Saturday, March 07, 2009

Thursday, March 05, 2009

OPERACION VALKYRIA

TOBIAS KNIEBE

20 de julio de 1944. El joven coronel de la Wehrmacht, Claus von Stauf fenberg, y sus compañeros, cansados de los crímenes cometidos por Hitler y de las pérdidas que está sufriendo. Alemania a causa de su megalomanía, llevan a cabo un atentado cuyo principal objetivo es el mismo Führer. La Operación Valkyria está en marcha. Sin embargo, Adolf Hitler sobrevive de forma milagrosa al atentado perpetrado en la Guarida del Lobo. Mientras, Stauf fenberg, ignorante de que el asesinato ha fracasado, se dirige a Berlín para dar un golpe de Estado. La operación acaba de forma desastrosa y sus participantes, entre ellos Stauf fenberg, son fusilados u obligados a suicidarse. Tobias Kniebe reconstruye de forma minuciosa el atentado que pretendía salvar a Alemania de sí misma. Operación Valkyria ofrece una rigurosa mirada a los acontecimientos del 20 de julio de 1944, un día que podría haber cambiado la Historia.

$55
EVERY MAN DIES ALONE
By Hans Fallada. Translated by Michael Hofmann
543 pp. Melville House
Postcards From the Edge
By LIESL SCHILLINGER


A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred, but if publishers had been more vigilant, it could have been a signal literary event in any of the last 60 years. This event is the belated appearance in English of the novel “Every Man Dies Alone,” the story of a working-class Berlin couple who took on the Third Reich with a postcard campaign intended to foment rebellion against Hitler’s Germany. Published in 1947, the book was written in 24 days by a prolific but psychologically disturbed German writer named Rudolf Ditzen, who spent a significant portion of his life in asylums (for killing a friend in a duel, for threatening his wife with a gun), in prison (for embezzling to finance his morphine habit) and in rehab. In spite of his precarious emotional state, he wrote more than two dozen books under the pen name Hans Fallada, which he took from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Schillinger-t.html