How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good'

NEW HOLOCAUST BOOK, NEW THEORY

FuehrerBy Jody K. Biehl

in BerlinHitler not only fattened his adoring "Volk" with jobs and low taxes, he also fed his war machine through robbery and murder, says a German historian in a stunning new book. Far from considering Nazism oppressive, most Germans thought of it as warm-hearted, asserts Goetz Aly. The book is generating significant buzz in Germany and it may mark the beginning of a new level of Holocaust discourse.


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Hitler took great care to pamper and coddle his people and they loved him -- and the Nazi regime -- for it.A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also -- in great contrast to World War I -- particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side.Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says. Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich." Instead, Hitler continued on the easy path of self deception, spurring the war greedily forward. And the German people -- fat with bounty -- kept quiet about where all the wealth originated, he says. Was it a deplorable weakness of human nature or insatiable German avarice? It's hard to say, but imagine if today's beleaguered government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could offer jobs and higher benefits to the masses. "No one would ask where the money came from and they would directly win the next election," Aly says.


Stadtarchiv Oberhausen
The Nazis helped themselves to Jewish wealth and used it to feed the war machine.Likewise, in the 1940s, soldiers on the front were instructed to ravage conquered lands for raw materials, industrial goods and food for Germans. Aly cites secret Nazi files showing that from 1941-1943 Germans robbed enough food and supplies from the Soviet Union to care for 21 million people. Meanwhile, he insists, Soviet war prisoners were systematically starved. German soldiers were also encouraged to send care packages home to their families to boost the morale of their wives and children. In the first three months of 1943, German soldiers on the Leningrad front sent more than 3 million packages stuffed with artifacts, art, valuables and food home, Aly says. "About 95 percent of the German population benefited financially from the National Socialist system. The Nazis' unprecedented killing machine maintained its momentum by robbing from others. ... Millions of people were killed -- the Jews were gassed, 2 million Soviet war prisoners were starved to death ... so that the German people could maintain their good mood." By contrast, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill cajoled his people in 1940, just after France had fallen, to "brace ourselves to our duties" so that in a thousand years, "men will still say, this was their finest hour."How to make a criminal regime thrive
DPA
The Nazi war plunder had a snowball effect. If Hitler stopped it, the Reich would have been bankrupt.Aly's theory is not only fascinating for its brazenness, but also for the ruckus it is causing in Germany, where lately the trend has been to accept that Germans, too, suffered under Hitler and under the Allied bombing raids at the war's end. Aly is now negating much of that suffering, insisting that every single German benefited from Hitler's culture of killing. The Feuilleton, or cultural pages, of German newspapers -- which only recently exploded with coverage of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz -- have teemed with articles about Aly since the book, "Hitler's People's State" came out on March 10. In the left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung, he has even engaged in an open fight with Cambridge economics historian Adam Tooze who has criticized the mathematical methods he used to substantiate his theory. Sales, too, are much better than he or his publisher imagined. "I didn't write the book for the lay person," he says. "It's crammed full of facts and dry historical and economic data and has close to 1,000 footnotes." But if people want to read it, he says he won't complain. It will come out in French this autumn and in English in 2006. The timing for the book's German release, as his publishers well know, couldn't be better. Germany will spend the next six weeks hitting dozens of World War II anniversaries before arriving at memorial celebrations on May 8 and 9 marking 60 years since the war's end. It is also, says Aly, no coincidence that the work comes close to three generations after Hitler's suicide. "The book could have been written 10 years ago, even 20 years ago," he says. All of the documents were there. We just weren't open to them. Personally, I didn't have the questions then." The documents include reams of complex economic, bank and tax records as well as thousands of clippings from regional newspaper archives that Aly spent the past four years scouring. In the book, he uses them to support his theory that half the war was financed by government credit and that close to 70 percent of the rest came from plunder. "I am not trying to turn the history of National Socialism on its head," he insists. "But I think -- despite all the time that has passed -- it is still important to ask the most fundamental questions, namely how all this happened. What were the most important elements that allowed this criminal regime to thrive? So much came out of the German middle class. That is the most troubling aspect of the history."
AP
Jewish slave workers toil at the Dachau concentration camp to benefit the Reich.Such ground has been broken before. In his 1996 bestseller, "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," controversial Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen -- an American Jew -- dared to point his finger at average Germans and insist they not only knew about the Third Reich atrocities, but in their rabid anti-Semitism were eager co-conspirators. And for decades, historians have spoken of Hitler's popular appeal, his ability to head off unemployment and shore up the nation's shoddy infrastructure. In fact, Germany's famous "Autobahn" (highway) is sometimes called the "Hitler Bahn" because it was built by the Nazis. His Napola and Adolf Hitler schools famously cut through social classes, admitting rich and poor to Nazi indoctrination. Still, until now, economists have struggled to prove that the plunder from abroad really drove the war machine.Perhaps, says Aly, that is partly because German historians weren't ready to look at what he calls "secondary" questions about the structural and financial underpinnings of the Nazi war machine. "Writing about them would have reduced the human scale of the tragedy," he says. Plus, he insists, it is always "much easier to say it was the fault of a small group of elites, the power-crazed SS commanders, or even big businesses" than to point to your own greed. German society has spent decades digesting and "perhaps now we have reached a new level," he says. Were Germans liberated from the Nazis, too?


