Word: wiechert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TIDINGS (302 pp.)-Ernst Wiechert-Macmillan...
...late Ernst Emil Wiechert (1887-1950) was one of the last of a vanished breed of German writers-romantic in feeling, mystical in outlook, spendthrift in prose (in his 63 years he wrote 60 books, none of them very well known in the U.S.). When Hitler came to power, Wiechert backed one of the dictator's most detested internal enemies, Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, and paid for it with five months in Buchenwald concentration camp followed by years of enforced silence. Tidings, Wiechert's posthumous novel (first published in Germany in 1953) is the fruit of his musings...
What Amadeus sees is, of course, precisely what Author Wiechert saw in his own closing years. Defeat or victory in battle means "nothing or next to nothing," because today both victors and defeated share equally "the appalling fear of the terrible loneliness of the human race." Man's tie with tradition has been cut through, nor can mere political poster slogans bring back what has been lost. Woman used to be superior to man in maintaining the "well-arranged paths." But now, even she has forgotten "the old order of nature" and enters maturity "marching instead of dancing, carrying...
...Wiechert uses modern characters to illustrate his old allegory and presses home his message with intense sincerity. His weakness is a mystified view of history that exaggerates both the stability of the past and the uniqueness of the present. His prose is filled with sentimental, turgid solemnity. But the book will please those who like their religious literature to be a little lower than the angels and a little higher than Lloyd Douglas...
| 1 |