Word: herre
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...Well, what I really meant by that was...") At Hershey the Senator said,"Well, I think it was the Germans that originated this modern concept of peace through strength." The Germans?Peace? The revision of modern history is as complete as the name change of that Viennese paper-hanger, Herr Schickelgruber...
Novelists since the time of Fielding have made speeches to their readers, but few can have done so more ingeniously than Herr Kirst: he includes, as a sort of appendix, a section entitled "A Speech Which Has Often Been Pondered But Never Delivered." The speech is superfluous and rather annoying, but it points up the skill with which the author has balanced suspense, satire, and philosophy throughout the rest of the book. Only when the plate marked "ethical implications" falls noisily to earth do we realize that we have been watching a balancing act all along...
Building on this plot, Herr Kirst offers a satirical view of life in the upper echelons of the Wehrmacht as he follows the efforts of von Seydlitz-Gabler's wife to marry their daughter, Ulrike, to Tanz. Ulrike is in love with Lance Corporal Hartmann, who is being kept under cover after inadvertently surviving a skirmish that the German press, for propaganda purposes, reported as an atrocious slaughter. And Hartmann is a young naif (of the sort that seems obligatory in a German anti-war novel) who serves, in his pacifistic innocence, as an effective exponent of the author...
...tried to capture the essence of heroism," he is nevertheless subject to strange tics and seizures, inexplicable quirks of behavior; a steely disciplinarian, indifferent to the value of individual lives, he displays exemplary courage and single-minded patriotism. Clearly Tanz is meant to be a mythic, archetypal figure--Herr Kirst even goes so far as to suggest that he is "the personification of war"--but he also seems horribly real. Tanz is the sort of man that made Germany's nightmare, and readers are likely to notice him in theirs
...Hahnlosers, Herr Doktor Arthur and Frau Hedy, were 33 and 30 when they bought their first work, Ferdinand Hodler's Little Cherry Tree. Thereafter, although the Hahnlosers were not rich, they bought contemporary art steadily until the walls barely showed through the paintings. By 1924, buying most of the time directly from artists, they owned Renoirs, Bonnards, Vuillards, Vallottons, Cezannes, Manguins, Hod-lers, Rodins, Maillols, Redons, Matisses, Rouaults, Utrillos, and just about every other French or Swiss artist that mattered at the time...