SEARCH IN GOMORRAH

Panger's tendency toward talkiness and preachiness only slightly marred his affecting novel about the terminally ill, Dance of the Wild Mouse (1979). Here, however, those flaws are fatal--in a plodding, numbingly verbose morality-play that attempts to dramatize, yet again, the question of German war-crimes guilt. A US soldier--referred to only as ""the soldier""--shoots five unarmed German POWs, all SS men, in a desperate them-or-me situation. He's officially exonerated, but he suffers psychosomatic symptoms (frostbitten hands that won't heal)--so, urged on by an Army psychiatrist, the soldier vows to ""find out who were the men I killed. . . to learn if they were guilty of crimes."" In postwar Germany, then, he investigates the five dead men--in five static chapters. Klans Erhardt turns out to be a bona fide monster (though ""from another point of view he was just all fucked up""--by his neurotic parents). Heinrich Rathenau is revealed as a fanatical, professorial Aryan racist but a non-violent one. (""Like all of us,"" says the wife of a part-Jew helped by Rathenau, ""he was neither all good nor all bad."") Kurt Golze, it seems, was a frightened, passive family man no better or worse than ""the soldier"" himself. (The soldier has a spot of graphic sex with Golze's widow Anna, now wed to a fat, impotent hypocrite.) Erich Kleist was cold and efficient, but his by-the-book approach saved many Jews. (The soldier's investigation here leads him to a US undercover agent looking for Martin Bormann.) And finally there's Julius Schwarzmann, who turns out to have been a music-loving commandant at Treblinka, a madman whose inconsistent behavior is recollected by a Treblinka survivor. The soldier's conclusion? He can't reach one, of course, but merely returns to find love with Anna. . . who asks, ""Can your search ever end?"" (""The soldier stared upward through the darkness, then slowly shook his head."") A familiar sermon--wearyingly belabored.