Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Levi's initiation into chemistry's ordered universe came in the late 1930s as chaos threatened the world. While Mussolini mimicked Hitler's menacing rhetoric, the Jewish student sought relief in science from "all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, and all the imperatives" of Fascism. His comrade in this search for verifiable values was Sandro, a peasant youth who later became a celebrated resistance fighter. Sandro dragged Levi on exhausting treks through mountain passes, up rock cliffs and over slopes of ice. "He felt the need," Levi says, "to prepare himself (and to prepare me) for an iron future...
DeLillo has a knack for faculty follies. The school is well known for its department of Hitler studies, headed by Jack ("J.A.K.") Gladney, the novel's narrator. Students are also offered courses in popular culture, seminars in car crashes and cereal-box texts, a professor named Alfonse ("Fast Food") Stompanato and a teaching staff of New York emigres, "smart, thuggish, movie- mad, trivia-crazed . . . here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they'd known in their Europe- shadowed childhoods...
Life precipitated in the city, the locus of modernism. His own cities were Leipzig, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris and Florence up to the coming of Hitler; Paris and Amsterdam during the war; and refuge, after it, in St. Louis and New York, where he died in 1950. But they tend to merge in his work into a single place. This city was the great human switchboard, the cruncher of experience, where events acquired a formidable urgency and swiftness, where people were forced together and the distances between them grew. It stood for oppression, strain, careful poses and unmediated confessions--above...
Such accolades are tough to come by in academe, where scholars guard their intellectual turf and rarely show kindness toward a contrary thesis. Abraham's volume laid a measure of blame for the failure of the post-World War I German government upon German businessmen, who came to favor Hitler, a view that scholars have squabbled about for decades. The book, with its Marxist perspective, was respected even by uncompromising Gerald D. Feldman, a University of California expert on late imperial and Weimar Germany. Feldman had critiqued an early draft and pronounced the volume "imaginative and interesting...
Interestingly, Turner was completing a book of his own, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. That volume, scheduled for publication by Oxford on Jan. 20, attributes the Weimar Republic's demise to an array of historical causes. "Only through gross distortion," writes Turner, "can big business be accorded a crucial or even major role." Privately, he now comments, "If Abraham's right, I'm wrong...