no popes--a little Grass

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

To Doblin "victories, defeats, treaties, all the dated facts
that, taken together, have come to be known as the 'Thirty
Years' War, are worth no more than a subordinate clause or
are, often enough, deliberately passed over. What interests
him is the comings and goings of armies looking for winter
quarters, the labyrinthine court intrigues, dragged through
the chancelleries, palace gardens, and hidden galleries, and
ending up in confessionals
. Distorted as by concave
mirrors, mystically heightened, the tangled rituals of
cunning preparations, spun in Vienna or at the court of
Maximilian of Bavaria, roll over whole pages, while the
outcome of courtier's efforts, such as the disposition of
Wellenstein or the refusal of the Elector of Saxony to let
Gustavos Adolphus and his army pass through Saxon territory,
are mentioned (without special emphasis) only because such
things happen to be part of the picture; but history they
are not, for history means the innumerable absurd
simultaneities  that Doblin wants to lay bare."


-- Gunter Grass on Doblin

"only when I spoke of individual destinies--a flight into
death, a flight into Palestine, for example--did I hold the
children's attention...Demonstrably as television series
shatter, touch or horrify the masses, much as they move them

to pity or even shame--and this was the effect of the
Holocaust---they are quite incapable of disclosing the
complex "modernity" of genocide and the many-layered
responsibilities at the root of it....A writer, children, is

someone who writes against the passage of time."

--G.Grass  "What shall we tell our children?"


Come Cherrycoke, no need to leave us, "keep the children
ammus'd" M&D and "no hell can take us in." DY