Word: gregor
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EAST BERLIN--East Germany's embattled Communists today proposed Gregor Gysi, a 41-year-old reformist lawyer who has worked for the opposition, for the post of party chair, a party spokesperson said...
...wakes up as a giant insect has provided one of the 20th century's hallmark nightmare images. The essence of the horror is that there is no explanation for it, no deeper meaning, no instructive or redemptive metaphor: the suffering just is. In the transmutation of Gregor Samsa, the world ceases to be predictable or rational; natural and moral order disappear. Critics have found in Kafka's vision hints of everything from the Holocaust to AIDS. But to burden the story with greater weight is in fact to lessen it. The thump in the gut comes from the literal details...
Berkoff manages to convey the essence of the dilemma for Gregor's parents and sister, albeit without the least sympathy for their natural anxiety and revulsion. He is far more interested in portraying them as grasping and money mad, in a Marxist gloss on the plight of the worker. They are so coarse and reprehensible -- more animalistic when eating than the bug in the back bedroom , -- that there is no point of connection for the audience, certainly no creative tension between expecting the family to take a noble course and knowing why it succumbs to a selfish...
...from the patterns and relationships of pea plants that a concept of heredity first arose in the mind of Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk. In 1865, after studying the flower colors and other characteristics of many generations of pea plants, Mendel formulated the laws of heredity and suggested the existence of packets of genetic information, which became known as genes. Soon afterward, chromosomes were observed in the nuclei of dividing cells, and scientists later discovered a chromosomal difference between the sexes. One chromosome, which they named Y, was found in human males' cells, together with another, called X. Females' cells...
There are no moral complexities here, no cunning passages of history, no double agents trading allegiances for meaning. But there is a tumultuous plot, an appealing young protagonist -- who except Hitler could root against a pre- pubescent? -- and a prime villain. Colonel Gregor Laemmle, the SS officer in pursuit of Thomas, is far more than the usual posturing sadist. A former philosophy professor, he is a connoisseur of art and literature and something of a chess master himself. Laemmle regards the hunting of Thomas as a large- scale tournament, with gambits to be savored even when they go against...