Word: kazakhs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Soviet troops engaged in a series of bloody border fights last March. The Dzungarian Gates lie just 250 miles from China's nuclear-testing and research sites on the Taklamakan Desert. Moreover, the Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region, as it is officially called, is two-thirds populated by Kazakh peoples, many of whom resent Chinese rule Russian radio propaganda beamed there frequently urges Chinese Kazakhs to rise up in arms against the Peking authorities...
...offer about as much chance for originality these days as a cowboy-and-Indian movie. Nonetheless, the Austrian-born English author of Czar and Journey of a Man has managed to produce an extraordinary book about that very relationship. Thomas Wiseman's study of two Austrians-Stefan Kazakh, a half-Jew, and Konrad Wirthof, a wholehearted Nazi-is a brilliant tour de force of rare psychological depth and complexity...
...novel begins in 1967 with Kazakh, a rich London-based survivor of World War II and of three wives, obeying a powerful compulsion to return to Vienna. There, memories of his youth and early manhood torment him, providing the narrative structure for the book. A more predictable story might have emphasized the Nazis' victimization of the Jews. Instead, Wiseman focuses on Kazakh's metaphysical obsession with Wirthof, an SS officer with grand passions and grandiose ideas. Though the two are totally disparate in personality and background, Kazakh feels that his own identity has somehow been submerged in Wirthof...
Outrageous Demands. The two first meet in a magician's tent in 1925 as ten-year-old boys. Wirthof, a rich, aristocratic Aryan and the son of a crippled World War I general, is already arrogant and glib despite his pale blond fragility. Kazakh, son of an Aryan mother and a Jewish father who is killed as a heroic leader of the Social Democrat uprising in 1934, is a shy, sensitive boy, but stronger and taller than Wirthof. Kazakh easily wins the foot race that follows their initial encounter; yet he is able to realize even then that Wirthof...
That domination determines both their fates. When they meet again accidentally after the Anschluss, Wirthof has joined the SS and become an unthinking mouthpiece for Nazi ideology. Kazakh, a purposeless intellectual uncertain about his future or his feelings, has turned from engineering to become a hypnotist and a pioneer in advertising with nouveau riche connections. Curiously, it is Kazakh who comes closest to being a callous cynic. Wirthof, despite his crass behavior in bordellos, his egotistic mistreatment of acquaintances and his sensual brutality, is actually the overemotional romantic...