, there are problems of judgment facing Manuel. Some are immediate and specific: is an eccentric with wild claims one of the valued scientists to be shipped to America or a madman to be left for the Russians? Others border on the cosmological: does justice demand that the vanquished be punished or assisted? The young Manuel, who had been a journalist during the Spanish Civil War, sees "sloppy romantics" who "slobber over the vanquished," and feels like an accessory to injustice for treating the guilty with some respect. The mature Manuel, looking back, sees in himself the "sentiments of superior virtue that besmirch all victors." With stream-of-consciousness prose more literary than journalistic and observations more layered and nuanced than chronological or even logical, this book is a brief glimpse through relatively sophisticated eyes of humanity stripped of the cloak of civilization. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Manuel (A Requiem for Karl Marx) was a European correspondent for The Nation at the outbreak of World War II. But in late 1943, because he spoke German, he became an intelligence officer for the U.S. Army. His main job was to interview prisoners--whom, he discovered, were only too happy to provide information as long as they were not turned over to the Russians. Here, Manuel reflects on those days: drawing bits and pieces from the interviews and offers supplementing them with his memories, he illustrates the confusion of war and his impressions of the prisoners. Because his stint in the army lasted only a few months (as he followed the army into south Germany) the book is short. And although it is neither profoundly philosophical nor scholarly, it is worth reading. More appropriate for public than academic libraries.
-Mark E. Ellis, Albany State Univ., Leesburg, GA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Manuel, an eminent historian of ideas, was an interrogator with the U.S. Army that swept into Germany in 1945. He imparts his recollections of Nazidom's chaotic collapse in various literary modes. Quotations from his contemporaneous documents seem straightforward. In other places, Manuel imagines the thinking of the German officers he's questioning, which extends to the self-justifications such cogs in the tyrannical machine might have made to themselves, from "I knew nothing" to "I could do nothing." Yes, it was hard for Manuel to find red-blooded Nazis in 1945, though self-pitying captured soldiers were common. Making no pretense at exactly recording his dialogues with the prisoners (he describes this book as "feigned history"), hoi-polloi and formerly high and mighty alike, Manuel nevertheless preserves his then-attitudes: contempt for Germans and feelings of superiority in himself, of which he writes he is now ashamed. Self-deprecatory sarcasm about his contribution to victory lightens this unconventional, but verbally nimble and informative retrospective. Gilbert Taylor