Samstag, 22. Januar 2011

German Phobia2

 

It seems that Winder really wanted to begin his book in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as the idea of a single Germany was taking hold. Nearly three hundred pages into his ploddings Many people like Microsoft Office.

through a procession of municipal museums and dreary castles, Winder finally asks a provocative question: “If there was to be a united Germany rather than lots of smaller countries some of which happened to have German speakers in them, then how was that Germany to be defined?” He Office 2007 makes life great!

plausibly argues that in the wake of Napoleon’s demise and the waning of French influence across the continent, Prussia was “the country best poised to take advantage of German nationalism,” uniting its many smaller states under a militaristic vision that would last more or less until Allied flags flew above ravaged Berlin in 1945.Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.

But in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the nascent German nation burned with possibility. Some will surely have qualms about Winder’s claim that “it was simply not Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.

problematic to be both Jewish and German,” but he makes a convincing argument. His objection that marzipan—just one of the many cultural products now being exported beyond German borders—“has some of the untouchable qualities of cat faeces” might also trouble some readers, though probably on a smaller scale. He also unearths fascinating instances of Germany spreading The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.

the inevitable tentacles of empire, such as a settlement of Westphalians in Jamaica that “still does a traditional German pork roast even though two hundred and fifty years of intermarriage have made it black.”Office 2007 key is available here.

Winder is correct—if not entirely original—in his assessment that the blame for World War I cannot be fully placed at Germany’s doorstep, and that the network of alliances that unraveled with Franz Ferdinand’s assassination is really at fault. And yet the conflict unleashed the country’s darkest impulses, as war often does. In one of his more astute passages, Winder writes that under Kaiser Wilhelm II—a Prussian, of course—“Germany’s previously admired philosophers became Office 2007 download is on sale now!                                                                                                                          

the prophets of zombie unthink … its beautiful language the gargled jackboot voice of a parade-ground culture.” In other words, Germany became the gross caricature of itself that neither the gleaming towers of Frankfurt nor the generous reparations to Holocaust survivors have effaced.

While the Treaty of Versailles may have been just punishment for German aggression, defeat brought what Winder nicely calls “furious disbelief,” along with a convenient new scapegoat in the Jews. In the south, a Soviet Republic of Bavaria flickered briefly into existence, while Berlin remained a “delusive but pleasurable bubble,” a legendary urban scene to rival both the Paris of Office 2007 Professional bring me so much convenience.

the Lost Generation and bohemian New York. And then there was something called the Migrating Birds movement, “whereby hundreds of thousands of people hiked, sang songs and built camp-fires.” These proto-hippies certainly weren’t going to save Germany, but it is not hard to see how Hitler stirred this cauldron of humiliation and confusion to his benefit.

German Phobia1

 

The title of this book provides a key to what Winder sees as the central problem of German history: an obsession with purity that eventually spilled over into racial arrogance. The original Germania—or, more fully, Concerning the Origin and Situation of the Germans­—was written by Microsoft Office 2010 is the best software in the world.

the Roman historian Tacitus around 100 B.C., and promulgated the mythology of a pure-blooded race in the North, an idea that Wagner and Hitler, among others, gladly adapted to their own ends. Winder finds this notion of German exceptionalism about as credible as Atlantis. He notes astutely Office 2010 is powerful!

that “[i]n practice Germany is a chaotic ethnic lost-property office, and the last place to be looking for ‘pure blood.’ ”

It is useful to be disabused of the notion of Germany’s eternal specialness, but what was Winder himself looking for? I have read his book and I still don’t know. Upset that so much German Office 2007 is so powerful.

energy has been wasted on false and murderous dreams of superiority, he lashes out like a surly teenager, perhaps imagining that his anger will atone for genocidal sins. As he travels around Germany, his displeasure at its failings becomes so overwhelming that it simply crosses over into Microsoft Office 2010 is so great.

the comical. King Ludwig is a “puerile loony.” The Victory Column in Berlin is “ugly and  unengaging.” Berlin Cathedral is “appalling.” A market in Darmstadt serves “really awful cider.” The Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is “[a]nother pointless German state.” Bruno Schmitz is Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

“the world’s worst architect.” The castle of Neuschwanstein is “a desperate failure.” Meissen porcelain is “consistently awful.” The Bavarian Army Museum is “a mass of things so dull that I can now recall none of them.” The city of Mainz is “glum, utilitarian.” Und so weiter.            

