Word: von
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gregor von Rezzori...
...dips back into a past full of evocative stage props and period business. Memory is another matter. Remembering truthfully is as difficult as inventing well -- indeed, more so; hence the paucity of good memoirs. "You must never undertake the search for time lost," warns the last sentence of Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear, "in the spirit of nostalgic tourism." The rest of the book shows how carefully he has obeyed this precept...
...Bukovina. Father was sexually unfaithful to her and volcanic in temper; an anti-Semite who despised Nazis as Untermenschen; a watercolorist, photographer and architectural historian whose diversions included dragging a dead wild boar through the hall and up the stairs in the course of a soiree. Above all, Baron von Rezzori was an obsessive hunter, whose profound and almost mystical relation with the woods and the etiquette of the chase would mark his son for life. Finally there were the beloved Other, his sister, dead at 21, and the Pomeranian governess, "Bunchy," who presided over the boy's home education...
...leadership. Then as now, the European uprisings fanned the flames of nationalism and raised what came to be known as "the German question" -- the possibility that all Germans would unite in one state. In 1848 the widely despised symbol of the old order was the aged Austrian Chancellor, Klemens von Metternich. His flight from Vienna touched off the kind of rejoicing that greeted the opening of the Berlin Wall this November...
...unified Germany has been the single most destructive power in the world during the last century. The last time Germany unified, after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, surging nationalism under Otto von Bismarck caused changes in the balance of power that eventually led to World War I. And we all know of the horrible forces German nationalism produced...