J.D. Salinger, America’s most enigmatic author, has been the subject of much detective work. Eberhard Alsen peels away a few misconceptions while sifting through the author’s military records and digging into German archives. He’s not the first to recognize that Salinger’s parents strove to fit into WASP Park Avenue and that he may have found his Jewish background embarrassing. Alsen wrestles repeatedly with Salinger’s “nonjudgmental attitude” toward the Nazis, finding that he despised his U.S. Army service and his loutish fellow soldiers and saw little to distinguish them from rank and file Germans. He did enter a death camp before the bodies were buried and possibly, as Alsen asserts, suffered a nervous breakdown as a result. As for his brief marriage to a German woman, Alsen refutes the charge that she was a Nazi. And yet, in the end, Salinger’s life remains an open case.
