Hochhuth's controversial play The Deputy dealt with WW II Vatican
diplomacy, but here he finds a smaller, everyday-people focus for
his grieving, outraged search into the Nazi infection - the tragic
love affair between German housewife and mother Paula and Stasiek
Zasada, a handsome young Polish prisoner consigned to farm work in
her village. Although the Nazi code penalizes intercourse between a
German woman and a foreigner (concentration-camp for her, death for
him), these two lonely young people are too vulnerable, too
fragile, to become other than victims. At first, Pauline and Stasi
themselves are seen only in a few small vignettes - aberrant gleams
of sunlight before the dark - while Hochhuth wrestles with that
nagging question: why did ordinary people seem to absorb and
perpetuate the mental illness at the top? Through excerpts from
documents and interviews, he convincingly recreates "the terrible
density of the police net which enshrouded Nazi Germany. . . .
There was not a citizen whom the system failed to debase into a
dog, not a dog without a watchdog trotting beside him." He mulls
over the national - or is it universal? - pull of "obedience," the
infatuation with a "legal, collective" conformity, the "hatred of
the intellect. . . ." And only after reviewing the blinkered
impotency of seasoned military men, the paranoiac bases of Nazi
racial and ethnic policies, and the atrocities practiced by Germans
against Germans (soldiers executed for "treasonous" clowning), does
Hochhuth bear clown on the personal case at hand: the execution of
Stasi - a bungled, horrible death by hanging carried out by the
tentatively decent, the truculent, the bored, the titillated, the
disgusted. . . who all watch a strong young man slowly strangle for
the sake of legality and order. An old but demandingly angry
argument - and an often searing, incontestably moving, painfully
simple story. (Kirkus Reviews)
When Ruth Padel saw an advert for a cheap break to India, she
decided to visit what she had always wanted to see: tropical jungle
and a wildlife sanctuary. Her impromptu trip was the start of a
remarkable two-year journey in search of that most elusive and
beautiful animal: the tiger. Armed with her granny's opera glasses
and a pair of Tunisian trainers, she sets off across Asia to ask
the question: can the tiger be saved from extinction in the wild?
Plunging into leech-infested jungles, she tracks tigers by jeep, by
elephant and on foot, from Bangladesh to Bhutan, from China to
far-east Russia. The result is a unique blend of natural history,
travel literature and memoir, and an intimate portrait of an animal
we have loved and feared almost to destruction.
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