A Small Town in Germany [antikvár]

1NTR.ODUCTIONA Small Town in Germany is printed with aversion in my memory, and I can think of little good to say of it until I begin to remember its three principal protagonists: the former refugee, Harting; the acidly pragmatic British diplomat, Bradfield; and the driven and unhappy investigator, Alan Turner, whose part 1 secretly allocated to myself. Then reluctantly 1 have to concede that I did, after all, achieve much of what I had wanted to achieve, and that the novel is not the eyesore I always imagine it to be.The reasons for my aversion are many. The first is that I had set out to write something close to a black comedy about British political manners, and yet the result was widely perceived to be ferociously anti-German.And perhaps it was. The West Germany of Konrad Adenauer was not all lovely by any means: old players from the Hitler time were two-a-penny, whether they were such men as Adenauer's own eminence grise, Herr Globke, who had had a hand in drafting Hitler's Nuremberg laws discriminating against the Jews, or such luminaries of the Free Democratic Party as Herr Achenbach, who helped organise the deportation of French Jews from Paris, or the ebullient Herr Zogelmann, who only eighteen years before had been a high-ranking figure in the Hitler Youth. In the West German police, the judiciary, the intelligence fraternity, and the armed services, in