Word: regler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...when Regler was released in 1940, he was proud of a graduation gift from the "bums"; it was a certificate: "By your departure, the camp is impoverished, but liberty is enriched." In the camp, too, he had heard Communist Gerhard Eisler presiding in a latrine over a party kangaroo court-an experience that afflicted him with further doubts, and diarrhea...
...Regler sweated out the rest of World War II in Mexico, to receive the usual reward of those who give their non serviam to Communism-ostracism by friends, charges that he was in the pay of Washington, or of the Gestapo. Ironically, he was denied a U.S. visa, while Eisler, the latrine lawgiver, spent years in the U.S. as an unwelcome visitor...
...Pepper Gun. Through this tortured political tale runs a beautifully unexpected thread-a true love story. Marie Louise Vogeler, born into a bohemian-utopian-socialist circle in Germany, was first Gustav Regler's mistress, then his wife, and always his real conscience. As a young girl on the family farm, she knew left-wingers as loquacious loungers who would cut down a walnut tree under which Rilke had written a poem rather than walk farther for firewood-and knew at the same time that nothing good would come of that lot. Through her beauty and her faith...
...painful death, apparently of cancer, in Mexico in 1945-the final scenes accompanied by Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik played by a visiting string orchestra-is described with more good faith than taste; her death seems to have liberated Regler from bitterness and the wish to judge. As a gesture against political bullies back home, Marie Louise once carried a bamboo blowpipe to puff pepper into the eyes of German police; pity had made her, too, willing to blind someone. Symbolically, Regler buried the pepper gun with her in her coffin...
...Regler's book is an important memoir for anyone with a serious concern for the moral and political history of the last 40 years. Those who make themselves responsible for every fallen sparrow-or the twisted ear of every tailor-give themselves godlike rank but inevitably end in quite another echelon. This, if there is one, is Regler's message to his generation...