Word: germane
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...author phrases the catastrophe in explicit and--for a German--uncommon terms. "In the gas chambers of the concentration camps the last breath of Christian feeling for humanity and of the Christian culture of the West was finally extinguished. The Third Reich was not only the greatest misfortune that the German people have suffered in their existence; it was also their greatest shame...
...does not deny that Nazism was a German phenomenon, though he sees other nations susceptible to its appeal. He analyses it as Germany's special and fraudulent resolution of the forces of nationalism and socialism in Europe--a formula which demanded the complete sacrifice of the individual to the State. Prussian militarism was primarily responsible for the abrogation of private moral judgment. Yet in stating the universal truism that "a full understanding of the totality of historical existence was lacking in these technicians of war." Meineeke does not discuss the more important factor that in Germany these militarists were given...
There are several passages in the book which no one but a German could write or understand. For instance: "The will, which in all these fields of the good, the true, and the beautiful, serves as the ultimate executive power, owes obedience to Queen Reason, the mistress of all the spiritual forces springing from the whole, molding, harmonizing, and guiding them...
These are sound and positive recommendations. They are encouraging coming from a German of Meineeke's stature. But they are ineffectual unless they convince the youth, who do not remember the Germany which Meineeke and his contemporaries seek to revive...
...Battleground" is the story of an airborne unit at Bastogne, during the German winter counter-offensive of 1944. This is a singularly unheroic unit as movie fighters go, preoccupied not with the Tradition of the Service or the Call of Duty, but with frozen feet, interminable K-rations, and three-day passes to Paris. The unit is trapped, partly through its own inexperience. It fights against an intelligent, non-fanatic enemy it often cannot see Its men die quietly and terribly with a minimum of dissertation on the evils of war, or the girls they have left behind...