Night Of The Broken Glass - Softcover

Peter Broner has had a varied career as a novelist, playwright, journalist, psychotherapist, and intelligence agent. Emigrating as a boy from Germany, he fought in World War II against Germany, serving in various branches of U.S. Intelligence. After the war, a bachelor s degree in journalism led to work as a foreign correspondent in Vienna and Frankfurt before returning to the United States to pursue a career in writing. In 1970 he obtained a master s degree in social work and worked for ten years as a staff therapist in a mental health clinic. He continues to maintain a private psychotherapy practice near Hyde Park, New York, where he lives with his wife and two children. Mr. Broner has had several plays produced Off-Off-Broadway and elsewhere, published a number of short stories and has twice won Samuel Goldwyn writing prizes. Night of the Broken Glass is one of several novels he has written.

An old-fashioned multiplot novel showing the attempts of three well-meaning Germans to resist the horrors of the Nazi regime. Paul Silver, hungry for acceptance by his anti-Semitic friends, leaps at the chance to join the Hitlerjugend when his Gentile mother reveals that he's really the illegitimate son of Baron von Hallenberg; but when the spineless, apolitical Baron--recently forced to join the Nazi Party in order to protect his lands--tries to adopt Paul and make him his heir, Paul takes off for America and enlists with the Allies following Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, streetcar conductor Johann Stantke, unable to live in acquiescence with the Nazi oppressors, turns first to anti-Hitler graffiti--a futile gesture--and then has himself arrested and sent to Dachau to express solidarity with the oppressed. Finally, shoe manufacturer Martin Hammerschmidt rescues nearly four hundred Buchenwald inmates by requisitioning them to work in his factory, cautiously improving their lives while pretending to exploit them. The moral thrust of all these actions seems clear, but playwright Broner, who doesn't appear to trust his powers of dramatization, keeps explaining and explaining the message of each obligatory scene, turning his exploration of evil into a tidy moral allegory. Broner's Victorian plotting improbably rescues his three decent principals while consigning his villains to sundry bad ends--a depressingly happy ending. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.