Best of
Germany

1951

The Forest Passage


Ernst Jünger - 1951
    No matter how extensive the technologies of surveillance become, the forest can shelter the rebel, and the rebel can strike back against tyranny. Jünger's manifesto is a defense of freedom against the pressure to conform to political manipulation and artificial consensus. A response to the European experience under Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, The Forest Passage has lessons equally relevant for today, wherever an imposed uniformity threatens to stifle liberty.

The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany


Kay Boyle - 1951
    Both here, and in the stories, the ""true computation is fervently made"" that here, in the German people, is no realization of guilt, no knowledge of guilt. The stories are enormously effective, compassionate, bitter, sharpened by the understated, the unsaid,-and it is in the short story situation (rather than in the novel) that Kay Boyle is particularly gifted. There's the arson revenge of a German child against an American family; a take-off of the Amis in Cabaret, a touching tribute to a soldier, and the little boy he outfits, and a harsh scoring of the occupation's bigger brass; and The Lost and Adam's Tod give a powerful, tacit portrayal of the victims- young and old- of displacement and discrimination... If not keyed to the preferences of her more popular audience, this will carry to her earlier, discriminating following.