Word: naif
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Seydlitz-Gabler's wife to marry their daughter, Ulrike, to Tanz. Ulrike is in love with Lance Corporal Hartmann, who is being kept under cover after inadvertently surviving a skirmish that the German press, for propaganda purposes, reported as an atrocious slaughter. And Hartmann is a young naif (of the sort that seems obligatory in a German anti-war novel) who serves, in his pacifistic innocence, as an effective exponent of the author's views...
...Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very tightly, continually murmuring "Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou," the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naif image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversions. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard...