Crazy in Berlin by Thomas Berger

especially now that he was flunking. He tried to convince her that the Army life held promise of far more squalid drudgery than did college, that it was likely a person of his delicate constitution would collapse in training, and she was to a degree mollified.
    Of course he didn’t really say this; he seldom talked to his parents at all, simply, on his holiday visits home, communicating silently through the shoulder blades, a language he had learned from his father. When he was a small boy Reinhart had often wished for a temporary catastrophe from which he could rescue his folks—an unarmed burglar or minor fire—not only to show he cared but also to see if they did, if they could honor triumph as well as defeat, but the occasion never came, and just as well, for it might have come during one of his frequent illnesses—at which time, anyway, he had their interest.
    They were German too, one generation closer than he, and celebrated the fact in their tastes—must have, because they could hardly have invented them on their own: heavy, flavorless food, limited ambitions, disapproval of the maverick, funeral-going, trust in people with broad faces, and belief in the special virtue of a dreary breed known as the German mother. “German” as a lifelong malady that was without hope but never serious; as the thin edge above want and far below plenty; as crepe-hanging; as self-pity—yet from these compounding a strange morality that regarded itself as superior to all variant modes. He had been encouraged since infancy to think of himself as an average man, but in a harshly restricted community where some were less average than others; if wealthy, had immorally taken too much from the world; if very poor, were immorally lazy; if taking pleasure in the material, ostentatious; if ascetic, holier-than-thou. But never “German” as the lofty vision, the old and exquisite manners of prince and peasant, battlements and armor, clear water splashing down from high, blue rocks, wine named for the milk of the Virgin, maleness, the noble marriage of feeling and thought.
    But they sent him to college, on an insurance policy which his father, being an agent, had sold to himself, and the premiums for which, lean year in and out, had claimed all their unencumbered money, and Reinhart had first opted for Liberal Arts instead of Business Administration and now left even that. As he departed for camp he carried, along with his toilet articles and change of socks in a miniature suitcase, an acute suspicion that he would come to nothing, and... a marvelous sense of relief.
    At the induction center an interviewer saw the B in zoology on the record and put him down for a medic, asking him first, though, for as a volunteer you had some faint choice. And he agreed, suddenly finding his bloodthirsty fancy had paled; a superior and sensitive person deplored violence; it didn’t, as every retroactive commentator on past wars insisted, “settle anything.” He personally had made himself so strong with the weights that no one bothered him, and if they did, he generally gave way in the conviction that not only were they probably right but that also anger and hostility were degrading. Under the Geneva Rules medical troops were all but neutral, and in recognition of this were not intentionally shot at and if captured were obliged to go on treating wounded, theirs or the enemy’s, it made no difference; they were above the taking of sides.
    The Germans honored this convention—that was admitted by the most rabid. For after he had been in the service a few months, Reinhart began to seek reasons why the Germans, while wrong—they warred against the U.S., for one thing, and it was probably true that Czechoslovakia and Norway and Holland, little harmless Holland!, had inoffensively not deserved invasion; true as well that, even discounting for cheap newsmen and their “copy,” there had been regrettable brutalities by the extremist, Nazi units, although