Word: evian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...mess sergeant's taste buds. The demand is spreading. Mountain Valley Water Co. distributes its green bottles of spring water from Hot Springs, Ark., to 40 states. And to cater to tastes brought home by tourists, President John G. Scott has added such familiar European mineral waters as Evian, Vichy-Célestins and Fiuggi to the company's line of products...
...Frenchmen who may not like the carbonated Perrier or the somewhat sulphuric Vichy, there is still Evian (454 million bottles) or Vittel (335 million) to irrigate their kidneys, soothe their livers, relieve their gout and perform all the other cures ascribed in France to mineral water. And if they remain thirsty, there is always wine, which still outsells mineral water 3 to 1 in France...
...much is fact. Author Habe was in Evian-les-Bains that July covering the conference for Prager Tagblatt, a German-language newspaper published in Prague. He knew Professor Neumann, Hitler's conscripted auctioneer, and as the meeting progressed to its apathetic conclusion-the offer refused, nothing whatsoever done about the Jews-Habe took copious notes on the proceedings and his long private sessions with the doctor. On that foundation, Habe, now 55, has built what he calls a documentary novel: the story of humanity's failure at Evian-les-Bains...
...reader may be hard put to feel much indignation. In the catalogue of Hitler's crimes, Evian-les-Bains amounted to little more than a misdemeanor. Hitler went on to destroy German Jewry, and Habe sensibly does not suggest that the successful sale and salvation of 40,000 Jews in 1938 would have prevented that wholesale slaughter. As Habe admits, Hitler probably never intended to find a market at Evian-les-Bains; his purpose may have been to show, by the free world's refusal to enter into such a negotiation, that anti-Semitism is merely a matter...
...Evian-les-Bains was an episode, scarcely enough to sustain a novel. Habe's book is upholstered with plot digressions, epigrams ("the everlasting exchange of deceptions which we call social life"), philosophizing and methodical character analyses beneath which the characters themselves threaten to disappear. The figure of Habe's protagonist, Heinrich von Benda, is so overburdened with the mantle of tragedy that his death, of a heart attack in the train bearing him back to occupied Vienna, comes as a kind of comic relief...