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BEFORE THE DELUGE: A PORTRAIT OF BERLIN IN THE 1920'S by OTTO FRIEDRICH 418 pages. Harper...
Vivid Portrait. The city and the decade provide a nostalgic paradox that has fascinated novelists, scholars and citizens from Christopher Isherwood and Hannah Arendt to the long lines currently waiting to see Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Otto Friedrich has combined history and cultural journalism to produce the most vivid portrait of the period yet written. Weaving back and forth in time and place between Marlene Dietrich and Joseph Goebbels, between Berlin and Hollywood, between 1920 memoirs and 1971 interviews, the author, who is a former managing editor of the Saturday Evening Post and now a TIME senior editor, has recreated...
...culture is plentiful and the gossip spicy. Yet Friedrich is never far away from the presentiment of the horror to come. What turns out to be most significant about the era is not its spectacular vulgarity and lust, or the brilliance of its art, but its sheer inattention to what was really happening-the long struggle between Communists, Socialists and Nazis. The popular stance in politics was a traditionally stolid German "Ohne mich"-"Include me out." Friedrich describes a night when, despite fighting in the streets, U.F.A., Germany's giant movie company, went ahead with its press preview...
...inevitable? No, says Friedrich, "it could have been avoided up to the very day on which Hitler took power," and his book creates an agonizing, step-by-step awareness of how things might have gone differently. Hitler thought so too; just two months before he came to power in 1933 he was threatening suicide in despair over an impending split in the Nazi Party. Shortly before that, in Germany's last free election, the Nazis lost 2,000,000 votes, and dropped 34 Reichstag seats...
...cosmos with the resolve of Sisyphus. Sloan states that his own growth in this direction is rooted in the work of theologican Paul Tillich, whose work The Courage to Be is footnoted in Comrade V.. He was further influenced by the writing of Borghes and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. A Stoic, according to Sloan, is one who "seeks assiduously for answers, knowing that they're not there, but hoping that he'll find them...