Word: kruppdom
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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During the Thirty Years' War, a Krupp sold guns to Protestant and Catholic alike, and from that day to the end of World War II the family was rarely false to the Shavian armorer's creed. The blood-and-iron saga of Kruppdom, including its rise from the ashes of World Wars I and II, is an intrinsically fascinating story. Unfortunately the drama is often dulled by German-born Author Norbert Muhlen's drab style. But he livens his chronicle with a series of personality sketches of the lonely, driven eccentrics who lorded it over the steelworks...
Alchemistic Search. The initial secret of the Krupp success was failure. The founder of modern Kruppdom, Friedrich, was a turn-of-the-19th-century dreamer, prophetically dedicated to an industrialized Germany. He spent his life in a quasi-alchemistic search for "the secret of casting steel," processed more irony than iron in his foundry, the Forge of Good Hope, and died at 39 of dropsy and despair. His son Alfred was later to find and filch the sought-for secret from British forgemasters while posing as a frivolous visiting baron, Herr Schropp. After he set the Essen smokestacks belching, Alfred...
Senile Ghost. Alfred's son Fritz was a pudgy, gourmandizing sybarite, who fattened Kruppdom by gobbling up coal and iron mines and the shipyards at Kiel. But his chief bequest was "the Capri scandal." There, in a Tiberian grotto, guarded by boys garbed as Franciscan friars, he staged Black Masses and homosexual orgies. When his wife protested, he had her locked up as insane. Just when the whole affair broke in the German press, Fritz suffered a fatal stroke and was eulogized by Kaiser Wilhelm II in a state funeral...
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