Word: germanics
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...Darquier fed the flames of hate, and after the Nazi occupation, it paid off. By currying favor with Nazis and collaborators alike, he became Commissioner for Jewish Affairs for the Vichy government in May 1942, presiding over a nest of corruption and the deportation of 75,000 Jews to German death camps. He died in 1980, unpunished and unrepentant. Callil lays out Darquier's sordid tale with cool disdain and relentless research. She first encountered his name after the apparent suicide in 1970 of her young psychiatrist - his daughter, it turned out, who had been abandoned decades before. In Callil...
...year is 1828, and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss has just met explorer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt in Berlin. This is where Kehlmann begins the life stories of the two eminent German scientists, but what happens after that is as much comedy as biography. Kehlmann writes the men as comically eccentric, sometimes tyrannical and, yet, not wholly unlikable. While Humboldt travels the world, Gauss prefers to journey into the depths of mathematics. Gauss loves women and Humboldt is curiously asexual. But the two contemporaries are united by their fanatical quest to explore the secrets of the universe. Gauss even...
...presence of Haruki Murakami, whose writing illuminates isolation both cosmic and urban. In this collection of previously published work, he revels in his favorite theme. Witness "The Year of Spaghetti," in which the narrator spends every day cooking pasta in a pot "big enough to bathe a German shepherd in," though there's no one else to cook for. A woman phones, but he dodges this potential entanglement, dooming himself to yet another solitary meal. "Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be," he muses, "if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?" Blind...
...Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan—although she said she didn’t discount the possibility that an insider could be effective—warned that a candidate from within Harvard might have too narrow a perspective on the institution...
...Belgian nationality is a recent invention. The country was born in 1830 when the southern, Catholic provinces of the Netherlands broke off with the support of other European powers eager to have a neutral buffer between France and the German principalities. The southern region of the country was for more than a century the richer part, with steel mills, coal mines and the cultural hegemony of the French language; the Flemish spoken in the north was considered little more than a peasant patois. But since the Second World War, Flanders has moved ahead, with higher income, lower unemployment...