DISCUSSED: The Third Reich, Emotional Numbness, Alphabetical
Travels, The Inspiration of Constraint, Rubble Literature, The
Aesthetics of Process, Erotic Obsession in the Sahara,
Exorcising the Fascism out of Language, The Topography of
Terror, Concentration Camps, Disrupting the Familiar  Someone
who knows more about books than I do told me to read How German
Is It (1979) by Walter Abish. I had never heard of it, but I
immediately wanted it. What a title! I rushed right out—at
lunch—and bought it. The cover featured a black-and-white
photograph of a man on a horse. This same photograph is
described in the novel itself: “a horse standing in a lake, in
one or two feet of water, with its muscular erect bareback rider
wearing a visored military cap and looking into the camera’s
lens.”  How German is that? Not very, at first glance. But the
military hat does, inevitably, connote the Third Reich, and a
rider’s bare legs against a horse’s wet hide might be an image
from a German health magazine. These are just gene