Volume 16, Number 6 · April 8, 1971
Down There on a Visit
By Neal Ascherson
The Red and the White: Report from a French Village
by Edgar Morin, translated by A.M. Sheridan-Smith
Pantheon, 263 pp., $7.95
The Other Germans: Report from an East German Town
by Hans Axel Holm, translated by Thomas Teal
Pantheon, 314 pp., $7.95
Ich bin Bürger der DDR und lebe in der Bundesrepublik
by Barbara Grunert-Bronnen
Serie Piper (Munich), 129 pp.
After Hitler: A Report on Today's West Germans
by Jürgen Neven-Du Mont, translated by Ralph Manheim
Pantheon, 319 pp., $6.95
A French sociologist is looking at the bust of Marianne, the Spirit of Republican France, in a Breton mairie. As if for the first time, Edgar Morin stares into those terrible, blind eyes and sees her as 'the Cybele or Isis of a dead civilization. At the same time, I suddenly discovered the beauty of this proud virgin's face and realized that it produced in me a state akin to faith….' Morin's book, The Red and the White, is the summing up of a project conducted by a team of researchers on a Breton community, but it is in effect a man's reflections upon his own society and beliefs.
Review, 2878 words
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