Word: burgerlich
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hoeg's ferocious burlesque, burgerlich awfulness has its own flavor in Denmark. One of his best chapters has a dissolute theology student, who has been drinking, whoring and mocking his professors for several years, sneering as his negligee-clad girlfriend reads him a letter from home. "Your father is dead," she reports. "To hell with him," says he. Just then his mother's portrait falls off the wall to the floor. His shallow rebellion vanishes at this omen. He sinks to his knees, repents and returns home to preach hellfire to amazed and grateful peasants. If Dreams is regarded...
...class, they have even lost their ability to breed. "A virgin to both sexes" is a confessional phrase used more than once, wryly but without regret, by his heroes. Some of them still have money -- old, of course, because latching on to new money would require the burgerlich rapacity that their great-grandparents successfully hid. If they have professions, they are likely to be lawyers, ineffectual but tolerated in the old firms because their names are those of dead founding partners. But their only consistent strengths are snobbery and a watery kind of good taste...
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