The Face
See me with all the terrors on my roads,The crusted shipwrecks rotting in my seas,
And the untroubled oval of my face
That alters idly with the moonlike modes
And is unfathomably framed to please
And deck the angular bone with passing grace.
I should have worn a terror-mask, should be
A sight to frighten hope and faith away.
Half charnel field, half battle and rutting ground.
Instead I am a smiling summer sea
That sleeps while underneath from bound to bound
The sun- and star-shaped killers gorge and play.
Edwin Muir
Hate Story1
Was Konny even capable of hate?Several times he denied hating the Jews. I am inclined to speak of Konny's matter-of-fact hate. Hate turned down low.An eternal flame. A hate devoid of passion, reproducing itself asexually.(page 210)
Wilhelm Gostloff, Gregor Strasser
David Frankfurter
Robert Ley
KdF and Wilhelm Gostloff
Aleksandr Marinesko
Hate Story2
Why does Konny supress the presence of navy in the ship? Desire for an unambiguous enemy?(p 109)
This is the scariest book that I have read because it was so bleak that I was having problem writing this. Then I gave it a second reading. Sounded bleaker than before, then suddenly as it happens in such cases, I am seeing this as a book of hope. I will write a detailed review and post it when it is ready.
The key is Konny's relationship with his father. Tulla's with Jenny.
This book is more about internet generation that is growing without emotional connect with life. I want to write a true review . Somewhere Tommy from golden notebook will make an entry with Konny and Wolfgang.
6th Sept.
--------------------------------I have been meaning to write a review of Gunter Grass' Crabwalk for a while. Here is Wiki on this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabwalk
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Themata--
1.How the perception of the past affects the future is a theme of this novella. The narrator Paul Pokriefke was born as Tulla, Paul's mother was rescued from the sinking Kraft durch Freude ship Wilhelm Gustloff. From history -
In 1936 Landesgruppenleiter Wilhelm Gustloff (born on 30th Jan 1895), a Nazi stationed in Davos, Switzerland, was assassinated by the Jew David Frankfurter, hoping to inspire Jewish resistance against Nazis. In his trial, Frankfurter claimed that he shot because he was a Jew and he had no regrets.Gustloff's funeral was attended by the entire Nazi top brass. His wife had worked under Hitler. He was declared a Blutzeuge (martyr) to the Nazi cause and a Kraft Durch Freude cruise vessel was named after him. Thus anti Jewish feelings were stirred and nurtured. Couple of years later, the assassination of a German diplomat by another Jew provided the pretext for pogrom against jews; Christallnacht marked the beginning of Final Solution. On 30th Jan.1945, Wilhelm Gustloff, then a refugee carrier carrying over 10,000 people predominantly civilians fleeing advancing Red Army, but there were wounded soldiers also, was attacked by a Soviet submarine. Over 9,400 people perished, making it the biggest maritime disaster of all time,bigger than the sinking of Titanic.Tulla wants Paul to write about the sinking of the ship, which he resists as 'If I really have to settle my own historical accounts now, everything I messed up is going to be ascribed to the sinking of a ship'.But surfing the internet he comes comes across a website dealing with Wilhelm Gustloff and Wilhelm Gustloff . It is far right in tenor and Paul discovers that it is his son Konny who is behind the postings under the name Wilhelm. Online Wilhelm is countered by David (Wolfgang Stremplin assuming the role of David Frankfurter)
Konny or Konrad is named after Tulla's dead brother. She finds in him a receptive audience that she could not in her son.
2. Another theme is the nature of evil. Tulla Pokriefke, who is same age as Grass and appears in Grass's Cat and Mouse and Dog Years as promiscuous evil temptress almost subhuman, is now a woman whose life is permanently marked by the sinking of Gustloff , the shock bleaching her hair overnight. Tulla speaks her mind even when she is politically incorrect as when she claims that the Kraft Durch Freude ship was truly classless and claims herself to be Stalin's last faithful follower.
3. Internet
Paul, Tulla, Konny, Wolfgang, Stremplins
Nature of hatred as when Konny says in his trial " No, hate played no part in this,My thoughts were entirely practical"
Konny , "Tth classless liner Wilhelm Gustloff was and remains the living expression of nationalist socialism, a model to this day, and truly exemplary for all times to come!"
4. Inadequacy of trials in courts, how they evade the real issues.
5. The tragedy of Stremplins. It scares me.
6. Followers of Konny like Breivik-- We believe in you, we will wait for you, we will follow you.. even when Konny has moved on ..
7. I think it is letting emotions speak the language of morality??? Emotions should be acknowleged and allowed only as emotions??
8. Fatherless, motherless
Tulla loses her parents in the ship .At 17 she is a mother and doesn't know who the father is. Paul has a mother, who is unable to nurse him (doesn't lactate because of the shock?)
Tulla has a parent figure? in Jenny, her schoolmate and is seperated by division of Germany.
Jenny - through her Paul attempts to feel some fondness for Mother, unsuccessfully. also "I never did have a father, only interchangeable phantoms
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