Posts Tagged ‘Hitler’
Nabokov in Berlin
Lesley Chamberlain takes a closer look at Vladimir Nabokov's relationship with Berlin... Vladimir Nabokov was starting his career as a writer when he found himself in Berlin. "It is clear, for one thing, that while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place; he is not simply a kind of spirit, hovering over the page...Something or other is going on around him." The short 1934 novel Despair from which this quote comes is already heavily self-ironising compared with [...]
Book Review: Young Hitler by Claus Hant
Paul Scraton reviews a new "non fiction novel" that looks at Hitler as a young man... Using real, historical figures as characters in a novel is not completely unusual; nor is the concept of the “non-fiction novel”, that by most accounts began with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. So the premise of Claus Hant’s Young Hitler should not necessarily be a problematic one. Over three hundred pages Hant tells the story of Adolf Hitler from the age of 16 in 1905 up to his thirty-first year [...]
Notes From The Underground
Paul Sullivan heads underground to explore an immaculately preserved WWII bunker... Most passengers passing through Gesundbrunnen S Bahn station don’t think twice about the door at the bottom of the stairs. Why should they? It's a plain old door, indistinguishable from a normal private entrance or storage area. But if you opened the door you'd be face-to-face with bonafide Nazi history, in the shape of one of Berlin’s best-preserved war bunkers. The door is locked of course, but not [...]
The Berlin Stories
Little less than a century old, Christopher Isherwood’s classic book still sheds light on the city that’s its star… Aficionados of Slow Travel know that to get to the soul of a place you don’t necessarily have to explore its heart. Tourists gathering around London’s Trafalgar Square or Rome’s Trevi Fountain may feel that they have come face to face with a city’s history, but these are landmarks, nothing more, ignored by locals to whom they represent little. The soul of a [...]
