Books: The Anatomy of Courage

THE STEEPER CLIFF (340 pp.)—David Davidson—Random House ($3).

This is perhaps the best novel yet written by an American about postwar Germany. It is sometimes too stagey, often too self-consciously penetrating in its analysis of character. But it is honest, observant, and has a theme at once simple and troubling. Its hero, Lieut. Cooper, works in the Newspaper Section of Military Government; his job is to unearth heroes, i.e., German journalists who had bucked the Nazis and somehow survived. He squirms guiltily in his role of judging conqueror. How would he, as a German, have stood the test of the Nazi terror?...