Word: mann
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They didn't laugh when he sat down at the Steinway, but then for a change, they weren't supposed to. Last week Dudley Moore, 48, made his Carnegie Hall debut as a full-dress, classical pianist. Joining his friend, Violinist Robert Mann, 62, Cellist Nathaniel Rosen, 36, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Conductor-Violinist Pinchas Zukerman, 34, Moore offered a sensitive, well-paced performance of Beethoven's Triple Concerto. And he played it straight, until the very end. Then, just before heading offstage for a congratulatory hug from his longtime squeeze...
...Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht were among the most gifted writers of their time. Artist Max Ernst made surrealism accessible to a generation. The architects-in-exile of the Bauhaus, led by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, changed the face of the American city. Middle European Physicists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller became the ambivalent stepfathers of the atomic...
With only the baggage of their memories and their accents, the refugees came prepared to be instant Americans. "I believe," Thomas Mann told his new hosts, "that for the duration of the present European dark age, the center of Western culture will shift to America. It is my own intention to make my home in your country, and I am convinced that if Europe continues for a while to pursue the same course as in the last two decades, many good Europeans will meet again on American soil." Like Brecht, who went from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Austria to Switzerland...
According to Heilbut's debatable thesis, after Pearl Harbor the German Americans were thought of as just one more group of aliens. After World War II, the McCarthy period seemed to strike an ominous and familiar chord. Mann, who had found in California his Eden, came to dismiss it as "an artificial paradise," America as a "soulless soil." Einstein complained that Americans, shortchanging their idealism, were not American enough. Psychologist Erik Erikson once wrote that only in the U.S. could Freud's prescription for human dignity, Lieben und Arbeiten (love and work), be realized. But he became "increasingly...
...subjects of Heilbut's study were, after all, no ordinary group. Most were intellectuals who would have been restless in any culture. It is doubtful, for example, if Brecht ("Wherever I go, they ask me, Spell your name") would have been happy anywhere on earth. Others, like Mann, never really understood the nation they first overpraised, then cursed for being imperfect. Some, like Writer Gerhardt Eisler, were Communists, hypocritical in their horror at the House Un-American Activities Committee. Heilbut's defense of these emigres seems disingenuous: "If Einstein or Thomas and Klaus Mann were back and could...