Word: weimar
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...turbulent post-World War I Germany, two German soldiers sliced three paintings from their frames in the Grand Ducal Museum of Weimar. Last week the paintings were up on walls again, this time in Washington's National Gallery. On view were a Rembrandt 1643 self-portrait (worth upwards of $750,000), a Gérard ter Borch, one of Rembrandt's contemporaries, and a work by the 18th century German, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. Their strange odyssey bespeaks of both the awe and the ignorance that surround great art works. It also suggests that masterpieces, like people...
...Grosz. Grove Press. $15. Germany's savage satirist, who died in 1959, represented by some of his finest thrusts at pomposity and obtuseness. The drawings and water-colors done in the between-wars period reflect Grosz's deep pessimism as he watched the wavering fall of the Weimar Republic, with Hitler waiting in the wings of history. "Once you have glimpsed these corrosive portraits, these street and bedroom scenes," writes Author Henry Miller in a foreword, "you will never forget them...
Adenauer saw that the old, Roman Catholic -oriented Center Party of Weimar days could no longer survive in a Germany divided first by occupation zones, then by the Iron Curtain. His Christian Democratic Union split the Center, encouraged Protestant and peasant membership, and in 1949 edged out the older, better organized Socialist Party of Kurt Schumacher to win Germany's first free election in a generation. Then began the adroit maneuvering that brought Germany into NATO and won back the Saar coal and steel complex that France had taken. In 1953, he made his first trip...
...centuries of Western culture. In Germany he is worshiped as a demi-divinity; Albert Schweitzer, for instance, modeled much of his life on Goethe's. Yet in the English-speaking world his works are very little read. The Goethe of transatlantic reputation is the plaster Zeus of Weimar who thundered at secretaries and toadied to princes ("Blessed are those who draw near to the great of this world!"). Of his works, only Faust is famous, largely because Charles Gounod made grand opera of it, and only a few of his finest lyrics have survived the assaults of 19th century...
...somebody did. On his return from Italy, Goethe took up with a factory girl named Christiane Vulpius, a charming young thing of 23 who, as he once remarked, "made the mattress shake." To Goethe, the affair was a convenience; to Christiane, it was a tragedy. The court of Weimar called her "Goethe's pig," and he did not allow her to share his table when company was present. As the years passed, Christiane took to drink and ran to fat. After 20 years, in a fit of remorse, Goethe married her; but the damage had been done. Christiane died...