A deep, significant exploration of artistic atonement in postwar Germany.
An elucidating cultural study explores the ways artists forged a sense of redemption—both personal and societal—from the devastation of post–World War II Germany.
European and American writers, journalists, filmmakers, and painters were drawn to postwar Germany to witness the horrendous carnage as well as the Allied attempts at rehabilitation. In her rigorously researched study, a natural extension of her previous look at the Blitz through the eyes of selected London authors, The Love-charm of Bombs (2013), British scholar and journalist Feigel (English/King’s Coll. London) picks through the rubble of Germany through the points of view of a variety of writers. These include Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Martha Gellhorn, and two of the children of Thomas Mann, Erika and Klaus, returned from exile. Should the Germans be excoriated and forced to confess their guilt—as the Allied Occupation established in the “JCS 1067” document that formed the official postwar policy in Germany and which the Manns insisted upon—or should the suffering of the people be addressed through humanitarian efforts, as proposed by British author Stephen Spender and others who hoped to enlist German culture in the country’s resurrection? Were the British, Americans, Russians, and French who divvied up Berlin to be considered liberators or enemy occupiers? Moreover, along with the divergent opinions on how to deal with the defeated Germans, there was the personal anguish experienced by correspondents like Gellhorn, who plumbed her grief over visiting Dachau in her war novel Point of No Return (1948). Feigel looks at the incredible speed with which the Berlin theater regained its footing and examines the rise of what would become known as Trümmerliteratur (“rubble literature”), as writers scrambled to find what Peter de Mendelssohn called “a vocabulary with which to describe bombed cities.” Exiled German speakers—e.g., Hollywood director Billy Wilder and actress Marlene Dietrich and Thomas Mann—were most relentless in their damnation of the Germans.
A deep, significant exploration of artistic atonement in postwar Germany.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-551-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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