Werner Bergengruen was one of the most prominent and widely acclaimed German authors of the 1940s and 1950s, a writer with impeccable anti-Nazi credentials who offered comfort and hope to a demoralized people. The conservative, strongly Christian tone of his works was not threatening to anyone. While others began to question middle-class values and spoke of a disintegrating, senseless, and absurd world, Bergengruen proclaimed a "heile Welt" (sound, uninjured world) in which disorder and chaos were only transitory--testing man's strengths and weaknesses, confronting him with his fate, but in the end leading him to the ultimate recognition of a divine order. If Bergengruen had written Waiting for Godot, Mr. Godot would surely have appeared in the end. Bergengruen did not, however, offer simple answers to complex issues; his concept of a heile Welt has nothing to do with a cheap happy ending. His view of the world is...