Word: salzburger
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...BURNING GLASS, by S. N. Behrman. Set in Salzburg, New York and Hollywood during the '30s, the celebrated playwright's first novel tells of the shifting fortunes of a group of intellectuals and socialites who make very agreeable company...
...packed on a stage. The hero Stanley is a young Jewish playwright from Ohio, talented but vain, who is battening on the smash success of his first Broadway comedy. He falls in love with Stephanie von Arnim, a beautiful, aristocratic Austrian actress, and goes to live in her Salzburg castle with the hazy intention of fashioning a comedy for her talents and her accent...
Flight. As Stephanie's guest, Stanley plunges into the brilliant intellectual and social haut monde in Salzburg for the music festival. He is a self-conscious blunderer, but the one thing he understands far better than his indifferent friends is the true nature of Hitler's mania. The Jew and Gentile gathered to hear Toscanini conduct Fidelia cling to the illusion that Austria is protected by some ineluctable immunity. But after watching his barber preen in his new National Socialist uniform, and after seeing the troopers take over the best restaurants, Stanley knows that he must...
Leave he does, for an assignment in Hollywood, only to find his Salzburg companions arriving daily-adrift, usually broke, looking for movie money. Behrman's glimpse of Hollywood will not trouble the ghosts of novelists Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West, but he does focus on something these satirists missed. Behrman's Hollywood is like a latter-day Paris or Geneva-an asylum for talented refugees who in fact fled to the area in the late...
Like Stanley Grant, Behrman went to Salzburg in 1937, and the memory of a doom-laden summer started him on the book, the only novel he plans to write, nearly two decades later. "I knew what was coming," he said. "The streets were choked with Mercedes full of Nazis. But all that those dear people talked about was whether Mahler or Bruckner was a better composer-that was the big debate then. To this day I don't understand why they didn't see it and get out; but the sad truth is that no matter what public...