Word: prussianize
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Berlin theatergoers were entranced and disturbed at the same time: Die Meuterei auf der Caine upset their time-honored Prussian reverence for military men and military orders. The neo-Nazis found some solace in Lieut. Barney Greenwald's last-act defense of Navy discipline, insisted that the play supported the defense at the Nürnberg war criminals' trial: that subordinates are not responsible for the orders of their superiors. But most West Berliners accepted the lesson of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial as a common-sense American compromise between institutional rules and individual dignity. The Caine, like...
Died. Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, 73, German World War II tank commander, exponent and early practitioner of the blitzkrieg; of circulatory difficulties; in a Russian prison camp. Product of the Prussian military caste, Von Kleist contributed decisively to France's swift collapse by sending his Panzer divisions racing around the northern end of the Maginot Line. In 1945 he surrendered to two American soldiers (to avoid being captured "in the presence of common, retreating German soldiers"), was sentenced to 15 years as a war criminal by the Yugoslavs, who then turned him over to the Russians...
...mock hero of The Man Without Qualities is a thirtyish intellectual named Ulrich. an egghead so tired that he is little more than a spiritual shell. Echoing his nihilism is a chorus of earnest buffoons: a Prussian millionaire who yearns to be an ethical superman, a general who is a kind of military Mortimer J. Adler and wants to classify all the world's great ideas, a beautiful but muddled matron who thinks the quickest trip to heaven is on a cultural broomstick. Author Musil perches them all on the lip of a volcano-the years 1913 and early...
Herr Oskar Altmann, a stiff-backed Prussian of the old school, and his wife were prim and proper Berliners who suffered privation in silence but protested peevishly against such innovations as lipstick and slacks, which they thought "incorrect." Elder son Kurt was dead or a prisoner in Russia; Fritz, the younger boy, was a good-for-nothing young Nazi who had once betrayed his parents to the Gestapo and who soon would betray them again. Author Faviell's favorites were the two Altmann girls, as different as flesh and fire. Ursula, the pretty one, had been raped...
...without any scientific proof whatsoever . . . As the result, parents are in total confusion . . . Scout leaders report behavior in ten-and twelve-year-olds that usually was relegated to the nursery-school level. But discipline? Ah, that's a dirty word and used only to describe the old Prussian army . . . But the greatest loss of all has been good, old-fashioned common sense. Without this, the genius becomes stupid in society, and the stupid, with just a modicum of it, can raise his I.Q. . . . Today, junior's hotspot is no longer his little red bottom...