Books: Death of a City

BERLIN (446 pp.)—Theodor Pllevier—Doubleday ($4.50).

As Hitler's Germany went to its doom in Berlin 1945, it was still dominated by the Fiihrer, who issued orders for mad and bloody victories, moving nonexistent ghost battalions across the map, while the bombers and Russian artillery destroyed his city and people above his bunker. It is in terms of this "Bunker-God" that German Novelist Theodor Plievier tells the story of the end. To that story he has brought a method somewhat reminiscent of Tolstoy's War and Peace—a combination of imagination and public record—that he applied to...