Word: oskar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...LIFE OF MY MOTHER-Oskar Maria Graf-Howell, Soskin...
Soon after Hitler came to power, Joseph Paul Goebbels, Ph.D., asked best-selling Oskar Maria Graf to become his official Nazi novelist. Replied Graf: "What have I done to deserve this disgrace? Burn my books! I would consider it an undying mark of shame if my books were not burned by you." Burned they were, and homeless Novelist Graf has wandered ever since-Austria, Czechoslovakia, Russia, the U. S. In The Life of My Mother, "a biographical novel," Outcast Oskar Maria Graf seeks a way back to his spiritual verities...
...Young Oskar Graf was neither peasant like his mother nor petty merchant like his father. So he ran away from home to the arty and radical circles of Munich's Bohemia, where "nothing was so taboo as sentimentality," where anarchism, drunkenness and futurism foretold coming decades of disintegration. They came: the World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, inflation, hunger, humiliation, the Nazis. Oskar Graf thought more & more of his mother. He identified her with the masses, "the blameless German people . . . already behind the plow, in the workshops, factories, and offices, working as hard as ever, without particularly concerning themselves...
Then exiled Oskar Graf went to the U. S. S. R., where he found "incomparable social institutions . . . almost like a fairy tale." But the primitive, polyglot city of Tiflis again reminded him of his mother. "Napoleon wasn't worth anything, and Hitler certainly isn't. They think they change the world, but in the last analysis everything remains as it was. . . . The human instinct for self-preservation is tough and ineradicable. Its patient, long-suffering force seems to keep pace with any historical change, and finally to outlast it." This statement of faith comes easy to Novelist Graf...
Among Emil Nolde's fellow German "degenerates," Oskar Kokoschka escaped to London, Satirist George Grosz settled and calmed down in the U. S., Ernst Kirchner died of tuberculosis in exile. Karl Hofer, onetime Carnegie International prize winner is still in Germany, has been forbidden to paint. Artist Nolde, now 73, is still in Germany too. But he gets along very well. He is a Nazi Party member. Although he is officially banned, he paints what he likes, sells it while Nazis look the other way. Reason: Hermann Göring collects Nolde paintings...