Word: putzy
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pole), gives him good reason for alarm. In Paris she flutteres her feathers across the stage of the Folies-Bergere. In the south of France she becomes romantically involved with a Mediterranean matron-menace named Amadeo Armadillo, and in the Tyrol with an obnoxiously handsome Nazi named Putzi. In London Lady Gravell-Pitt, a flatulent and fraudulent old sandbarge, undertakes to direct Mame's entry into court society...
Nicknamed "Putzi," Hanfstaengl has described himself as Hitler's "court jester." He fled Germany in 1937 when, as he said in a recent interview, Hitler stopped listening to his advice...
...Hitler. Not only did the man resemble a suburban barber on his day off; he could not tell a Caravaggio from a Michelangelo. Worse, he seldom paid his debts, loved to stuff himself with pastry and whipped cream, sat delightedly through three showings of King Kong. Hitler, says Putzi contemptuously, was a Muttersöhnchen (mamma's boy) whose impotence may have been caused by syphilis and who resented all those who could enjoy normal sexual relations...
Hitler was also a tremendous orator with a droning voice whose hypnotic effect "has never been equaled," and Putzi Hanfstaengl dreamed of becoming the power behind the drone. With a quality of mind that Germans call dummschlau-a combination of cunning and stupidity-he thought he could use the Nazi barbarians to defeat the domestic Communists and Socialists, and then craftily make sure that Hitler's "revolution" would be orderly and beneficial...
...Putzi's book, probably his last attempt to capitalize on his career as Naziism's foremost political pianist, often reads like an edition of Munich Confidential. Politically and morally, it has the usual 20-20 hindsight. Its value for future historians will lie mostly in the gossipy anecdotes that show Hitler in his moments of off-platform relaxation-some of them very comic, as when Adolf, after the failure of the beer hall Putsch, threatens to commit suicide, but allows himself to be easily disarmed by Hanfstaengl's pregnant wife...