Word: berliner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fall of communism in a grand web of causality and suspense. Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, Speer, Heisenberg, Honnecker and Gorbachev strut and fret through hot war and cold. The action ricochets back and forth from the '30s to the '90s, from Potsdam to Los Alamos to Auschwitz to post-Wall Berlin, where neo-Nazis are plotting an apocalypse that could put new zip in Einstein's abandoned idea...
...book has almost that many plots. Basically, it involves a Dutch cognitive psychologist, Paul Andermans, who is doing research at the University of Potsdam in 1995. After a violent run-in with those neo-Nazis, he recovers at a hospital in nearby Berlin. There he meets Jozef de Heer, an Auschwitz survivor who persuades Andermans to write down his life story, a gripping tale of escape and betrayal in the wartime German capital. Like nearly everyone in the book, De Heer isn't what he seems. Neither is Paul Goldfarb, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who fled Nazi Germany to help...
Verhaeghen has fun with academic jargon, but his writing is otherwise topologically stable. Channeling Grass and the magic realists, he has a kids' TV magician overseeing construction of the Berlin Wall, and a cat mediating Andermans' love life. Of the university dining hall, Andermans notes: "Friday's pizza was not a food item but a search engine, topped with the mercilessly burnt memories of everything that had been on the past week's menu." De Heer, describing a bombed-out house, is equally vivid: "On a metal table in one of the rooms I spot a typewriter, the type bars...
Omega Minor was born of curiosity about a past that Verhaeghen, 42, never knew. "I was doing a postdoc at Potsdam in 1995," he recalls, moments before leaving his Atlanta home for a psychology conference in California. "I took the train to Berlin and emerged at Mitte, the center of old East Berlin. I found myself alone on this huge square, except for a strange glow coming from a glass plate in the pavement. There was a small white underground chamber lined with empty bookshelves. On it was that famous [Heinrich] Heine quote, 'Where they burn books, they will...
...Saint-Exupéry and Byron are very different from Christopher Isherwood, whose stay in Berlin seems to have been motivated chiefly, as one person put it, by the ready supply of German boys. Weimar was the place to be in the early interwar years, and Isherwood was there, writing a gloriously camp version of the rise of Nazism...