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The Survivors, by Norbert Muhlen
- Abstract
In the December 1962 issue of Der Monat (West Berlin) Norbert Muhlen published a plaintive article on the German image in contemporary American letters. Everybody, it seemed, was being beastly: Katherine Anne Porter was just plain anti-German; William L. Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich had neglected to mention the other totalitarian dictatorships possessing “more or less terrible characteristics” that existed after World War I, and besides, his work showed a lack of “balance” and “thorough personal research” ; Kay Boyle had written that Germany’s present and future were “an indissoluble part of her past”; T. H. Tetens in The New Germany and the Old Nazis had resorted to tactics like presenting regrettable exceptions as the norm, citing questionable sources, and “disregarding evidence contrary to his own thesis”; dozens of paperback books on the Nazi period, though factual enough in content, were distorting the German image by focusing exclusively on the grisly past.
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