Generic History Doesn’t Hurt Enough : BRONSTEIN’S CHILDREN <i> by Jurek Becker; translated by Leila Vennewitz (Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich; a Helen and Kurt Wolff book</i> : <i> $19.95; 207 pp.) </i>

History begins as a unique event--specific, material, with the color of blood, the flash of glory or the stench of abasement. Then it turns generic.

To those who have specifically bled, prevailed or lost, to be remembered in generic history may be almost as intolerable as to be forgotten.

Witness the pain of the Vietnam veterans whose nightmares are ignored in the dovish or hawkish analysis of national miscalculation. And the blankness of college freshmen not altogether sure where or when the war was fought, and altogether puzzled that someone would go suffer in it.

No piece of history I can think of has mobilized more spiritual and political effort to prevent it from turning into a bland generic than the Holocaust.

There are films such as “Shoah,” the writings of a Primo Levi or an Elie Wiesel, national Holocaust monuments and museums, Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial. There is the sudden collapse of a West German politician when he tried too theatrically to remind his countrymen of their indifference to the plight of the Jews.

Never has such a mighty effort been made collectively to call out: For God’s sake, or for the sake of your own life, do not forget.

Jurek Becker’s “Bronstein’s Children” is a chilly, disquieting novel about historical slippage; about the seemingly inevitable decline of horror into a vague and generic recollection. The East German writer has devised something between story and allegory to evoke the cold generational millennium that separates a father, with his concentration-camp memories, from a son, adrift in a society with no memories whatsoever.

The story is told by Hans, who, at the time of telling, is living in a state of apathetic depression. He is an orphan, staying with friends of his recently deceased father. He has been admitted to a university but the prospect means little to him.

He tries vaguely to find a place of his own to live. He has let his friends drift away; he is faintly jealous of his former girlfriend, Martha; he desires other women but makes no move to approach them.

He is in a state of limbo, in other words. And his narrative alternates the tedious details of his current aimlessness, with recollections of the event that brought it about shortly before his father died.

At the time, the two were living together. Hans was conducting a passionate affair with Martha and using his father’s small shack in the country for their trysts. One day, he goes there to wait for Martha and finds his father and two other men beating and interrogating a fourth old man, chained to a cot.

Bronstein--the father--and his two companions, Kwart and Rotstein, are Jews who survived the camps. Heppner, their prisoner, is a former camp guard. He is there, shackled, maltreated, living in his own filth, until he shall acknowledge his guilt.

In the impersonal grayness of the bureaucratic state--it is East Germany, but Becker’s point goes wider--such an act of personal vengeance is unheard of. Hans cannot grasp it.

In a series of tearing confrontations and, at home, nightly recriminations, he demands to know what right these three victims have to take the law into their own hands. It is a plausible question, perhaps; but it is the plausibility with which the inhabitant of some immeasurably distant galaxy might dismiss the idea that there is life on Earth.

Hans sees only the violence of an oppressive older generation living in a past that means nothing to him. Opposing his father--he plots to set the prisoner free--he is asserting the right of a new generation to start fresh. How far back does historical justice go before it becomes present injustice?

But the three ancient captors have another question. Why does Hans focus upon the prisoner’s pain? Why is he so incurious about what Heppner has done? “Why are you so unconcerned? Why don’t you get angry when you think of their victims?” the father demands. “A little more indignation, if you please.”

Hans did not ask to be brought up in the German Democratic Republic, any more than his father had asked to be a Jew in Nazi Germany. What else can the youth do but demand to know why the three old men don’t deliver their victim to the police, in accordance with the law? Any former prison guard would be certain to face severe punishment.

But it is not punishment that the old men require. It is judgment. A sentence passed by the state, in automatic obedience to its political orientation, doesn’t meet the need. God must be heard to judge; and since God is not available, the prisoner--bland and self-excusing--must be brought to do it.

Eventually, when Hans goes with tools to set Heppner free, he will find his father there, dead of a heart attack. It is almost as if the son, unable to take up his father’s cause, had killed him.

And at the time of telling, months later, Hans has paid the price of this generational disassociation. He is a blank, hopeless and without will. “Perhaps,” he reflects near the end, “I am a victim of Fascism after all.”

That is the triple-knotted quality of Becker’s irony. It is a cold irony.

His book is more successful as a harsh parable than it is as a novel--even a novel of ideas. The narrative is sluggish, sometimes slapdash. Kwart, one of Bronstein’s two accomplices, is developed, at least vestigially; the other, Rotstein, is simply named. Hans’ sister Elle, who is almost 20 years older than Hans and whose sufferings under the Nazis have unhinged her, is portrayed with a certain lost sweetness, but she remains cloudy and dispersed.

The temperature at which “Bronstein’s Children”--the plural ties the narrator to an entire generation--is almost too low to allow fiction’s chemical processes to take place. The apathy of Hans’ story out of limbo suits his condition and his message; but it doesn’t really suit the book.