Word: pre-war
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While Céline's earlier volumes were set against the corruption of pre-war France, Castle to Castle takes place in a special Nazi detention camp. The author's attention is focused, if flashes of sheet lightning can be said to focus, on the "Boche Baroque" fortress-prison of Siegmaringen. The time is late in the war. France has already been liberated by the Allies. At Siegmaringen, French collaborators (including Celine) are huddled together, fearful of R.A.F. bombs, of their German masters and, most of all, of one another. In this bedlam, swarming with bizarre characters...
...book, mostly the work of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, represents the flowering of a dominant style of pre-war musical comedy. An intricate, well-knit plot midway between a P.G. Wodchouse novel and a Pudding Show, though visibly pieced together in the Taft Hotel or the New Haven Railroad, is among the best of its kind--good enough to pose a favorable contrast to today's usually more stylized, loosely constructed counterparts...
...uprising was in fact what Grass recreates. Like The Boss, he is snatching a bit of history and reworking it for his own ends. And his justification can be found in The Boss as well, to whom history is fantasy and the present is fact. Brecht -- politically disappointed with pre-war Germany and post-war America--meets the present for one last time in the German Democratic Republic. Finally perceiving the incongruity of his politics within and without the theatre, he retires to the countryside to contemplate trees and perhaps write poems about them. Grass, acutely aware of this same...
...German-occuppied, or German-allied, countries of Eastern Europe during World War II contributed considerably to their popularity in 1945. A number of developments after the war, however, led to a return of disillusionment in the Soviet Union, and the beginning of disillusionment in the new communist states in Eastern Europe--unrest caused by opportunities for young Soviet soldiers to observe life in the West, the disappointment of many at the failure of the Soviet regime to continue its relaxation of the extensive pre-war controls, and the failure of the communists in Eastern Europe to provide a free, democratic...
Though the President has never answered the letter--and by all accounts has no intention of doing so--Secretary of State Dean Rusk replied on January 4, inviting the signers to Washington. Likening Communism in Vietnam to the Nazi threat in pre-war Europe, the Secretary wrote the students that there was not a "shadow of doubt" in his own mind about the involvement of U.S. interests in Southeast Asia...