Posts Tagged ‘World War II’
Heisenberg and the A-Bomb: Just Say No
March 27, 2017
I read through the article breathlessly, astonished at the moral implications of what I was learning. When I got to the end, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to begin to take in the import of what I’d just read. The article was “The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb,” by Thomas Powers,…
Read MoreAnne Fontaine’s The Innocents
February 15, 2017
After World War II devastated eastern Europe, the Red Army pushed into the countries allotted to them as spoils, such as Poland. There, they continued the destructive work that the Nazis had begun. Among those hardest hit were the women religious of Warsaw. French Red Cross physician Madeleine Pauliac, sent to find and repatriate the…
Read MoreRepression, Oppression, Suppression: A Life of Domestic Routine
December 23, 2015
Somewhere in the middle of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the eponymous Jeanne eats a sandwich in her kitchen. We have, by that point in the film, seen quite a lot of Jeanne’s kitchen. We’ve watched Ms. Dielman cook in that kitchen, peel potatoes, wash dishes (shot from behind her back so…
Read More