Word: wirthof
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...originality these days as a cowboy-and-Indian movie. Nonetheless, the Austrian-born English author of Czar and Journey of a Man has managed to produce an extraordinary book about that very relationship. Thomas Wiseman's study of two Austrians-Stefan Kazakh, a half-Jew, and Konrad Wirthof, a wholehearted Nazi-is a brilliant tour de force of rare psychological depth and complexity...
...obeying a powerful compulsion to return to Vienna. There, memories of his youth and early manhood torment him, providing the narrative structure for the book. A more predictable story might have emphasized the Nazis' victimization of the Jews. Instead, Wiseman focuses on Kazakh's metaphysical obsession with Wirthof, an SS officer with grand passions and grandiose ideas. Though the two are totally disparate in personality and background, Kazakh feels that his own identity has somehow been submerged in Wirthof s (to an extent reversing the situation in Remain Gary's 1968 comic novel, The Dance of Genghis...
Outrageous Demands. The two first meet in a magician's tent in 1925 as ten-year-old boys. Wirthof, a rich, aristocratic Aryan and the son of a crippled World War I general, is already arrogant and glib despite his pale blond fragility. Kazakh, son of an Aryan mother and a Jewish father who is killed as a heroic leader of the Social Democrat uprising in 1934, is a shy, sensitive boy, but stronger and taller than Wirthof. Kazakh easily wins the foot race that follows their initial encounter; yet he is able to realize even then that Wirthof...
That domination determines both their fates. When they meet again accidentally after the Anschluss, Wirthof has joined the SS and become an unthinking mouthpiece for Nazi ideology. Kazakh, a purposeless intellectual uncertain about his future or his feelings, has turned from engineering to become a hypnotist and a pioneer in advertising with nouveau riche connections. Curiously, it is Kazakh who comes closest to being a callous cynic. Wirthof, despite his crass behavior in bordellos, his egotistic mistreatment of acquaintances and his sensual brutality, is actually the overemotional romantic...
...sentiment worthy of Hamlet. In The Quick and the Dead, Thomas Wiseman has constructed a superb picture of Vienna before and during World War II, of the Baroness Leonie Koeppler and her society and of the Nazi ideology as it infects Wirthof and Lüdenscheid. He has also created a brilliant psychological study of how two very different men can become so unwittingly entwined that each fatally determines the course of the other's life...
| 1 |