"...and Christppher Plummer as Field Marshal Rommel!" -- Garbo

The Kay Kemble Project, being history-based, tends to lead me down rabbit holes. Most of the time this is positive or at least neutral and interesting, but once in a while I find myself in a toxic radioactive mine, research-wise. This happened to me recently while looking stuff up about the 1933 film "Herioes for Sale."

 The pre-Code movie has Loretta Young and other Hollywood stars in it, the but story about a veteran with drug problems was based on the work of German author Hans Hellmut Kirst. 

 

 

To find out more about Kirst, I did what I always do when looking up 20th century history: I borrowed some old books from the public library. Our local library has mostly murder mysteries and reference books students used to use for school papers, but our statewide system has a lot of college libraries and they have shelf room for the dustier old tomes.

 

 

 

Hans Hellmut Kirst, I soon discovered, had a whole series of books about an Everyman character, a German soldier named Gunner Asch. The author was so prolific and had so popular with American readers that I felt Kirst might be an author whose work I wanted to try out. So in addition to the books I'd borrowed, I also bought a couple of cheap paperbacks on eBay.The cover art for one of these was kinda creepy, which should have been a red flag, but I ignored that.

 

 

 

 

 Since the character of Gunner Asch was a rebel who defied the Nazi leadership, I thought his creator, Hans Kirst, might have been a brave German voice speaking up after the war about how wrong it all was. 

Well, how wrong I myself turned out to be. The character of Gunner Asch is more an Ensign Pulver or a Gomer Pyle than a dedicated resister. The average German soldier is a dolt or a selfish lazy schemer in these books, and the point of it all is how incompetent or easy-to-hoodwink the Nazi military leadership was. 

There was a 1957 film called "08/15," a compilation of episodes from some of the Gunner Asch stories. As you can see from watching a few minutes, "08/15" is like the British "Carry On" series, but with Nazis. This is twelve years after the German surrender, when the truth and reality of the Nazi brutality was really just coming to light.

 

 

At this point,I suppose,  another amateur historian would have given up on this author research. But I thought "There mus be more to this Kirst guy," so I dug up more info. Kirst, I found out, had written  some suspense novels set within the strife-filled, back-stabbing world of the high leadership in the Nazi party, which seems like an interesting premise. So I tried a couple the"Generals" novels: The Affairs of the Generals, and The Night of the Generals. This second one had come out in 1962, and it received the Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America.

 

After an unpleasant afternoon with the two books, all I can say is $^&$!!  I mean,in my time I have read some misogynistic American literature of the 1940s through the 1970s, but wowee.

 I started one of the books in this series -- I think in was The Affairs of the Generals -- found the violence and pure hate and violence toward womankind very hard to take. So I let that one go and started with a second novel in the Generals series. 

 Not readable. Seriously. No one who has the tiniest bit of respect for their wife, mother, sister, or female friends could read Kirst's Generals series and feel all right about it. I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say it's not an act of violence here, or an epithet there. I encountered pages and pages and pages of two alternating vats of vileness:  slurs against women, in one case a murder victim, and discussion of gratuitous sexual violence. Yikes and yikes and yikes again. I still feel slightly ill from reading as much as I did and that was some time ago

 

 So finally it occurred to me to look up more about Hans Hellmut Kirst's biography instead of going with my original assumptions that he was anti-Nazi. Uh no. Wikipedia got me sorted out in a hot minute.

Kirst joined the Nazi Party early, in 1933. He said later that he "had confused National Socialism with Germany." served in the military as an officer. Wikipedia said he had been a First Lieutenant and National Socialist Command Officer. Kirst was unrepentent after World War II. The wiki goes on to say "Kirst later indicated that after the war he did not immediately believe accounts of Nazi atrocities. 'One did not really know one was in a club of murderers,' he recalled."

Does not seem to have hurt his literary career or reputation any. I have no idea what to make of that. But what Hollywood made of it was a1967  movie. One of the taglines of the trailer for "The Night of the Generals" is the title of this blog post.