Siegfried

The Secret Life of Siegfried and Roy reveals the touching, little-known story of how two youngsters founded a friendship, a franchise, and a tempestuous on-and-off love affair that would last a lifetime.

A bracing meditation on the nature of evil and a moving evocation of the human heart, Siegfried is one of Harry Mulisch's most powerful novels. After a reading of his work, renowned Dutch author Rudolf Herter, who had recently commented in a television interview that it may be only through fiction that the uniquely evil figure of Adolf Hitler can be truly comprehended, is approached by an elderly couple. The pair reveal that as domestic servants in Hitler's Bavarian retreat in the waning years of the war, they were witness to the jealously guarded birth of Siegfried—the son of Hitler and Eva Braun. For more than fifty years they have kept silent about the child they once raised as their own. Only now and only to Herter are they willing to reveal their astonishing story.

Though Siegfried Sassoon would argue the point throughout his life, most critics regard his war poetry, written during World War I, as the best of his writings. Like many of his artistic contemporaries, Sassoon embraced the "Great War for Civilization" with great fervor, and it was this passion that he brought to his earliest writings about the war. "Absolution," his first war poem, published in 1915, summed up his feelings: "fighting for our freedom, we are free." Fighting on the frontlines, Sassoon soon came to the conviction that his war for civilization was anything but civilized. And thus his writings took on a new tone, courageously denouncing a conflict that was no longer about "defense and liberation" but was for "aggression and conquest." Through primary documents and extensive research, the current work provides critical analyses of Sassoon's war poetry. Detailed examinations of each of the so-called trench poems show how the poet and his poetry were transformed through his wartime experiences and give the rationale for the critical consensus that the Sassoon canon is among the most significant in the literature of modern warfare.

It is the spring of 1929 and, while the international jet set is celebrating the last hurrah of the jazz age, the international military set is gearing up for a war to make the world safe for dictatorships. In Berlin Count Siegfried von Ohr is accustomed to dividing his time between partying and espionage. Now the Minister wants him to go to the Soviet Union. Stalin has given permission for Germany (stripped of all its armed forces by the VersaillesTreaty) to operate a clandestine airbase in Russia, where the future officers of both the Luftwaffe and the Red Air Force will be secretly trained and equipped. Siegfried recruits his younger brother Tristan (a pilot) to join him in the Workers Paradise. Everything the brothers do there will be dangerous—and illegal. In Moscow Siegfried soon discovers that being a “guest” of Stalin brings him to the attention of the dreaded secret police, the OGPU. Circumstances require Siegfried to do a favor for the head of the secret police. But then a crazed OGPU agent tries to recruit Siegfried into a conspiracy to destroy Stalin! Luckily at this precise moment the Minister orders Siegfried to go to Italy and enjoy the pretty scenery and spy on Mussolini

This book encompasses the complete life and works of Siegfried Sassoon, from his patriotic youth that led him to the frontline, to the formation of his anti-war convictions, great literary friendships and flamboyant love affairs.

This book presents a cognitive stylistic analysis of the writing of Siegfried Sassoon, a First World War poet who has typically been perceived as a poet of protest and irony, but whose work is in fact multi-faceted and complex in theme and shifted in style considerably throughout his lifetime. The author starts from the premise that a more systematic account of Sassoon’s style is possible using the methodology of contemporary stylistics, in particular Cognitive Grammar. Using this as a starting point, he revisits common ideas from Sassoon scholarship and reconfigures them through the lens of cognitive stylistics to provide a fresh perspective on Sassoon's style. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, war poetry, twentieth-century literature, and cognitive linguistics.