Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...German style, the sight of men marching and drilling on a onetime Wehrmacht training field near Rostock. Then the evidence came faster. The Russians were busily organizing a military "police" force of a quarter of a million Germans, almost twice as large as the entire force of pre-Hitler Germany...
...drama - gravely concocting and slowly handing back & forth list upon list of government decrees, which must be "carefully aged, like bottles of rare wine" before they could enter public life. And on the public roads, the previous occupants of these high seats, now paying the price of cooperation with Hitler, were playing the same drama as if they were still in it. "Please, Herr Oberregierungsrat," requested the ex-judge, "will you have the kindness to hand me that shovel?" "With the greatest of pleasure, Your Excellency," replies the ex-ministerial councillor...
...term (which used to run until March) now starts earlier, stops at Christmas. With not enough coal to heat classrooms, students wear dyed Wehrmacht overcoats to cold-weather lectures; a chilling wind seeps through the cracks or whistles through the holes in bombed-out walls. (Windows are fixed with "Hitler glass," a kind of cellophane Hallstein acidly describes as "one of the big gifts this man gave to the German people.") The rector had planned to spend $250,000 this year on rebuilding Frankfurt, but currency reform wiped out the funds...
...progress of a fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind v. regimented thought, the relationship of disease...
Faustus will be considered a masterpiece by some, a bore by many. A good deal of it reads like Mann's heaviest formal essays. To those who look for it, however, the book offers a masterful explanation of those sides of the German character that welcomed Hitler. Most readers will see a symbolic parallel between Adrian's bargain with the Devil and Germany's similar sellout...