Richard Kaufmann’s _Heaven Pays No Dividends_ (1951) is one of the better books to come out of post-war Germany although it is not, as its cover enthusiastically declares, the “modern _All Quiet on the Western Front_.” Roderich Stamm is a completely non-political young art historian who drifts into Nazi organizations because life is made rather unpleasant for one outside them. His father, however, is an economist who becomes attracted to the Nazi movement, lectures at meetings, and eventually rises to an important post in Hitler’s Foreign Ministry. As a gunner in a flak battery, Stamm fights in France, Russia, and Germany. He emerges from the war minus several teeth, an arm, and all his illusions. Each of the girls he has loved has married or died. Through his eyes the reader sees the events leading to victory in Paris and defeat on the road from Stalingrad. But one also meets Gestapo men like Alfred Karawan and officials like Heinrich Himmler. This novel chronicles the sound and fury of politics and war as it explores the effects on the German people of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Less political than most novels in this study, Kaufmann’s book has a good deal in common with many of them. The lives of its people are played out against a backdrop of local, national, and international affairs. And the novelist records not only the comings and goings of the individuals he creates, but also the events of the world in which they live. chapter four The Novel as Mirror of National Character