A better title [for Eine Liebe in Deutschland] might be "A Hochhuth Hotchpotch." For most of the volume is stuffed with a mélange of quotations, anecdotes, documents and thoughts issuing from Hochhuth's reading, research and reflection on Germany past and present, while "Eine Liebe in Deutschland," the account of a former Polish POW doing forced labor in a German village and of a German woman with a husband off in the army, takes up far less than half of it. (p. 96)

Bringing to light the facts of [a] 1941 case—of the two lovers and the citizenry involved in their denunciation and punishment (all of whom possible he interviewed)—more than suffices to justify Hochhuth's documentary zeal and to do him credit as a writer. It therefore seems all the more to mar this sobering story, so telling in itself, that he feels compelled to offer a fictional...