September 13, 2006

  • Octobers for Fest

    In memory of Joachim Fest, a noted biographer of Hitler who died on 9/11 at age 79--

    A link from 5/27, 2005 (a date mentioned in Monday's Log24 9/11 entry):

    "the four corners of the horizon."

    A search on this inelegant phrase from Sartre's Being and Nothingness leads, surprisingly, to remarks by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain said to have been published in the month of October in the fateful year 1941.

    According to Telegraph.co.uk today, Fest was "the most celebrated historian and the most distinguished journalist of the post-war generation in Germany."

    The Telegraph says he 

    "aroused
    the envy of professorial rivals, none of whom could match the incisive
    elegance of his writing. Equally important was his flair for
    controversy. He was determined to prevent the wrong lessons being drawn
    from the past by the Left-wing establishment that had dominated German
    intellectual life since the 1960s.

    Conservative in politics and
    Catholic by upbringing, Fest stood out among his contemporaries for his
    rejection of the influence of the Marxist sociologists of the Frankfurt
    school on the historiography of the Third Reich. Fest saw the Nazi
    phenomenon not as a product of capitalism, but as a moral catastrophe,
    made possible by the abdication of responsibility on the part of
    educated Germans."

    For a view of Christian politics closer to that of the Frankfurt school, see a review by Charles Isherwood in the 9/11 New York Times of a play, "The Man Himself."

    Related material:

    A Log24 entry
    from October 29, 2002:

    Our Judeo-Christian Heritage:

    Two Sides of the Same Coin

    On this date in 1897,
    Joseph     Goebbels was born.
    Related reading:

    The Calvin College
    Propaganda Archive     and

    Prince Ombra.

    Cabaret

    Joseph Goebbels

     and Echoes
    (August 11, 2006).