runawaysun

Bertolt Brecht has also written short fiction. Not much is written about this (after all Brecht is mostly known as a playwright and a poet),...

Bertolt Brecht’s theatre was intellectual. He believed that, to induce social and political change, the audience needed to be incited and ar...

Bertolt Brecht is considered to be one of the greatest playwrights and dramatists of the 20th century. So highly is he rated in the literary...

If not anywhere else, you can be certain that German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s plays have a place in Kolkata, the capital of the Marxist-r...

Adolf Hitler has fascinated many people – not only during his rise to leadership in Nazi Germany, but over the years. He has been, and still...

“The Nazi regime was one that practised what one historian [most likely Martin Broszat] famously called ‘cumulative radicalism’, whereby eac...

Why did no one fight back? If over six million Jews were killed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 – over a million of them in Auschwitz con...

“Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the i...

I’m reading Laurence Rees’ book Auschwitz: The Nazis & The ‘Final Solution’ and watching his BBC TV series at the same time. Of course,...

The belief that human stock could be improved by careful breeding is not something devised by the Nazis alone. Much before the Nazis got ont...

Hitler’s hatred for Jews was hinted at and later communicated freely in his speeches. He blamed them for Germany losing WW1 and for draining...

The Holocaust or mass slaughter of Jewish people by the Nazis is a subject that cannot be ignored when we think of WW2 and its aftermath. At...

Rachel Seiffert and Bernhard Schlink (see my previous post) aren’t the only ones to embed their sentiments of post-WW2 Germany in my mind. L...

I feel ashamed that I know so little about the aftermath of the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. No other nati...

“The decision to use evil for the sake of good requires that the decision-maker be willing to bear the brunt of evil.” [Quote from Bernhard ...

63 years ago, on a clear day, history was created. On that day, 6 August 1945, at 7:42 a.m., an atom bomb was dropped on a city called Hiros...

We’ve grown up reading about wars in history books, with narratives of how great kings and great generals have been responsible for victorie...

In a film as recent and as mediocre as Wanted , directed by Timur Bekmambetov, actor Morgan Freeman’s character ‘Sloan’ talks of taking cont...

What we see, and act upon, is more a product of what is inside our heads rather than what’s out there. We think we see the real world but, a...

The issue of ‘background books’ that Umberto Eco raises in his book Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (see my earlier post ‘Travellers’) i...