Word: hitleritis
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...between a Holocaust survivor (Hal Linden) and his son, will arrive on Broadway in April. And off-Broadway's Classic Stage Company is presenting "I Will Bear Witness," based on the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who was married to a Gentile and remained in Germany throughout Hitler's regime...
...Bear Witness," the dramatization of Klemperer's diaries, is a fairly dry monologue recitation of excerpts, hardly scintillating as drama (George Bartenieff, a co-adapter, plays Klemperer adequately). Still, it digs into a fascinating and unfamiliar chapter in the Holocaust story (a Jew who stayed in Germany - and outlasted Hitler!). And it revels in the nuances - notably, a hero who is often less than heroic, and German neighbors who are capable of kindness as well as villainy...
During World War II, the veterans of the Spanish war enthusiastically enlisted to fight in the American army against Hitler and the Axis. Still mourning the Spanish Republic's defeat, they yearned for democracy's victory over fascism, for the chance to participate in the triumph of good over evil. An unwritten policy of the U.S. Army barred the Lincoln vets from the front lines; like blacks during the war, the Brigaders, despite their combat experience, were relegated to demeaning tasks far from battlefields. In the 1950s, communist witch-hunters imprisoned and fined veterans of the Brigade because of their...
...preserve a legally elected democracy "of the people, by the people, for the people," as its namesake had proclaimed at Gettysburg. Many of them were blacks weary of lynchings in the South and day-to-day mistreatment by whites. Others were Jews who feared for their fellow Jews in Hitler's Germany. They fought fascism in Spain to strike back at the American fascist elements of racism, police violence against organized workers and inequality of opportunity for Jews, blacks and immigrants. They feared the "fascist" segments of American society would allow full-fledged fascism to usurp American democracy...
Like the Amish in Witness, these Socialists in Gallagher's extended family experience life more fully because they believe so deeply. Devoted readers of the Daily Worker, Stalinists to the end ("the pact with Hitler was a tactic, darling"), they sometimes look ridiculous but steadily buoy Gallagher with a bracing sense of connectedness. As a girl, she thought a portrait of Lenin hanging on the wall was a picture of her grandfather. Her summers at "worker's camp," where the oppressed were celebrated, provide wonderful memories, although political purity was strictly enforced: an extra slice of watermelon to a black...