Word: municher
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...Munich Was Hell. Here the novel begins to reveal its announced design. This may be reduced to a quasi-theological conundrum. In the absence of God, the English, victorious but emotionally drained, did not think it was necessary to invent a new one; the defeated Germans, humiliated and unreconciled to humiliation, invented, or reinvented, something sinister-the old tribal warrior-deities...
...innocent Augustine, Germany is full of "lovely people," its countryside under the snow as pretty as a set of picture postcards. He had expected to find the new Germany pacific and progressive. It is only slowly that he comes to see the Munich of 1923 as a hell "where justice is not being done and seen not to be done." He recognizes confusedly that "in England, the ending of the war had come like waking from a bad dream; in defeated Germany, as the signal for deeper levels of nightmare." Society had been fragmented into "men living desperately incommunicado like...
...creating a system of related microcosms (thus saving nine-tenths of the wordage of the usual novel of public events). In the German half of The Fox in the Attic, the microcosm is the family of Augustine's baronial kin, who live in a huge old castle near Munich...
...long passages on the Munich beer-hall putsch of 1923, Hitler's escape, hiding and capture are a tour de force of dreamlike action. Hughes makes totally credible the incredible figure in the stained trench coat, hypnotically making his devil's incantations and stuffing cream puffs in his pockets-an ogre sowing the wind, though only the reader has a foreknowledge of the whirlwind to be reaped...
...first installment, Fox alone has taken six years of work. To underpin his imagination, Hughes read through the entire Nürnberg trial transcript, traveled to Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Poland to interview "dozens" of people who knew Hitler personally in the Munich days-including a boy who used to call Hitler "Uncle Dolph." His prize find: an old newspaper file containing the diary of a participant in the 1923 Munich putsch...