Scenes and Monologues, War Poetry, American Poetry, Acting & Auditioning
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Overview
Here, fifty years after the fall of the Nazi Third Reich and V-E Day, is W. D. Snodgrass's "The Fuehrer Bunker:The Complete Cycle." These dramatic monologues are spoken by members of the German High Command—Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, Hermann Goering—their wives and mistresses, including Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels, during the last month of the European campaign of World War II, before many of them, along with their Fuehrer, committed suicide in his bunker. Dramatizing the end of the horrible psycho-drama that was Hitler's Reich, "The Fuehrer Bunker" shows much of the paranoia, self-indulgence, degradation and rage that consumed the German leaders. Snodgrass uses a variety of forms—villanelles, letters and sonnets, and nonceforms—triangles, inverted triangles, platoons and squads, American popular songs and a game of solitaire—which intensify the internal conflicts. Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and minister of armaments, for example, speaks and thinks in geometric forms, which, as Hitler's mania and Germany's losses increase, break down. Framing the monologues are the songs of Old Lady Barkeep who is both Chorus and Mistress of Ceremonies. She sings of the High Command's deceit and of the people's disillusionment with their leaders.Editorials
Library Journal
Eminent American poet-translator Snodgrass, who won the Pulitzer in 1960, offers the "complete cycle" of a work first published in 1977. With over 65 monologs by 15 speakers and a variety of supporting poems in collage format, Snodgrass achieves remarkable historical breadth. The action takes place in one month (April 1945) in the Berlin Bunker where Hitler and other Nazis died, and each doomed speaker has poetic forms appropriate to his or her character, e.g., Heinrich Himmler speaks in a memo-telegram style printed on graph paper and Magda Goebbels in rondeaux. Snodgrass's masterful language is graphic; his analysis of war and defeat and his interest in historical personages pushed to extremes of pain are compelling. Hitler, however, falls well short of Macbeth, and others, alternatively deluded and forlorn, are not so much tragic victims as willing accomplices to those who sacrifice everything in pursuit of power. Still, to hear these voices imaginatively re-created is purgative. Recommended for literature teachers.Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., InstituteBook Details
Published
May 1, 1995
Publisher
BOA Editions
Pages
250
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781880238189