Word: mannes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...July Saturday afternoon, some 150 dazed travelers kept their vigil. Many had camped in the terminal for four days. "I've had it! I want a bath, I want a bed, I want clean clothes," said Sharon Mann, 23, a drama student in a formerly yellow blouse. Aleyda Warren, a Londoner who had been visiting friends in Connecticut, figured that she had spent $100 during her four days in line. Other standbys were cheerful: Bill Lockyer and his wife Joy, a retired couple from New Zealand, had seen a Broadway show (Elizabeth Taylor in Private Lives) with the money...
Every tale, whether it was a novella or a paragraph, was given what Thomas Mann called a "conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear and correct style." Kafka's pathological concern for style was so extreme that only a few tales were published in his lifetime. But the meticulousness that made him a dangling, indecisive figure in life produced modern myths in a prose like shards of glass. It was meant to be lucid, and it was intended to cut. It has drawn blood for 50 years...
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...