THE SLAVE SHIP

The years from to 1945, when Hitler piloted the slave ship of the Third into the , background the story of Georg Forster, a liberal newspaper man, who deplored the of the little corporal but like so many others did nothing about it. Off to an awkward start, and somewhat bogged down by the drawn-out cafe this follows Georg from a brief Italian holiday to a set back in his career and the opening of a book publishing firm, and gradually but inevitably to war. From 1943 and the first effective airraids against Berlin, the story picks up pace and becomes sharply vivid in its descriptions of life in the city when Berlin is reduced to rubble. The climax in the tremendous fire-and-phosphorous bomb raid on in which Georg's wife is killed, his identity wiped out, and he greets the American tanks as a graying man without a past and with not too much future... Another indictment of the well-meaning, do-nothing liberal, this has a timely theme.