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Life with the Enemy By Werner Rings Doubleday, 351 pp., $17.95 The indignity of living under foreign military occupation is a bitter trial that most Americans have experienced only in their darkest nightmares. Yet for 220 million people—nearly the whole of the European Continent—the long dark night of Nazi repression was a grim reality that did not dissipate with the morning light. Their nightmare began with the German Blitzkrieg and continued until the Allied counteroffensive hurled the invaders back to Berlin. And, almost worst of all, in the intervening years these captive peoples faced the choice of either confronting or collaborating with their enemy.

So at least we have believed. Comes now Werner Rings with a new analysis of life under Nazi occupation. Rings was born and educated in Germany; he emigrated to Spain in 1933, thence to France, and finally to Switzerland, where he eventually became a citizen. He argues that there was no such clear-cut distinction between confrontation and collaboration, and that the role of wartime resistance has been largely overstated.

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Alan L. Miller

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Life with the Enemy By Werner Rings Doubleday, 351 pp., $17.95 The indignity of living under foreign military occupation is a bitter trial that most Americans have experienced only in their darkest nightmares. Yet for 220 million people—nearly the whole of the European Continent—the long dark night of Nazi repression was a grim reality that did not dissipate with the morning light. Their nightmare began with the German Blitzkrieg and continued until the Allied counteroffensive hurled the invaders back to Berlin. And, almost worst of all, in the intervening years these captive peoples faced the choice of either confronting or collaborating with their enemy.

So at least we have believed. Comes now Werner Rings with a new analysis of life under Nazi occupation. Rings was born and educated in Germany; he emigrated to Spain in 1933, thence to France, and finally to Switzerland, where he eventually became a citizen. He argues that there was no such clear-cut distinction between confrontation and collaboration, and that the role of wartime resistance has been largely overstated.