SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Adultery in the Natural Interest.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (1 January 1989): 3.

In the following review, Eder evaluates the German nationalist theme of No Man's Land, relating the political and corresponding personal implications in terms of its protagonist.

Wolf is a German nationalist, but forget all the abominable meanings the term has picked up over the last century.

Think of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, pastoral nostalgia, sausages, comfortable bad taste, amiable pedantry, the Rhine and the touch of comedy that beguiled Mark Twain. Think neither of the soldier, the brownshirt nor the four-Mercedes industrialist, but of the romantic who lay in a meadow and thought cloudy thoughts.

Martin Walser, who writes mordant parables with comic tenderness, brings us Wolf, a peaceable nationalist. He fights in his own impractical way against the division of the Germanies.

Wolf is a one-man unifier. Years ago, he effected a small linkage...