By Simon Mawer
Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are choked with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of principal Europe of the Twenties once they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a house to embrace their exuberant religion sooner or later, and the Landauer residence turns into an rapid masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a wealthy Jewish tycoon married to a considerate, smooth gentile, pour all in their hopes for his or her marriage and budding family members into their lovely new domestic, filling it with young ones, associates, and a iteration of artists and thinkers desirous to abandon old-world eu type in want of the hot and the avant-garde. yet as lifestyles intervenes, their new domestic additionally brings out their such a lot passionate wants and darkest secrets and techniques. As Viktor searches for a hotter, much less demanding convenience within the palms of one other lady, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous buddy Hana for pleasure, the wedding starts to teach symptoms of pressure. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 speedy evaporate underneath the typhoon clouds of global struggle II. As Nazi troops input the rustic, the kinfolk needs to depart their previous lifestyles at the back of and try and break out to the United States ahead of Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi recognition, and earlier than the relations itself dissolves.
As the Landauers fight for survival overseas, their domestic slips from hand handy, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet ownership and at last again to the Czechoslovak nation, with new population continually falling below the fervent and unrelenting effect of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those that are aware of it, inspiring them, liberating them, calling them again, until eventually the Landauers themselves are eventually drawn domestic to the place their tale began.
Brimming with slightly contained ardour and cruelty, the precision of technology, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the phobia of failure—The Glass Room comprises all of it.
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Multiply this team by thousands and the bomb payload by hundreds of thousands, and eventually by millions, and one can start to see how the American war effort became not only a major deciding factor in the war effort but the most destructive military force in history. Metaphorically, it began with only one team. This is how a technological democracy builds up the moral steam to divert from the quotidian and become an extraordinary arsenal of war with almost unlimited destructive power in a relatively short period of time.
Our arguments and disunity might have kept us ineffective or only partly effective until it was too late. But Germany and Japan were bound to blunder sooner or later, and blunder they did. In attacking us they destroyed their greatest ally, our sluggishness, our selfishness, and our disunity. The attack on us set in motion the most powerful species drive we know—that of survival. It created direction toward which we could aim all of our vitalities—and we have great vitality. What the Axis could not understand was that the measure of our unrest was the measure of our vitality.
The B-17 “Flying Fortress” dropped astronomical amounts of conventional ordnance, primarily on the manufacturing and industrial infrastructure of the Axis countries, and yes, this long-range bomber also directly attacked the basic fabric of civilization of these nations. The B-17 likewise established much of the operational and psychological groundwork for the eventual explosion of nuclear weapons over Japan in 1945. Otherwise peaceful, democratic nations where the government’s actions have to be justified to the electorate, such as the United States, do not ordinarily begin the wholesale bombing of civilian populations without justification, precedents, and a moral foundation to build upon.
