Word: kaputt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...KAPUTT (407 pp.)-Curzio Malaparte, translated by Cesare Foligno-Dutton...
What the publisher's jacket fails to tell about Author Malaparte is exactly what a reader should know to get a straight line on Kaputt. Curzio Malaparte, born near Florence in 1898, was a Fascist even before the 1922 march on Rome. Says Malaparte: I too, was of course, a Fascist as was everybody at that time for the same reasons for which everybody is now antiFascist. He became editor of Turin's influential La Stampa and stood very well with the Duce. Later he got into trouble with Fascist big shots (even sat in jail...
...Kaputt (German for "broken, finished, gone to pieces") is the readable and often brilliant distillation of Malaparte's war experience. Italian diplomats and newsmen say: take it with salt, especially his cloying, new-found love of suffering humanity, his suspiciously detailed and too melodramatic recital of fast-moving events. But whatever their worth as history, these tenuously connected yarns have the quality of horrible legends recited against the feverish background of Europe's moral decay...
Berlin was kaputt. Always an ugly city, it was now uglier rubble. From its stones, and from the torture-chamber prison camps all over Germany, the stench of Naziism rose to sicken the civilized world (see FOREIGN NEWS...
Above the little group, captors and captives, towered the marble-and-gold podium, where at Nazi festivals Hitler had once screeched and barked. "Alles Kaputt!" The young Storm Trooper sobbed over & over again. "Alles Kaputt! It's all over. All we have been taught all our lives will be useless now. Alles Kaputt...