SOURCE: Skwara, Erich Wolfgang. Review of Die Verteidigung der Kindheit, by Martin Walser. World Literature Today 66, no. 2 (spring 1992): 334-35.

In the following review, Skwara hails Walser's achievement in Die Verteidigung der Kindheit as “a major literary event,” delineating its themes, protagonist, and plot within the context of “German-German” postwar history.

Martin Walser's newest work, Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (The Defense of Childhood), truly a magnum opus, is a book of fiction—or is it rather a biography? If so, then we read a double biography: namely, the life of ill-fated Alfred Dorn, painful hero of the impossible, and that of East and West Germany in the fore- or background. The novel, then, might be read—and would be misread—as a historical or political text alone, but its author goes far beyond such worthwhile yet trivial intentions. Despite the rather traditional epic narrative likely to make the book...