Word: kultured
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind v. regimented thought, the relationship of disease to creative activity...
...Neurotic Kultur. So far as his biographer-friend knows, Adrian had but one sexual experience with a woman, a prostitute; but it leaves him with a disease that alternately retards and heightens his work and leaves him a senile wreck at the end. Perhaps the best and most readable section of Faustus describes Adrian's years in a rustic Bavarian retreat near Munich. Mann's description of Munich's cultural and pseudo-intellectual crowd between wars, and their stiff-necked, neurotic Kultur helps explain how an Austrian fanatic got them to eat out of his hand...
...high level of government service cannot be maintained. Traditionally underpaid Civil Service employees will not be able to suffer their static promotion system when the F.B.I. also tells them what they must think. With every position in jeopardy, the Civil Service is faced with the possibility of an extensive Kultur purge that will substitute political wheelhorses for expert, but supposedly unfit officials...
Beware the Weak. Malaparte says he dined with German Governor General Hans Frank at his Warsaw palace, heard him extol German Kultur, play Chopin with delicacy, later that same night saw him use a live child for target practice while the women of the party giggled. Says Malaparte: "In no part of Europe had the Germans appeared to me so naked, so exposed as in Poland. In the course of my long war experience, the conviction had grown within me that...
Always a good German, Strauss has been an on-again-off-again friend of the Nazis. Last June, he publicly snapped his fingers at Hitler's threat to cancel his birthday celebration, said: "It was not I who started the war" (TIME, July 17). Even then, the Kultur-conscious Nazis, considering his prestige valuable to Germany, let him be. As the war approached his doorstep, the aged composer continued to cultivate his musical garden...