Word: nazi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the major novel about the Nazi terror is written, its theme will almost certainly be not physical brutality but moral decay. Night Falls on the City merely anticipates the probability. Some of the animal savagery is there, and the death and suffering, but what is even more shameful is the almost total collapse of human decency in a highly civilized-perhaps overcivilized-society. Author Gainham knows Austria well, and the Viennese victims, fence sitters, Nazi bullyboys, happy collaborators and German overlords are all convincing enough for documentary purposes. Almost predictably, her heroine, a famous actress, has a Jewish husband...
This is a novel that anyone who was in Austria during the war or just after it could have jotted down from ordinary conversation and observation. It captures the slow fading of Austria's old escapist, professional charm before Nazi reality. It details the deportations, the mean spying for the Nazis by willing people of all classes, the fear of speaking openly, the people carted off for no known reason. Through the use of rather contrived plot coincidences, Author Gainham keeps her selected characters in view at all times, or at least until the SS and finally the Russians...
...contemporary fame of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi German Protestant theologian who was executed in 1945 for taking part in the plots against Hitler, rests primarily on the Letters and Papers from Prison he wrote to friends and family. In these cryptic messages, most of them smuggled out of his cell in Berlin's Tegel Prison, Bonhoeffer outlined a new kind of secular theology for a "world come of age" that has become the axiomatic premise for post-Christian thought. Last week a new cache of Bonhoeffer letters came to light-revealed by the woman to whom...
Confirmation Flunked. There was an element of incongruity in their relationship. Bonhoeffer was a mature intellectual with a passionate commitment both to Christian theology and the anti-Nazi underground; Maria, half his age, had no zest for either theology or politics. The two first met in 1936; Bonhoeffer was 30, she was twelve. At the time, he was operating an underground seminary for anti-Nazi divinity students in Finkenwalde; Maria, member of an aristocratic, landed family, was living nearby with her grandmother, who asked Bonhoeffer to include the girl in a confirmation class for Maria's older brother...
...this century of horrors, the deadly concentration camps and prisons of Stalin in the '30s, relatively old-fashioned and bureaucratically cumbersome in their operation, were soon to be overshadowed by the smoothly functioning Nazi death camps and crematoriums of the '40s. But they were no less ruthless in quality for being more primitive and inefficient. Moreover, they existed on such a scale that ordinary Russians knew about them and stolidly accepted (or had to accept) the destruction of their fellow countrymen...