Word: briefness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Blessings of Liberation. Toward this chaos of simplicity, a tall, gangling officer was speeding back last week, after a brief breathing spell in Italy. General Mark Wayne Clark, commander of the U.S. occupation forces, found nothing unusual in these alarms and confusions. It was just an average week, and Clark could still claim with justice that Big Four relations in Vienna were better (or less visibly bad) than anywhere else in Europe...
Littler than Least. Vienna in the late spring of 1946 was a broken city. The baroque grandeur of its stone merely served as a backdrop for uncleared rubble, and the remnants of its once-blithe spirit were merely counterpoints to present hopelessness. Within the brief flash of 30 years, Vienna had in turn been the gay and gilded center of an empire, the outsized capital of a bankrupt rump republic, a subordinate, provincial town in Nazi Germany, and the cringing wartime scene of bombings, street fighting, burning, looting...
...miraculous survival was one of the few signs of comfort the Viennese found in their city. Another was the battered but unbowed survival of the huge community housing projects which Vienna's Socialists had built for their workers in their brief, triumphant decades before Hitler. The gaunt spire in the center of the city and the workers' fortresslike homes on the outskirts (which Catholic Chancellor Dolfuss shelled in the bitter years of civil discord) were both symbols of Vienna's different pasts. They were also symbols of two sturdy European forces, Catholicism and Socialism. From the present...
...Austrian elections, a quip was heard around the polls: "Nobody who owns a watch is Communist in Austria." When the returns were in, the Communists had managed to roll up only 5% of the country's vote (the Volkspartei polled some 50%, the Socialists some 45%). From their brief intermezzo of glory under Russia's exclusive occupation, they retained only one dull portfolio (Power & Electricity) and three seats in Parliament...
...when Lord Alconleigh greeted the dawn with one his favorite records (Drake Is Sailing West, Lads, the "mad" scene from Lucia, or Lo, Here the Gentle Lark, sung by Galli-Curci), and strode on to the lawn cracking a Canadian stock whip. After breakfast, he gave his daughters a brief head start, then hunted them crosscountry with four bloodhounds...