Word: prussian
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...Never in history has any country contained such a high proportion of cowed and eunuchoid males, drilled with Prussian thoroughness to shun all household sins. Never, but never, do they drop cigar ashes in the icebox, prop their feet on a coffee table, leave an unwashed dish in the sink . . . They endure their married lives in mute docility, and die mercifully early in life from ulcers and high blood pressure...
...shapes up in The Kaiser of Prussian-born Biographer Joachim von Kürenberg is a vastly different fellow from the monster who was hanged in effigy throughout the U.S. in World War I. It is not simply that the author remembers Wilhelm II's good points; it is the fact that he had so many weak ones. Kürenberg's book makes the going a bit sticky for people whose knowledge of modern European history is shaky, but it will bring many a surprise to readers who vaguely remember Wilhelm as the Iron Hohenzollern...
Behind the Trappings. For a Prussian prince, Wilhelm began life in 1859 with a crushing handicap. He was born with a crippled left arm and rapidly picked up the inferiority complex that went with it. He was afraid to ride, used a special knife-fork gadget at meals, and exercised his right arm relentlessly to make up for the weakness of the other. As if one physical handicap were not enough, he suffered from a "scrofulous" ear sickness that made a court physician advise an insurance company not to write a policy on his life. Later, many highly placed Germans...
...Kaiser was too complex to be either all of the time, but there were times when he could seem like both. To a sculptor working on a monument to Wilhelm's parents (Kaiser Friedrich and Kaiserin Victoria), the Kaiser sent an order saying that "Prussian eagles, even when sitting, must be represented as if they were flying." No great soldier himself, he worried his general staff, as Author Kürenberg puts it, by "losing himself more and more in external trappings, designing new uniforms and braidings or inventing cords and silver whistles for dispatch riders." He could...
Something like 4,000 Gehlen agents, some of whom served as German spies in World War II, are at work in Europe and Russia. Some range as far afield as Cairo, Istanbul and Madrid. Their chief, former Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen, 52, is a slight, tight-lipped Prussian with a passion for anonymity. A Wehrmacht regular, Gehlen rose in World War II to become head of the "Enemy Army-East," the super-secret intelligence staff that evaluated the reports of a vast network of German agents ranging the Eastern front from Leningrad to the Caucasus. Because his realistic appraisals...