Regurgitated Affair

I certainly agree with David Shaw’s review that Irving Wallace’s “The Seventh Secret” (Book Review, March 2) is a contrived and regurgitated affair, to the point of once again leveling conspiracy and guilt on today’s “official” Germany: The Berlin police certainly can’t be trusted in a hunt for the surviving Eva Braun!

What deeply disturbs me, however, is Shaw’s attempt to expose the “cheap-shot suggestion” by Wallace that the “Evelyn Hoffman/Eva Braun” character would respect Reagan’s visit to Bitburg as an “honor to the Waffen SS” via compounding this dangerous fantasy. Although he finds such a suggestion “repugnant,” Shaw prefaces it by offering us his opinions of Ronald Reagan and by calling the Bitburg visit a “stupid, insensitive and callous blunder.” Aside from the fact that these are personal views that have nothing to do with this particular book review, Shaw should be made aware that there are hundreds of German war dead from two world wars at Bitburg Cemetery aside from the “Forty-Nine” from the pan-European Waffen SS. The visit intended symbolic respect for ALL GERMAN LOSS and not for any of the various ideologies surrounding the fallen of the last 70 years.

The obvious blunder here is Shaw’s own perpetuation of the fiction he intends to criticize by being ill-informed, admittedly lacking in literary background and ignorant of the feelings of Germans and German-Americans.

ROBERT HARRIS

Sherman Oaks