Word: brutalizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Urge to Self-Punishment. A murderer, he observes, almost invariably leaves at least one revealing clue. This is no accident: every murderer, however brutal, seems to be driven by an unconscious compulsion to betray himself, to punish himself for his crime. The more cautious he is, the more certain he is to make a misstep; some criminologists say that the hardest murder to solve is a completely impulsive...
...Grandmothers (1927). The story of a bullying Nazi officer who moves in on a family in Athens (which Wescott has never visited), it is an uneven, over-literary tour de force, interesting chiefly for its suggestion that some liberated Europeans may, for a time, feel rather lost without their brutal conquerors...
...Zhukov apparently had no thought of stopping one moment before the inexorable laws of military supply compelled him. This great human mass of soldiers on the move, as drab and endless as the Russian steppes, had been welded into an enormous, brutal force. Zhukov's bedraggled, unshaven, grimy army, marching beside an incredible number of giant tanks, self-propelled guns, katusha mortars, and almost overburdened with submachine guns, rifles and grenades, had only one cry: Dayosh Berlin! (Give us Berlin!). With the quarry in sight, the cry took on new meaning...
...incredible guilelessness of Isaac Emmanuel's errand, and his courage and dignity before his brutal judge and torturers, serve all the more to convince the Gestapo that he has a great deal to cover up. After prison scenes which recall those of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the old man is released, thanks to an Anglo-Jewish cabaret star and a Nazi bigshot (Walter Rilla) who is infatuated with her. When at length old Isaac does find the boy's mother, she has married a Nazi and has so wholly betrayed all that was ever good...
...these same apple pickers. We have seen our comrades go down under German machine-gun fire and torn to bits by artillery and mortar shells. We have heard the Nazis manning these weapons cry "Kamerad" when their ammunition was gone or the going got tough. These men are cold, brutal, and trained from childhood as killers...