Word: nazi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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House Upon the Sand, by Jurgis Gliauda. A Lithuanian novelist who endured the German occupation in World War II studies the corrosive effect of Nazi bloodymindedness on a decent German aristocrat...
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...
...revenge, Messkirch decides to murder a French prisoner. He chooses Mollendruz, a young man of intelligence and character, as a worthy countersacrifice for his son. No sooner has he committed the murder than he learns that his daughter is carrying Mollendruz' child. True to his newfound Nazi standards, Messkirch disowns his daughter, who kills herself. He becomes a local hero, because "the father had yielded to the German in me." Ultimately, he sardonically observes, the Nazis "would have raised me to a legendary figure; my deed would have graced the pages of school primers; it would have been celebrated...
...chief character of The Birthday King, by British Novelist Gabriel Fielding. Ruprecht Weidmann is the scion of a wealthy manufacturing family that has a slight admixture of Jewish blood and is trying desperately to get into Hitler's good graces. A cold opportunist, Ruprecht commits his anti-Nazi brother to a concentration camp, drowns a companion, betrays a business associate who is plotting against Hitler, sends off a dozen of his factory workers to serve as medical guinea pigs. Ruprecht is a kind of lago beyond the reach of life-and the credibility of the reader...