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The Worst of the Madness Anne Applebaum

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  The Worst of the Madness Anne Applebaum The vast majority of Hitler’s victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Some ten million died in killing fields in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. November 11, 2010 issue Reviewed: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder Basic Books, 524 pages, $29.95 Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark Princeton University Press, 163 pp., $26.95 Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality. Mass violence, he explained, could shatter a man’s sense of natural justice. In normal times, had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions…. Murder became ordinary durin...
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Rilke by Coetzee

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  My Account Logout Site logo Politics Collapse Literature Collapse Arts Collapse Ideas Collapse Current Issue Current Issue More from the Review Events All Issues About Us Shop Literary Gifts Shop NYRB Classics Going All the Way J.M. Coetzee December 2, 1999 issue Reviewed: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William H. Gass Knopf, 233 pp., $25.00 1. In one of the many polls that have marked the year 1999, the Folio Society, a fairly staid British book club, asked respondents to name the five Poems of the Century. Four of the titles that came up were—not surprisingly—by English-language poets: Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Plath. The fifth was Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies . The fact that Rilke, a foreigner and a considerable Anglophobe, could make it onto the Folio Society’s list with a poem as difficult as the Elegies suggests that even in England the grand poetic manner and the trappings of German metaphysics are not fatal drawbacks so long as the poetry i...
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