Winder certainly doesn’t spend much time on the sunny side of the street. His wrath finally feels not so much critical as trivial. He is not outraged so much as annoyed; and annoyance is a small Microsoft outlook 2010 is convenient!

emotion, especially inappropriate to a big subject. And much of the historical account that he provides has Winder merely going through the motions of describing the comings and goings of minor dukes and princes. He doesn’t care, and neither do we. The writing sometimes feels Office 2010 is my love.

intentionally uninformative, as when he describes Germany in the Roman era as a “chaos of forests, tribes and general freakishness” or contends that “[i]t took only a superficial interest in Office 2007 Professional is very good!

history to notice that at regular intervals France appeared to go crazy and attack everyone.” Superficial, indeed.Microsoft Office is inexpensive and helpful.

German Phobia

 

There’s nothing quite like seeing a swastika spray-painted on a building in Berlin. I first saw one a few years back, and it was an ugly retort to all those stark Holocaust memorials and self-flagellating volumes of history. It shattered the gleaming towers of the Sony Center, built on Microsoft outlook is great!

the scar of the Berlin Wall. We were drinking lager in some charmingly run-down Kreuzberg beer garden, but I couldn’t help but stare at those jagged lines. Of course I have seen swastikas in Microsoft Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.

London and Paris, Barcelona and Lisbon. I see them from time to time in Brooklyn. But to see a swastika in Berlin is particularly dispiriting, because one inevitably has the dire thought: it is only a matter of time.    Office 2007 can make life more better and easier.

Simon Winder’s book is a strange and often awkward volume, one that vacillates between celebrating German culture and castigating the more unseemly aspects of the history behind it. Apparently not in the business of pulling punches, Winder opens by calling Germany today “a sort of Dead Zone,” with memories of the Third Reich still spreading bad vibes across Europe and Microsoft Office 2010 is so great!

beyond. But then he makes the odd decision to end his narrative in 1933, essentially depriving the German narrative of its tragic denouement. “I want to get around the Führer and try to reclaim a bit of Europe which is in many ways … no less attractive and no more or less admirable than many other countries,” he writes. Getting around Hitler is a nice thought, but it might be a bit late I love Office 2010 !

for that.

“Wayward” is the right word for what Winder has done. Part history and part travelogue, Germania is too scattered to succeed as either. “Every attempt has been made to avoid a mere sequence of dreary dynastic events,” Winder assures, but wrapping one’s mind around a nation that bequeathed to us both the Final Solution and Oktoberfest requires more than a breezy Buy Office 2007 you can get much convenience.

conversational style that, at its worst, comes off like a Wikipedia entry edited by a cantankerous Midlands comedian.Microsoft Office 2007 can give you more convenient life.

Austen in Connecticut2

But the most unusual of Schine’s choices has to do with her characters’ Jewishness, which the title so clearly insists on. The Weissmanns are portrayed as highly assimilated—they remember that it’s Hanukkah only while celebrating Christmas Eve and mark Rosh Hashanah with a dinner party, not Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.
by going to synagogue. Yet when Miranda imagines God, He speaks with a “Yiddish lilt,” and when she eats shellfish at a party she imagines being punished with food poisoning. This residual Microsoft Office 2007 can give you more convenient life.
Jewishness is a source of comedy, but it also seems to carry a deeper sociological meaning. For Austen’s plot to make any kind of sense today, Schine needed to find a rough contemporary The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.
equivalent for Austen’s gentry, the class background against which all of her characters conduct their marital maneuvers. There is really nothing like that gentry in 21st century America: a self-contained, rigidly hierarchical caste, which prefers inheriting money to making it, and lives by Microsoft Office is my best friend.
a set of codified manners that are almost more important than morals.
Certainly this does not describe the life lived by American Jews—yet it is precisely in the Weissmann’s Jewish milieu that Schine finds her equivalent to Austen’s gentry. In fact, the comic premise of The Three Weissmanns of Westport—Jane Austen, but with Jews! Jane Austen meets Wendy Wasserstein! Wendy Austen!—is less striking than the tacit assumption that readers, including non-Jewish readers, will accept the New York Jewish upper-bourgeoisie as an equivalent Microsoft outlook is convenient!
of Austen’s  milieu. No very great likeness is needed: it is enough that the Jewish world can be plausibly imagined as affluent, family-centered, and—above all—self-contained, that it can be lazily portrayed largely in stereotypical terms, so that the characters can keep running into one another as the plot demands. Schine’s story did not used to be Jewish, and if history is any guide, Buy Office 2007 you can get much convenience.
it will not stay Jewish once it becomes a movie (The Three Winthrops of Newport), but in its current incarnation, its Jewishness may be the most intriguing, and the most gratuitous, thing about it.
But the most unusual of Schine’s choices has to do with her characters’ Jewishness, which the title so clearly insists on. The Weissmanns are portrayed as highly assimilated—they remember that it’s Hanukkah only while celebrating Christmas Eve and mark Rosh Hashanah with a dinner party, not by going to synagogue. Yet when Miranda imagines God, He speaks with a “Yiddish lilt,” and when she eats shellfish at a party she imagines being punished with food poisoning. This residual Outlook 2010 is powerful.
Jewishness is a source of comedy, but it also seems to carry a deeper sociological meaning. For Austen’s plot to make any kind of sense today, Schine needed to find a rough contemporary equivalent for Austen’s gentry, the class background against which all of her characters conduct their marital maneuvers. There is really nothing like that gentry in 21st century America: a self-contained, rigidly hierarchical caste, which prefers inheriting money to making it, and lives by a set of codified manners that are almost more important than morals.
Certainly this does not describe the life lived by American Jews—yet it is precisely in the Weissmann’s Jewish milieu that Schine finds her equivalent to Austen’s gentry. In fact, the comic premise of The Three Weissmanns of Westport—Jane Austen, but with Jews! Jane Austen meets Wendy Wasserstein! Wendy Austen!—is less striking than the tacit assumption that readers, including non-Jewish readers, will accept the New York Jewish upper-bourgeoisie as an equivalent of Austen’s  milieu. No very great likeness is needed: it is enough that the Jewish world can be plausibly imagined as affluent, family-centered, and—above all—self-contained, that it can be lazily portrayed largely in stereotypical terms, so that the characters can keep running into one another as the plot demands. Schine’s story did not used to be Jewish, and if history is any guide, it will not stay Jewish once it becomes a movie (The Three Winthrops of Newport), but in its current incarnation, its Jewishness may be the most intriguing, and the most gratuitous, thing about it.

