Word: germanically
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...readers continually discover, Jarrell became one of the best and probably the most erudite of American literary critics in this century. The question "Have you read . . .?" recurs often in his letters, and he seems to have read nearly everything: psychology, anthropology, quantum mechanics, most of English and American literature, German folklore, sports-car magazines, science-fiction pulp, the comic strip Terry and the Pirates. He was also quirky and instinctive, peppering his letters with slang like "gee" and "do-vey" (meaning good) and bursts of imagination: "I felt quite funny when Freud died, it was like having a continent disappear...
When President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl of West Germany first discussed the idea, it seemed like a good one: a V-E day visit by the President to a cemetery in Germany where American and German soldiers lie side by side. It would be a ceremony of friendship and reconciliation...
...course, become a disaster. It turned out that no American dead from World War II are buried in Germany. It would have to be a purely German cemetery. And it turned out that Bitburg, the one suggested by Chancellor Kohl, contained the graves of 47 members...
...does it lessen the grief of his mother. But it does lessen the honor due him from the President of the United States. Even among the dead, we are required to make distinctions. It is not just grotesquely wrong to say, as the President said last week, that German soldiers are as much victims as those whom the Germans tortured and murdered. There is also a distinction to be drawn between Hitler's soldiers and the Kaiser's. Mitterrand's choice of Verdun, the awful symbol of World War I, shows a grasp of that distinction. The choice of Bitburg...
...distinction seems subtle, after the discovery of Waffen SS graves the need for subtlety vanishes. Even if one claims that the ordinary German soldier fought for Germany and not for Hitler, that cannot be said of the Waffen SS. Hitler's 1938 edict declared them to be "a standing armed unit exclusively at my disposal." A further directive in 1940 elaborated their future role. After the war the Third Reich would be expected to contain many non-Germanic nationalities. The Waffen SS would be the special state police force to keep order among these unruly elements. They proved themselves during...