Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015 53 Wiechert paid for this bold act of defiance with four months in the Buchenwald concentra- tion camp. On his release, Goebbels threatened to have him killed if he publicly protested again. Wiechert was blacklisted; no publisher would risk releasing a new book by him until after the war. The single exception was Das einfache Leben (“The Simple Life”) in 1939, a celebration of life in nature with similarities to Thoreau’s Walden. To Goebbels’s fury, the censor’s sup- pression order for this book failed to reach the publisher before it went to press, and in just three years it sold over a quarter million copies. After the war, on November 11, 1945, Wiechert made another “Address to the German Youth,” calling for national repentance and cas- tigating those who sought to glorify German war heroes: The heroes and martyrs of these last years are not those returning with victor’s laurels from countries we defeated. Rather, they are those who have died and suffered ruin behind prison bars and barbed wire, to Germany’s honor. For this kind of honor was the only kind to be had. Such words fell harshly on the ears of those post-war Germans who wished to forget the crimes in which they had been complicit. Wiechert increasingly lost his popularity among readers, and even fellow writers, many of them socialist, turned their backs on him, charging him with back-to-nature romanticism and “Old Prussian pietism” (in the words of Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács). Frus- trated, Wiechert left Germany for Switzerland in 1948, where he died two years later. Gradually his books went out of print in Germany (though not in Poland) and dropped out of the literary canon. A courageous voice was silenced again. While a prisoner in Buchenwald, Wiechert was put to work as a stone carrier and later assigned to the camp’s “surface drainage crew.” As Alfred Werner later reported in an obituary in Commentary, the once-celebrated author, then nearing fifty, became weak and tubercular, his hands and feet grossly swollen. He was shocked to the core by the horror he had witnessed. He “felt a crack run through God’s image [man], a crack that would never heal.” If this healing never came to Wiechert per- sonally, he dreamed of it. When he died in 1950, he left a startlingly honest novel that por- trays what such redemption might look like. Published posthumously, Tidings is a novel of Dostoyevskian depth which portrays an inner journey. While spare in historical detail, it is populated with characters both victimized and complicit, all striving toward restoration. First published as Missa sine nomine – “Mass without a name” – the novel is set in the Rhön Mountains of central Germany after the end of the Second World War. Baron Amadeus, the main character, is one of three brothers of German nobility who have been separated by the war. The novel opens with Amadeus on the road home from concentration camp, still wearing his striped camp uniform. He reaches the family castle to find it inhabited by Ameri- can troops while his brothers live in a small shepherd’s hut. Amadeus is reunited with his brothers, but is inwardly isolated by the suffer- ing he has witnessed and experienced, and by his own guilt: although gentle by nature, he had shot and killed “the hangman” of the camp. He tells his brothers: I have killed . . . with this hand . . . and what is more . . . I would kill again at any time, if one of the faces which smiled while they tortured appeared here. There something within me changed; something that I had was taken away from me. . . . You have remained the same. But no one is untouched by the war. The oldest brother, tormented by the memory of the night when he abandoned the peasant families in his charge to the onslaught of troops, seeks to make Tidings: A Novel Ernst Wiechert (Plough, hard- cover, 305 pages)