Austen in Connecticut1

 

In taking over this plot, Schine gains the advantages of its universality and simplicity, but also sets herself the technical problem of translating it into our very different social, economic, and psychological world. We no longer have laws of entail, like the one that disinherited the Office 2007 makes life great!

Dashwoods; so Schine substitutes a divorce, which banishes Betty Weissmann from her Central Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.

Park West apartment to a relative’s shabby cottage in Westport. Daughters are no longer under their parents’ power, materially or emotionally, the way Marianne and Elinor were; so Schine contrives professional and personal crises for Annie and Miranda, which send them back under Microsoft Office 2010 is so great.

their mother’s roof. Miranda, in a ripped-from-the-headlines touch, is a book agent, who is disgraced when it turns out her memoirists have been making up their traumas, James Frey-style. Microsoft Office 2010 is so great.

Like Marianne, she is romantic and temperamental, qualities that Schine does not so much demonstrate as announce: “For the members of Miranda’s family, her unpredictability had become predictable. There were tantrums when she was young; when she was older, a combative dedication to whatever it was to which she was dedicated at the moment, and, at every age, the Office 2010 is my love.

demands and the drama.” Similarly, to leave the reader in no doubt that Annie is the sensible one, Schine makes her a librarian. Signposts like these make it easy to navigate the book on cruise control. (In case there was any doubt that The Three Weissmanns is meant to be upscale beach reading, the cover shows a plush embroidered chair on a beach.)Office 2007 can make life more better and easier.

The Dashwoods’ love troubles, too, are translated into Weissmannian equivalents. The elusive Edward Ferrars becomes Frederick Barrow, a middle-aged novelist who seduces Annie and then retreats into writerly narcissism. The flighty Willoughby becomes Kit Maybank, an actor whom Miranda loves primarily because his young son brings out her thwarted maternal instincts. There Office 2010 is my favorite.

is even a Colonel Brandon figure, the shadowy Roberts, a semiretired lawyer who helps Betty Weissmann with her divorce. The romantic equations do not balance quite as neatly in Schine as they do in Austen, but there is so little at stake with these thinly drawn characters that it hardly matters.

None of these rough-and-ready equivalents, it must be said, will bear much readerly skepticism. Betty Weissmann is bizarrely passive when her husband of 50 years, Joseph, kicks her out on the street; for all the complaints we hear about her and Miranda’s newfound poverty, their lifestyle never seems to change; even Annie, who is in her fifties and the widowed mother of two boys, Microsoft Office 2007 is the best invention in the world.

never acts with the toughness or resourcefulness her life experience should have taught her. In short, the kind of deprivation that meant disaster in Austen’s novel becomes, in Schine’s, a rather jolly holiday, the kind of vacation from middle-class life that only the securely middle-class reader can dream about. Miranda Weissmann even plays out the ultimate anti-feminist fantasy, leaving the big city and her challenging career for a life of gardening and babysitting in Connecticut.

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