Word: german
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Which are for graduate study only. German undergraduates, as they did before the war, go to a Gymnasium...
Died. Field Marshal Heinrich Alfred Hermann Walther von Brauchitsch, 67, onetime commander in chief of the German army (1938-41); of coronary thrombosis; in Hamburg, Germany, where he awaited trial as a war criminal. Son of a Prussian cavalry general, Brauchitsch increased the Wehrmacht's motorized divisions from two to six, occupied the Sudetenland, led the 18-day blitz of Poland, took Norway, Belgium, Holland, France, Yugoslavia and Greece...
Ostensibly Faustus is the biography-in-progress of a fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind...
Mann's habit of interspersing long, solemn, gratuitous essays on culture, humanism, the German temperament and other intellectual matters throughout his story puts too many distractions between Adrian and the reader. But it is also true that some of the most brilliant writing in Faustus comes in these unexpected asides. The section describing Adrian's deal with the Devil (he sells himself body & soul for 24 years of creative greatness) is a tour de force-translated from archaic German into archaic English-that is a unique reading experience in or out of context. So is the subtle, near...
Faustus will be considered a masterpiece by some, a bore by many. A good deal of it reads like Mann's heaviest formal essays. To those who look for it, however, the book offers a masterful explanation of those sides of the German character that welcomed Hitler. Most readers will see a symbolic parallel between Adrian's bargain with the Devil and Germany's similar sellout...