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ISE UP IN ANGER by Stefan Olivier

ISE UP IN ANGER

By

Pub Date: April 26th, 1963
Publisher: Putnam

This is a revenge tale that begins as a blazing classic and ends as a very superior movie scenario. In 1942, Oberleutnant Herbert Boysen, 25, an idealistic Nazi, returns from fighting the Russians at Kharkov to duty in Athens. There he accidentally comes close to discovering that his superiors are part of the black market, and on a false charge he is sent off to a KZ (Concentration camp). He survives two murderous years there; goes on to the Russian front, is caught and spends five years in a Siberian POW camp. Released in 1949, he returns to Berlin and finds that his father is now rich. Boysen buys into a construction company, helps rebuild Hamburg and also becomes rich. Now he can revenge himself on the officers who had originally sent him off to the KZ, and he does. The mechanics of his reprisals are not as compelling as the day by day education of this Nazi Candide. The first scenes come off the page with a golden irony that needs no tricks and if the author had kept to the stripped story-telling of his opening, instead of going off into ""novelization"", interior monologue, obligatory scenes which are not obligatory, this would have been a much better novel. As it now stands, it is good and the scene where Boysen finds his father, after seven years, condenses into a single moment, a great national experience. Olivier may be remembered for his earlier and Vow (Putnam-1960).