Reviews for The Spider's Web and Zipper and His Father

The average rating for The Spider's Web and Zipper and His Father based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-24 00:00:00 Paris Nainggolan This bundle of two three-star novellas merits four stars as the combination provides a brilliant portrait of the Germany that would ultimately give the Nazis an electoral plurality. This was not of course what Roth was trying to do. The two works "The Spider's Web" and "Zipper and His Father" were both published in the 1920's at a time when a Nazi accession to power still appeared to be a highly unlikely possibility. Roth was simply try to portray the reaction of Germany's lower middle classes in the wake of the perceived humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles (1920). Theodor Lohse, the protagonist of "The Spider's Web" seems very typical of the low-level Nazi operative described in books by many authors notably Robert Merle, Jonathon Littell, Stefan Zweig, and William Shirer. Lohse who enjoyed serving in the Kaiser's army is lost in post-war Weimer Germany. He cannot find work and is resentful towards the socialists, communists and Jews who he believes caused Germany's defeat. He is recruited into Royalist group that commits violence against unions. Lohse is not a Nazi however. The Nazis are rather a competing group. The Nazis never wanted to bring the aristocrats back into power. In fact they often enjoyed humiliating them in personal meetings. Lohse is a social climber rather than a leveller. He hates Jews but is in love with the Jewish wife of his employer. Although somewhat stupid, Lohse is extremely cunning and totally unscrupulous. His talents cause him to rise in the covert Royalist organization. Ultimately, he is allowed to leave his clandestine existence. He is given a government position and a bride from the nobility. In the movie version of "The Spider's Web" Lohse's group will ultimately merge with the Nazis. This absorption of the Royalists by the Nazis did not however take place until the 1930s well after Roth's novel was published. The movie makers were nonetheless right to view Lohse as a proto-Nazi. "The Spider's Web" is indeed an excellent work about the methods used by the anti-democratic forces present in Germany in the 1920s and the type of individuals involved with them. "Zipper and His Father" is a much more benign work. It is about a father who is a great idiot and a son who is a little idiot. The two are petty bourgeois under-achievers who have received enough schooling to develop unrealistic expectations about their prospects in life. Both go from one career humiliation to another. At the end of the novel, the father dies while the son has found his station in life working as clown. They are both such asses it is hard to feel sorry for either even though Roth insists in the last pages that they do in fact deserve our pity. "Zipper and His Father" is very similar to "The Spider's Web" in that the protagonists in both novels are convinced that WWI was a great humiliation and that injustice towards decent Germans prevailed in the Weimar republic. The pair of novels does much to explain what happened to Germany in the 1930s.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-11-09 00:00:00 Anthony CentrillaII Two novellas. The Spider's Web is a chillingly told story of Theodore Lohse, a completely mediocre ex-soldier with questionable ethics who finds himself able to lie, murder, and climb his way to the top of a fascist organization. All the characters are despicable but understandable. It took me a while to get used to his writing style, often disorientingly full of gaps or filled with short sentences that don't allow the reader into the texture of the story; it's as if you're just reading a synopsis of the actual story. But oftentimes the language, though spare, is beautiful. I think it probably gets some of its power from maintaining this cold distance from the reader. I was able to get into Zipper and His Father much more. Roth is a master of portraiture, not just of one or two people, but entire generations get distilled in his pen so that it becomes clear how whole sections of society are feeling. In Zipper, he gets much more personal than in Spider's Web, you really get to know Zipper and his father, Old Zipper; it's a devastatingly sad story that seems to be based on a real person. Both novellas deal with young people who don't know what to do with themselves after fighting in the war, unable to reintegrate into normal life and unable to return to the war.