Word: german
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...through the night skies; Russian planes were flying ominously low. At 1:10 a.m., Radio Prague interrupted a program of music to confirm the worst: "Yesterday, on August 20, about 11 p.m., troops of the Soviet Union, the Polish People's Republic and the Hungarian People's Republic, the German Democratic People's Republic and the Bulgarian People's Republic crossed the frontiers of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic...
Striking with stunning speed and surprise, some 200,000 soldiers of the five Warsaw Pact countries punched across the Czechoslovak border to snuff out the eight-month-old experiment by Alexander Dubcek's regime in humanizing Communism. Russian and East German units smashed southward from East Germany. Forces thrusting from...
Genghis Cohn, a Yiddish music-hall comedian, is on his last stage. The stage is Auschwitz, and his audience is a German firing squad. But he seizes the opportunity for a last punch line. He turns his naked rump to the executioners and says: "Kush mir in tokhes!," which in Yiddish means "Kiss my ass!" Herr Captain Schatz, the man who has been placidly shooting Jews down on order, is so shaken that he accords Cohn the unusual respect of examining the corpse and ordering it clothed. Seeing an opportunity to keep his act going, Cohn's ghost slips...
...this unlikely premise, Romainian Gary has constructed a wildly funny, and ultimately mordant picaresque novel. The time is 20 years later, and Schatz has become police chief of a German town, though still captive straight man to Genghis Cohn's raucous spirit. "It has been my fate," says Cohn, "to add a new dimension to the legend of the Wandering Jew: that of the immanent Jew, omnipresent, entirely assimilated, forever part of each atom of the German earth, air and conscience." Night after night, he sits on Schatz's bedpost, teaching him Yiddish and the art of Jewish...
Gary attempts to explain not only German history but most of the history of Western civilization with this morbidly fascinating sexual metaphor. It is insufficient to the task, but somehow that does not seem very important when matched against the savagery of Gary's vision. Lily is described by a German admirer as "a being of exquisite sensitivity. Culture! That's what she lived for. She walked in beauty! She inspired heroism and sacrifice! Our students were taught to love her, even in kindergarten!" To which Genghis Cohn replies sardonically with a reminiscence of the moment when...