Word: burghers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Paradoxically, the chilling anger of The Visit springs from the fertile, unangry mind of a bulky (230 Ibs.), cigar-smoking Swiss burgher with the tastes of a bon vivant, the genial manner of a retired cook. Surrounded by his wife Lotti (once an actress), three children, four dogs and seven cats, 37-year-old Friedrich Düurren-matt churns out his bitter plays from a picture-postcard villa in the green woods overlooking Lake Neuchatel...
...closing lines of Chaucer and His Poetry sound strangely like a confession; "...Geoffrey Chaucer, poet, idealist, burgher of London, Commissioner of Dykes and Ditches, who loved his fellow man both good and bad, and found no answer to the puzzle of life but in truth and courage and beauty and belief in God." Kittredge longed to have a chance to live in an age when this sort of life was possible, a desire hinted at in Witchcraft in Old and New England, "We are all specialists now-a-days, I suppose. The good old times of the polymath...
...story is told with the luminous sincerity that haloes most of what Dreyer does. He has a deeper sympathy with the burgher virtues, a higher sense of the prosperous interior than almost any artist since the Flemish Renaissance; his frames impart the spiritual light of common things. And he can paint for the ear as well as for the eye; when suddenly the sound track fills with singing birds and a music of axles, bright September blows into the theater, tingling in the thoughts like merry harvest weather. Director Dreyer loves the human face ("A land one can never tire...
...dark, that is, of the German soul. In Mann's sensibility, the yawning portal of burgher respectability leads only to hell-that same hell in which Nietzsche, lonely and restless, contracted the syphilis that drove him insane, and in which sentimental devotees of Brahms Lieder ran concentration camps...
...later, in hotel corridors and on dark street corners, citizens sidled up to the Canadians and whispered: "Beat the Russians! Canada good, America good." One of the Vs stopped to ask directions from a Prague burgher. He got a bawling out in reply. "Why didn't you beat us twice?" complained the Czech. Then he wagged a stubby finger. "You beat the Russians," he ordered...