Word: untergang
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...When it has dealt with the subject of war on the big screen, postwar Germany has tended to view it from the dark side. Movies such as Das Boot (1981), 2004's Der Untergang (The Downfall) and Sophie Scholl (2005) explored the experience through an unwaveringly critical lens. Even the upcoming Valkyrie, a Tom Cruise movie about a German officer who tried to kill Hitler, focuses mainly on the horrors of war. Der Rote Baron, by contrast, portrays its combatant hero in a positive light. "It's a remarkable movie," the Baron's nephew, Manfred von Richthofen, told Die Welt...
...film was infinitely better, because it was more believable. It is perhaps the best movie ever made about adoleacent alienation and parent-child relationships in modern day America. Those young people should be seen and heard--this is not impossible in a book, either--not abstracted into a Spenglerian Untergang des Abenlandes. Berners can never find his son, because there is nothing left to find in Calisher's descriptions. "Would it be a reversal of the roles between cadaver and child? Would it be--that our children become our cadavers, and we are forced to dance with them?" Berners muses...
...line of poetry in a conversation preserved in Chapter 26, but he confesses he thinks it's "schmalxig." Rehder and Twaddell have in fact found only one man who is culturally aware (he is, I think, one of the Schmidts). Herr Schmidt has written a book Ueber den Untergang der Weltl, he announces with pride. But Schmidt is resolutely cold-shouldered by average-man Steinhauer, who remarks (witheringly) "So? Das ist ja sehr interessant...
During all the dark years of World War I, Oswald Spengler in a dank Munich tenement suffered from endless headache while he composed Der Untergang des Abendlandes. During the '20s, readers in seven languages suffered likewise in the effort to follow its vast erudition, cosmic vision, Teutonic mysticism. Americans read it as The Decline of the West. Because its title suggests doom & disintegration, and because it was the gospel of the Nazi intellectuals, The Decline of the West is perhaps the most misunderstood of the influential books of the 20th Century. Last week a U. S. disciple of Spengler...
Died. Oswald Spengler, 55, famed German philosopher; of a heart attack; in Munich. His monumental, two-volume The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), predicting the extinction of Western civilization by the yellow race within 300 years, was written in an unheated Berlin flat. Published just after the War, it brought him wealth and an international reputation. A onetime National Socialist hero because of his distrust of Communism and non-Aryan races, Spengler soon alienated party leaders by his strong independence of spirit, his refusal to turn his talents to Jew-baiting...