Felix Hartlaub's literary importance lies largely in the hypothetical--in what might have been had he lived beyond the age of thirty-one. On the basis of his precocious diction; his ability to transform visual experience into trenchant prose, whether cool or sensual; his breaking of syntax to reflect direct experience; and his early incorporation of filmic techniques into prose, his was one of the greatest and one of the most innovative talents of his generation. A trained historian, he was highly sensitive to the possibilities of interplay between professional language and literary language. Probably deriving from his sense of history is his "negative" or detached hero, who is buffeted by historical forces yet is capable of action and able to survive in spite of his fear and powerlessness. The distance insulating this hero from the historical forces working about him, as well as the distance between narrator and hero...