Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...play Hamlet, thriller writers sometimes show symptoms of hankering after respectability. John le Carre has handled this problem by surrounding his plots with a Jamesian density of details and implications. Now Len Deighton, known to millions of readers as the author of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, has, temporarily at least, given up suspense altogether...
...number of ways, although a sense of surprise is not one of them; nearly everyone knows how World Wars I and II turned out. Deighton's purpose is not to astound but to explain. He meticulously traces the lives of two brothers, the sons of a wealthy Berlin financier and his beautiful American wife. Peter Winter is the elder by three years; Paul, born in 1900, is a "child of the new century." One brother, inevitably, will become a Nazi, while the other will not. In his prologue, Deighton warns that the Winter brothers "had lived through a series...
...ghosts come out anyway; and it is Kiefer's project to lay them by showing their relations to the real cultural history of Germany, bitterly polluted by Nazi appropriation. When Kiefer paints a Nazi monument, such as the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, he also evokes by implication the noble tradition of German neoclassicism that Speer froze and vulgarized. His charred, plowed landscapes, their heavy paint mixed with straw, are real agricultural terrain, but they are also frontier, no- man's land, graveyard and the biblical desert of Exodus...
...squat, fire-blackened crypt, the paint laid thick in an effort to convey the ruggedness of the masonry, whose architectural source (as Mark Rosenthal points out in his astute introduction to the difficulties of Kiefer's work) was a Nazi "Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers" built in Berlin in 1939. At the end of this claustrophobic dungeon-temple is a small fire on a raised altar, the Holocaust itself...
...often happens in a televised age, the image Gorbachev projected was divorced from the reality of what he actually said: that the Berlin Wall was built by East Germany to protect itself from outside interference; that Moscow restricts emigration in order to thwart Western attempts to create a brain drain; that Soviet troops are in Afghanistan because of repeated requests from that country for protection from foreign subversion; that the U.S.S.R. is pursuing its own Star Wars research...