BOOK REVIEW : Life as an Aryan--When It Was Important : TALES OF THE MASTER RACE <i> by Marcie Hershman</i> ; HarperCollins $20; 223 pages

In an audacious and imaginative attempt to understand the incomprehensible, Marcie Hershman fictionalizes the lives of a representative group of Germans in a small Bavarian town during the years between 1939 and 1943.

The novel begins and ends with a questionnaire meant to suggest that the author was a journalist interviewing the townspeople of Kreiswald a half-century after the war.

Warily, the characters speak; each story touching upon the others either directly or obliquely.

Central characters in one tale turn up in peripheral roles in another, exactly as they might have done in actual life. The H-word is never mentioned.

There is a blindly obedient police commander, a young girl trying out for a gymnastics team, an unfaithful wife and the gentle government clerk she betrays, an elderly woman recovering from a stroke, a trumpet player, a soldier’s sweetheart who is also a saboteur, an ambitious young map maker, an opportunistic landlady--a broad cross-section of citizens who had the great good fortune to be Aryan when that was the only thing that mattered.

In each tale there’s an insistent back story indicating the horrendous events taking place while these ordinary folks go about the business of surviving during an extraordinary time.

Those same omens were there for the characters as well, though they rejected the implications of what they saw and heard.

They drank their ersatz coffee, did their homework, dusted their parlors, filed reports and watered the plants. The people of Kreiswald wrote letters to soldiers at the front, made love, stood in line for rationed food. They adapted.

Each chapter is preceded by a facsimile of a government directive, conveniently translated into English.

The reader is placed squarely in Kreiswald and forced to confront the question of how he would have behaved and what, if anything, he (or she) would have done.

By this simple device, the author effectively shifts the burden of knowledge from them to us.

In “The Guillotine,” a newlywed clerk in the police station is ordered to record the vital statistics of those sentenced to death by decapitation. The gruesome assignment affects him so profoundly that he is hardly surprised when his naive young bride is seduced by his superior officer, whose conscience remains untroubled by his duties.

Quietly, without protest, the clerk relinquishes his wife and accepts a transfer to another town, where “they had no guillotine, though the laws were still the laws and traitors were still subject to the full extent of them.” Trude Prudmann is an elderly woman recuperating from a stroke at a time when doctors were ordered to provide “release” for the infirm, insane, crippled or “useless eaters.”

Though she is unaware of the fact, Trude falls into two of these categories, but before she is “released,” she witnesses the removal of certain children from a ward and confides the fact to her husband, who dismisses her story as the troubled dream of an invalid. Petra Worshafter is 8 years old and prefers playing with her friend, Franzel, to anything else in the world. But Petra is Aryan and Franzel only half-Aryan. By the end of this brief searing story, Petra’s choice has been made for her.

The intensity of the stories constantly escalates, each building upon the one before. “Tales of the Master Race” turns into a novel as bricks become a wall, every small segment essential to the ultimate design.

Hints become knowledge, suspicions turn to certainties, but only one person in the town does anything at all to resist the inexorable progress of events.

Although her actions are courageous and well-meant, they’re sadly ineffectual. Thea Wenngarten, who calls herself “the traitor,” is unable to make a difference, but at least she can answer the interviewer’s questions without shame or evasion.

“The Shift” takes place in 1943, when the German forces surrender at Stalingrad as the town of Kreiswald is being fire-bombed. Characters from prior tales briefly resurface as the war’s victims and survivors. There are no heroes; the villains are indistinguishable from everyone else. There was nothing special about Kreiswald.

The actions of the citizens of Kreiswald merely illustrate the way average people behave and would behave again.

“Tell me,” the interviewer asks, four decades later, “how did you react when you discovered the people in charge are still living around you, right here?”

There is never an answer. “All right, I’ll rephrase it, ‘Tell me: how typical is your town?’ ” But by then, we know.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Sons of the Morning” by Dewitt S. Copp (W.W. Norton).