Volume 30, Number 17 · November 10, 1983
'The First Man on Earth'
By Stephen Spender
Kleist: A Biography
by Joachim Maass, translated by Ralph Manheim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 313 pp., $22.50
One day in June 1940 after reading in the London Times a lyrical account of the invasion of France by beautiful Nazi soldiers—their blue eyes smiling under steel helmets wreathed with wild-flowers, while their tanks were roaring across the green fields—I turned on the radio. The BBC was playing Schubert's great Ninth Symphony in C major with its marching rhythms entwined with ravishing melodies relentlessly moving forward as though across a vast plain, irresistibly. Suddenly I saw terrifying connections between German Romantic music and German military might.
Review, 2809 words
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