When Sinclair’s Lanny Budd goes to the week-long Nazi Party orgy at Nüremberg, he sees before him a people who have surrendered personal responsibility to a father image quite as fully as did Silone’s simple peasants. A people smarting from humiliating defeat had accepted the dream of a thousand year Reich. And it had been sold to them by a man as possessed as any of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Roderich Stamm in _Heaven Pays No Dividends_ is oblivious to much of the transition that takes place in Germany during the late twenties and early thirties. Through his father’s conversations, however, he senses some of the problems soon to be expressed in political action: “They contained the whole uncertainty of our age. There was something intangible and threatening in the air. It had all started with the world crisis and the huge unemployment figures, and then the Nazis had come, and then the Communists.” These forces and the movements which they precipitate are too strong for a republic barely fifteen years old. A people used to authoritarian rule reverts to it. When war comes Roderich realizes “we were all involved, because all of us had capitulated before HIM during all these years. We had all given HIM permission to start a war at HIS discretion, when HE decided it was necessary.” One is justified in distrusting stereotypes as inaccurate generalizations. But in this case the stereotype is borne out and emphasized in the novel. Many areas of these national portraits are only roughed in, with the fine-line detail missing. In other places there are gaps. This is partly because some of the groups of novels are small. It is also due to the fact that the novelist does not exhaustively examine voting trends, statistically analyze attitudinal changes, or plot the frequency of government realignments. Sinclair frequently approaches this method and Dos Passos gives some of the raw data upon which such estimates can be made. But generally the novelist tends to proceed from individuals to groups, extrapolating group behavior from individual behavior. This is the method used by Koestler and Conrad. While it does not have the statistical validity of the political scientist’s work, it has advantages which complement it. The novelist, with his artistic insight and his ability to shape his material as he wishes, can highlight his concept of a particular national character with drama and human interest to make this hard-to-define quality come memorably alive on the printed page. chapter five The Novelist as Analyst of Group Political Behavior