Word: prussian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PRUSSIAN NIGHTS by ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN Translated by ROBERT CONQUEST 113 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95. $2.95 paperback...
...before he was deported from Russia. Solzhenitsyn secretly made a recording of Prussian Nights, now available in the West. The author reads the 1,200-line war poem in the declamatory mode favored by many Russian poets, obviously savoring every line. Trochaic tetrameters and thumping end rhymes roll off his tongue. In an unexpectedly boyish baritone he interjects snatches of song, whispers, conversational asides and other special effects that hark back to his teen-age ambition to become an actor. The voice suits the poem. Prussian Nights represents the young Solzhenitsyn, still a decade away from the fine-tuned virtuosity...
...German playwright and satirist who wrote the screenplay for The Blue Angel, the 1929 film that made Marlene Dietrich a star; in Visp, Switzerland. Son of a Rhenish cork manufacturer, Zuckmayer won a pocketful of medals in World War I, then turned to writing. His immensely popular comedy about Prussian militarism, The Captain of Koepenick (1931), in which a shoemaker is able to take command of a town simply because he dons an army captain's uniform, earned Nazi wrath. After fleeing Hitler in 1933, Zuckmayer eventually settled on a farm in Vermont and wrote The Devil...
Your pictures told the story: the shaved heads, "beast barracks," the cruel faces of the plebes in formation, and the frightened clods being hazed or braced. Militarism, be it American or Prussian, is a stupid, vicious anachronism. Honor code? What honor is there in Balaclava, the Somme, Belsen, Dresden, Hiroshima...
...Sylvanus Thayer, superintendent from 1817 to 1833. A Dartmouth man with a backbone of iron, Thayer changed West Point from a humdrum school for the sons of wealthy families into a first-class engineering institution. After studying European military systems, he also imposed on the cadets a kind of Prussian discipline that lingers today. Thayer had strict rules against lying and stealing, and what was called "irregular or immoral practices...