Boys Will Be Girls

MOVIES

Late in 1944 I happened to be interrogating a German captain, a middle-aged man who wore the Iron Cross of the First World War and carried the Kaiser’s rank of Rittmeister. He asked me if I had read Vom Winde Verweht (Gone with the Wind), and his face fell when I told him it was kitsch-literatur. “That wasn’t the way things were?” he asked me. “No, not at all,” I told him. Only afterward did I realize that I was talking about a book I had not read.

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Francis Russell

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MOVIES

Late in 1944 I happened to be interrogating a German captain, a middle-aged man who wore the Iron Cross of the First World War and carried the Kaiser’s rank of Rittmeister. He asked me if I had read Vom Winde Verweht (Gone with the Wind), and his face fell when I told him it was kitsch-literatur. “That wasn’t the way things were?” he asked me. “No, not at all,” I told him. Only afterward did I realize that I was talking about a book I had not read.