Word: messkirch
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House Upon the Sand, a novel of savage ironies, belongs with the best of the literature on Nazidom. Written by a Lithuanian novelist who spent the war in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, it tells of a decent German aristocrat who turns into a Nazi killer with chilling ease. Messkirch, narrating the story of his own fall, is a well-to-do landowner in rural Germany. He takes pride in being a skeptic, a cut above the fanatical urban upstarts who are running the country. But in countless small ways, he betrays the weaknesses of character -the obtuseness, the occasional coarseness...
Blood for Blood. Though Messkirch is kind to the French and Russian war prisoners who work on his estate, he frankly considers them inferiors who rely on "temperament" instead of "temperance." He is contemptuous of the local party hack, who spouts Nazi clichés, but he has also a sneaking admiration for him: "In his round eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, I saw the extinct race of ancient Rome, which had marched intrepidly over the whole expanse of the ancient world and conquered it." He admits his isolation from the mainstream of European life: "The most...