bookshelves: re-read, spring-2010, dodgy-narrator, wwii, published-1959, noir, nobel-laureate, magical-realism, satire, nazi-related, paper-read, fradio, radio-4x, spring-2015, re-visit-2015, film-only, incest-agameforallthefamily, play-dramatisation

Re-visit 2015: Günter Grass, Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87

Description: Danzig in the 1920s/1930s. Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from his birth he decides at his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him at the eve of World War II. So he refuses the society and his tin drum symbolizes his protest against the middle-class mentality of his family and neighborhood, which stand for all passive people in Nazi Germany at that time. However, (almost) nobody listens to him, so the catastrophe goes on...



Did you spot Charles Aznavour in there!?
Powerful film of a powerful novel.

Sherbet fizz







Re-Read details: As Hitler rises to power, three-year-old Oskar decides he doesn't want to grow up. Stars Phil Daniels and Kenneth Cranham. Broadcast on:


blurb - Classic novel of the rise and fall of Hitler as seen through the eyes of the dwarfish narrator, Oskar Matzerath.

Not caring for the world he is growing up in, a small boy determines to remain a child. The epic sweep of Grass' novel satirises German nationalism and the rise and fall of the Nazi movement.

___

Brilliant portrayal of a youngster in denial of real-life. This theme has been loosely followed up in Cabaret and Pan's Labyrinth.

bookshelves: one-penny-wonder, history, nazi-related, paper-read, nonfiction, autumn-2011, under-20

Hardback, withdrawn from Surrey County Library. Quite a selection of black and white photographs included, mug shots of perfection. It is chapter 8 that I am most interested in,Maids of Norway, however it now looks as if the whole thing will grab me like the proverbial bunny in the headlights.

'For us the end of the war will mean an open road to the east, for the creation of the Germanic Reich in one way or another... the fetching home of 30 million people of our blood, so that during our lifetime we shall be a people of 120 million Germanic souls. That means we shall be the sole decisive power in Europe. That means that we shall be able to tackle peacetime, during which we shall be able for the first 20 years to rebuild and extend our towns and villages, and push the borders of our German race 500 kilometres father out to the east.' Heinrich Himmler, 14 October 1943

Reads like any Sword Religion manifesto really, doesn't it *shudders*

So this book outlines how the racial policy was arrived at, chiefly using passages from Darwin's 'Descent of Man', followed then by a swathe of Himmler's history (skimmed). I was a little uncomfortable to be told that some passages from H G Wells 1901 story Anticipations would have slotted right into Mein Kampf without a look back over the shoulder. Wells wrote:

The ethical system which will dominate the world state will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful strong bodies, clear and powerful minds and a growing body of knowledge - and to check the procreation of base and servile types... The method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man is death... For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence or stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.

Page 53 - At the beginning of 20th Century German annual birth rate was a healthy 33 per thousand population. By the 1920's it was down to 20.3 and by 1933 only 14.7.

I had not previously known about kidnapping. The SS would wander through Poland and identify candidates of racially pure children then take them back to Germany to be raised. If the child 'reconciled' itself to this then it was given the best that the system could offer, however, if the child fretted then it was killed as a disrupting influence. Clollectively they are known as Children of Poznan.

The end of the book outlines racial extermination in today's world. Overall this is an informative read without any spark or energy from the author... 'just-the-facts-ma'am'. My specific copy has many pencil crosses against paragraphs in the section I was most interested in, so somewhere the stories out of Norway were of specific use to aother, and I like that.



from wiki, a well known lebensborn child - Anni-Frid Prinzessin Reuss von Plauen (born Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad, 15 November 1945 in Bjørkåsen, Ballangen, Norway), is a Norwegian-born Swedish pop singer. She was one of the four members of Swedish group ABBA. She is formally styled Her Serene Highness Princess Anni-Frid Synni Reuss of Plauen following her marriage to a German prince of the former sovereign House of Reuss in 1992.

 

 

 

 

Read from October 16 to 20, 2011

** spoiler alert **

RELEVANT QUOTE - “I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.”
― Primo Levi

From wiki - On 11 March 1944, neighbors of a house owned by Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot at 21 rue Le Sueur in Paris, complained to police of a foul stench in the area and of large amounts of smoke billowing from a chimney of the house. Fearing a chimney fire, the police summoned firemen, who entered the house and found a roaring fire in a coal stove in the basement. In the fire, and scattered in the basement, were human remains.

General Information
===============
Narrator.......................Paul Michael
Abr/Unabr....................Unabridged
Genre...........................True story of a brutal serial killer
Total Runtime...............13 Hours 54 Mins

BLURBS: Death in the City of Light is the gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive murderer in a twilight world of Gestapo, gangsters, resistance fighters, pimps, prostitutes, spies, and other shadowy figures of the Parisian underworld.

The main suspect was Dr. Marcel Petiot, a handsome, charming physician with remarkable charisma. He was the “People’s Doctor,” known for his many acts of kindness and generosity, not least in providing free medical care for the poor. Petiot, however, would soon be charged with twenty-seven murders, though authorities suspected the total was considerably higher, perhaps even as many as 150.

Who was being slaughtered, and why? Was Petiot a sexual sadist, as the press suggested, killing for thrills? Was he allied with the Gestapo, or, on the contrary, the French Resistance? Or did he work for no one other than himself? Trying to solve the many mysteries of the case, Massu would unravel a plot of unspeakable deviousness.
When Petiot was finally arrested, the French police hoped for answers.

But the trial soon became a circus. Attempting to try all twenty-seven cases at once, the prosecution stumbled in its marathon cross-examinations, and Petiot, enjoying the spotlight, responded with astonishing ease. His attorney, René Floriot, a rising star in the world of criminal defense, also effectively, if aggressively, countered the charges. Soon, despite a team of prosecuting attorneys, dozens of witnesses, and over one ton of evidence, Petiot’s brilliance and wit threatened to win the day.

Drawing extensively on many new sources, including the massive, classified French police file on Dr. Petiot, Death in the City of Light is a brilliant evocation of Nazi-Occupied Paris and a harrowing exploration of murder, betrayal, and evil of staggering proportions.

This book should have come face to face with an active editor to whittle it down to ten hours max. Georges Simenon, Sartre, Camus, Fleming, Picasso and de Beauvoir's lives overlap with this grisly tale.