It is wrong-headed to read The Clown as a simple condemnation of German national character, or to find in its wistful hero that mythical figure so dear to our own uneasy sense of virtue—the Good German Intellectual castigating his vicious and hypocritical countrymen. Vice and hypocrisy are the subjects of the book, satiric castigation is its mode, and the twilight of the Nazi era sounds a sinister ground-bass in the memory of the narrator-protagonist, but neither ex-Nazis nor neo-Nazis are conspicuous in the contemporary Rhineland of the clown Hans Schnier. Drinking excessively and in a decline because his Catholic mistress has left him to marry a prominent Catholic layman, he telephones the entire range of his acquaintance in Bonn—ostensibly to borrow money and to locate Marie, but actually to operate as a kind of scourge of villainy, to force his interlocutors to come to an awareness...