Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerilla Movement, 1944–1946 by Perry Biddiscombe (review)

HUMANITIES 353 function for scholars: it provides an excellent schematic diagram (and bibliography) of Asian-Canadian writing and the criticism that writing has attracted over the last thirty years or so. In particular the book serves a function Miki emphasizes: 'to suggest the need for critical readings of critical statements that respond to the new visibility of racialized texts.' Miki begins by applying Derridean principles to texts such as Survival and Butterfly on Rock, before advancing to show the weaknesses of Kogawa and Bissoondath. He castigates Atwood and Jones for their egotistical and thematic priorities: yet in so doing he reveals egotistical premises in his own writing, and does treat redress as a theme, apparently not seeing its relation to Atwood's discourse of victimization. These liabilities are so obvious that they are easily marked and bypassed. While the reader may have a disquieting sense of soft ground to the rear, the movement forward into 'Asiancy,' where Miki demonstrates illuminating insights and a sparkling, poeticized critical discourse all his own, is W1doubtedly valuable. Miki brings postcolonial theory to bear on the canon with insistent momentum. His discussion is entirely limited to the English-Canadian canon. French Canada is ignored. Miki's is very much a specialized and localized perspective, and the book is very much a British Columbia product a book conscious of being on one side of the Pacific Ocean as well as on one side of a historical injustice. Redress is not treated solely as a tenyear -old accomplishment: rather (re)dressing is presented an an ongoing necessity, an ongoing extension of identities into the flux of national identity. This strongest point of the collection does not tie everything in the book together - a twenty-three-page journal!gloss on The Martyrology is very distantly related to the other nine essays - but does go a long way to doing so. (TERRENCE CRAIG) Perry Biddiscombe. Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerilla ~ovement, 1944-1946 University of Toronto Press. xii, 456. $39.95 The literature on all aspects of National Socialism and Nazi rule as well as Germany's defeat in the Second Word War is immense and growing. Why is it then that historians, in general, and German historians, in particular, have paid so little attention to the last-ditch Nazi efforts to organize a guerrilla movement, called Wehrwolf, in keeping with Nazi preference for propagandistic pseudo-mythology? Its goals were obvious: to keep the Nazi faith alive and to make life difficult and dangerous for Allied military occupation forces and German collaborators. While this study offers several explanations why the Werwolf organization has excited little research, citing difficulties in finding reliable source material, and also the German proclivity to concentrate on the resistance against the Nazi regime, the most convincing reason seems obvious. As the French historian Jean Hugonnot already concluded in 1961, 'the Werwolf was a total bust.' 354 LETTERS IN CANADA 1998 This is not to imply, however, thatPerry Biddiscombe's study, a revision ofhis doctoral thesis, has nothing new to say. On the contrary! His research, which is exhaustive and meticulous, documented in more than a hundred pages of footnotes, is interesting precisely because it not only focuses on the Werwolf but also ana1yses the different occurrences of sabotage and resistance throughout the former German Reich. Starting with a detailed reconstruction of the organizational beginnings of the Werwolf from German archival sources, the study makes it clear that this organization remained a haphazard and muddled effort until the bitter end because of Hitler's unwillingness to confront the inevitable: defeat and Allied occupation. In addition, the German military was openly hostile to the idea of guerrilla warfare, and loath to share its provisions and armaments. Moreover, most local and regional Nazi bosses were hardly eager to cooperate , and take up this hopeless task, while the German population at large wanted the war to end as quickly as possible. Thus, as Biddiscombe points out the Werwolf's biggest achievement was the propaganda message that the Nazi state was still capable of imposing vengeance upon its enemies. As a result, even after the Wehrmacht's military collapse, the Allied military leadership remained suspicious and expectant...