Ginnie's review
Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider by Peter Gay
I read Professor Gay's book before the new cultural history Weimar Germany : promise and tragedy by Eric D. Weitz. Until these two excellent titles taught me about this era I had been a completely ignorant American. This was an eye-opener. My knowledge this period had been limited to what I learned from Cabaret - well, almost
Much better than Cabaret are Isherwood's stories from Berlin. They won't educate you the way these books did, but they'll give you great atmosphere
I vaguely remembered "I Am A Camera" but my memory is so dense that I am not sure if it was a story within Isherwood''s "Berlin Stories" or what. Thanks to you I have a new white rabbit to chase down its hole.
Yes, I Am A Camera is one, and I think that's the one that introduced Sally Bowles and became the basis for Cabaret.
Good heavens! It's worse than I thought - my memory, that is."...my memory is so dense that I am not sure if it was a story within Isherwood''s "Berlin Stories" or what"
dense = thick, close-packed, tightly packed, closely set, close-set, crowded, crammed, compact, solid, tight; overgrown, jungly, impenetrable, impassable.
And what would you have thought if I had said, 'my memory is jungly?? I guess OVERGROWN is what I wanted. I'm as addicted as Bill Safire and his gang to the joy and treasures of the language. My aging sons can still chant my motherly rant at them when they would slip into tired slang, curse words or the like.
"For goodness sake, you can do better than that. English is your cradle tongue, your native language - the language of the Bible , Shakespeare, the Prayer Book."
Naturally I meant the KJV and the Book of Common Prayer but they knew better than to interrupt their mother in full cry.
