Word: leonhard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...short cut-a small, one-way alley officially reserved for der Alte himself but informally open to any of his ministers. When Bonn Traffic Officer Siegfried Hahlbohm, 24, failed to give Strauss's car an immediate signal into the alley, the impatient minister ordered his driver, Leonhard Kaiser, to go ahead anyway. Kaiser did so, thereby forcing the conductor of an oncoming trolley car on the main thoroughfare to slam on his emergency brake. As Strauss's grey BMW sedan screeched off toward the chancellery, Good Cop Hahlbohm dutifully noted down its license number...
Life with Mother. Leonhard is the sort of stylist who would rewrite Alice in Wonderland as The Bourgeois Illusions and Degenerate Fantasies of a British Middle-Class Female Child. He was 13 when his mother, a German Communist and a refugee from Hitler in Sweden, took him to the Soviet Union. There were thousands like them in Moscow. It was 1935, the eve of the Great Purge. Little Wolfgang was lodged, with other foreign youngsters, in Children's Home No. 6, then briefly among Russians in a grim Dotheboys Hall called the Spartak Children's Home. At school...
...Leonhard got a postcard from Mother; she had been sentenced to five years in a concentration camp for K.R.T.D., i.e., "counterrevolutionary Trotskyite activity." This did not shake the boy's faith in the system, or that of his schoolmates, many of whom had been similarly orphaned. Wolfgang worried about Mother sometimes, but not enough to prevent his getting excellent marks...
...School Lie. Leonhard finally came of age in what was surely the world's weirdest school. Even its name was a lie. The No. 101 Technical School for Agricultural Economy at Kushnarenkovo in the Ural region was not what it seemed to be-the boys would never cheer for Good Old Ag. Tech. It was a front name for a Comintern school, training foreign Communists to take over in their old homelands when the Russians won the war. The first odd thing about Tom Red's schooldays was that the hero had to change his name (he chose...
...never quite feel the same again about little Emmi. who had turned him in. From these case-history-hardened boys and girls, the Russians drew the personnel that took over in East Germany. Walter Ulbricht, a grim, humorless and inhuman man. even by Communist standards, was their leader, and Leonhard became one of his lieutenants. But in 1949 he fled to Yugoslavia, sided with Tito against Moscow, but remained a Marxist. The book is fascinating as a sort of Communist Candide-but it is far less amusing. It was written, after all, not by Voltaire but by poor, simple Candide...