THE QUICK AND THE DEAD by Thomas Wiseman. 442 pages. Viking. $6.95.
Any novel concerning a. Nazi and a Jew would seem to offer about as much chance for originality these days as a cowboy-and-Indian movie. Nonetheless, the Austrian-born English author of Czar and Journey of a Man has managed to produce an extraordinary book about that very relationship. Thomas Wiseman's study of two Austrians—Stefan Kazakh, a half-Jew, and Konrad Wirthof, a wholehearted Nazi—is a brilliant tour de force of rare psychological depth and complexity.
The novel begins in 1967 with Kazakh, a rich London-based survivor of World War II and of three wives, obeying a powerful compulsion to return to Vienna. There, memories of his youth and early manhood torment him, providing the narrative structure for the book. A more predictable story might have emphasized the Nazis' victimization of the Jews. Instead, Wiseman focuses on Kazakh's metaphysical obsession with Wirthof, an SS officer with grand passions and grandiose ideas. Though the two are totally disparate in personality and background, Kazakh feels that his own identity has somehow been submerged in Wirthof s (to an extent reversing the situation in Remain Gary's 1968 comic novel, The Dance of Genghis Cohri). Says Kazakh: "Wirthof still glitters in me, on my energy, in my time: that mica glitter of his: that is the source of my exhaustion; if only he would glitter less I would not have to despise him so much, and how much time and energy I spend on despising him, but there seems to have been a bargain struck between us, and I don't know how to get out of it, surely it cannot hold forever."
Outrageous Demands. The two first meet in a magician's tent in 1925 as ten-year-old boys. Wirthof, a rich, aristocratic Aryan and the son of a crippled World War I general, is already arrogant and glib despite his pale blond fragility. Kazakh, son of an Aryan mother and a Jewish father who is killed as a heroic leader of the Social Democrat uprising in 1934, is a shy, sensitive boy, but stronger and taller than Wirthof. Kazakh easily wins the foot race that follows their initial encounter; yet he is able to realize even then that Wirthof dominates him psychologically if not physically.
That domination determines both their fates. When they meet again accidentally after the Anschluss, Wirthof has joined the SS and become an unthinking mouthpiece for Nazi ideology. Kazakh, a purposeless intellectual uncertain about his future or his feelings, has turned from engineering to become a hypnotist and a pioneer in advertising with nouveau riche connections. Curiously, it is Kazakh who comes closest to being a callous cynic. Wirthof, despite his crass behavior in bordellos, his egotistic mistreatment of acquaintances and his sensual brutality, is actually the overemotional romantic.