Word: dwarfs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Like many another European writer who grew up under Adolf Hitler, German Novelist Gunter Grass, 36, is a man shadowed by the cruelty and grotesquerie of life. The groans and squeaks, the howls and primitive chuckles of his first hero, a prurient dwarf named Oskar Mazerath, made Grass's The Tin Drum the most powerful first novel to come out of Germany in a generation...
...Joachim Mahlke who is afflicted by a quivering excrescence of flesh over his Adam's apple. But if Grass still views life largely as a kind of Gothic sideshow, he permits himself, as he did not in the earlier book, a saving touch of human compassion. As a dwarf who had seceded from the adult world in order to survive in it, Oskar remained a skeptical spectator of absurdity. Through the muted and melancholy chronicle of Mahlke's brief life, Grass seems to say that deformed or not, man can burn with the likeness of a shapely aspiration...
...through "all the isms-expressionism, surrealism, nonobjectivism"-before settling in New York in 1941 to find his real calling: chronicling "the quintessential people of our time" from Arp to Zeckendorf, and producing a gallery always elegant and sometimes profound-as when he painted Elsa Maxwell as a Velasquez court dwarf...
Prison Bound. It was no surprise therefore that Maine's dwarf-sized duchess believed herself to be a fairy princess. She nearly beggared the Due trying to make the fairyland divertissements at their chateau in Sceaux out rival the splendors of Versailles. As Louis XIV aged, she relentlessly drove her unwilling Due into the struggle over the succession. And under the regency of the Due d'Orleans that followed, she plotted with the court of Spain to put Maine in power and got her helpless husband thrown into prison on charges of treason...
Since the new Watergate project will replace an abandoned gasworks, Washingtonians might have been expected to greet it with delight. Instead, a number of architects and critics are protesting vigorously that Watergate would hog Washington's skyline and dwarf nearby federal buildings. Watergate's architects pacified some of these critics with modest design changes, but are still fighting off an outfit called Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which sees dark meanings in the fact that Watergate is to be built by Italy's Societa Generale Immobiliare, in which the Vatican holds...