Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series): **AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4** (Orange Inheritance Book 2)

by Vasily Grossman

In Liss’s view, there were four main categories of leaders. The first were the simple, undivided natures, usually people without particular intelligence or finesse. These people were full of slogans and formulae from newspapers and magazines, of quotations from Hitler’s speeches, Goebbels’s articles and the books of Franck and Rosenberg. Without solid ground under their feet, they were lost. They seldom reflected on the connections between different phenomena and they were easily moved to intolerance and cruelty. They took everything seriously: philosophy, National Socialist science and its obscure revelations, the new music, the achievements of the new theatre, the campaign for the elections to the Reichstag. Like schoolchildren, they got together in little groups to mug up Mein Kampf and to make précis of pamphlets and articles. They usually lived in relatively modest circumstances, sometimes experiencing actual need; they were more ready than the other categories to volunteer for posts that would take them away from their families. To begin with, Liss had thought that Eichmann belonged to this category.