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German President Horst Koehler bows in memory at Auschwitz. Do Germans belong at Holocaust memorial ceremonies?Current politics seems to mirror this sentiment. These days, making use of an agile word and mind flip, Germans have begun to insist that they -- like the rest of Europe -- were also liberated on May 8, 1945. They say it marks the day they and their children were freed from Nazi oppression. Still, in 1945, says Aly, Germans didn't think they were being liberated. "They had to be liberated from themselves," he says. "That's the problem." In truth, Germans have made great strides in accepting their guilt and have even "liberated themselves," enough that it is now politically acceptable for German politicians to participate in World War II anniversaries in other countries. In May, Gerhard Schroeder became the first German chancellor to participate in a D-Day celebration. In January, German President Horst Koehler bowed his head at Auschwitz in memory of the 1.5 million people killed before the Red Army liberated the camp. Another trip is planned to Moscow for May celebrations.Scholarship and even more delicately, German Holocaust sensitivities, too have progressed in recent years. In January, the first post-war German-Jewish comedy, "Alles Auf Zucker" (Bet it all on Zucker) was released and became an immediate box office hit. Before its release, film and television executives had long held that any productions involving Jews and Germans meant poison at the box office. Germans are also starting to talk about their own suffering during the war, particularly during the relentless Allied bombing of German cities such as Dresden. Aly accepts such suffering as truthful, saying talking about it shows that Germans have made advances from the shame-faced decades just after the war when no German academic could look at the war objectively. The question, he says is, "how do you relegate that suffering? We were also victims of our own aggression." The important thing, he says is that German perspectives continue to evolve. He sees his book as an important part of that process. "I think in 10 years, because of this book, our understanding will be very different than it was less say a year ago," he says. "That's because my book contains a large number of short descriptions and sketches, and I am quite certain that the questions I ask will be investigated by my colleagues. That will definitely give us a lot more information. I notice it already in the echo from the book. I am getting letters from families who corroborate what I write. I'm sure more of that will come."
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005All Rights ReservedReproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

Rhyme and reason

(Filed: 10/03/2005)

A veteran of the vibrant 1960s poetry scene, Camille Paglia argues that critics can no longer read, poets can no longer write, and the unacknowledged legislators of our age are writing advertising jingles for peanuts

Poetry was at a height of prestige in the 1960s. American college students were listening to rock music, but also writing poetry. There were packed readings by poets on campuses and at political demonstrations. In 1966, for example, I attended an anti-war "poetry read-in" staged by visiting poets Galway Kinnell, James Wright and Robert Bly at Harpur College (my alma mater at the State University of New York at Binghamton). Harpur was then a hotbed of anti-academic poetry. During graduate school at Yale University, I attended readings by W H Auden, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and many others. In 1969, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso appeared at the Yale Law School, in an event significantly not sponsored by the English department, where there was open disdain for Beat poetry (one of my primary influences).
At that magic moment, professors specialising in poetry criticism had stratospheric reputations at the major universities. But over the following decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalised by pretentious "theory" - which claims to analyse language but atrociously abuses it. Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium they were no longer seen, even by the undergraduates themselves, to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to "read" any more - and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students.
My attraction to poetry has always been driven by my love of English, which my family acquired relatively recently. (My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in Italy.) While my parents spoke English at home, my early childhood in the small factory town of Endicott in upstate New York was spent among speakers of sometimes mutually unintelligible Italian dialects. Unlike melodious Tuscan or literary Italian, rural Italian from the central and southern provinces is brusque, assertive, and consonant-laden, with guttural accents and dropped final vowels. What fascinated me about English was what I later recognised as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects, is invigorating, richly entertaining and often funny, as it is to Shakespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry. It's why the pragmatic Anglo-American tradition (unlike effete French rationalism) doesn't need poststructuralism: in English, usage depends upon context; the words jostle and provoke one another and mischievously shift their meanings over time.
English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in America, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust. From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated north-eastern industrial town), I recognised commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America. Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M&M's chocolate candies. A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise longue, said in a twanging Southern drawl: "I'm an M&M peanut / Toasted to a golden brown / Dipped in creamy milk chocolate / And covered in a thin candy shell!" Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly towelled in her monogrammed candy wrap. I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.
My attentiveness to the American vernacular - through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs, and talk radio (which I listen to around the clock) - has made me restive with the current state of poetry. I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets laboured, affected and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets. Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures. Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English. Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry's declining status has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective: personal friendships have spawned cliques and coteries in book and magazine publishing, prize committees and grants organisations. I have no such friendships and am a propagandist for no poet or group of poets.
In my new book, Break, Blow, Burn, I offer line-by-line close readings of 43 poems, from canonical Renaissance verse to Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, which became an anthem for my conflicted generation. In gathering material, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past 40 years. Our most honoured poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness. Rote formulas are rampant - a lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and depression or a simplistic, ranting politics (people good, government bad) that looks naive next to the incisive writing about politics on today's op-ed pages. To be included in this book, a poem had to be strong enough, as an artefact, to stand up to all the great poems that precede it. One of my aims is to challenge contemporary poets to reassess their assumptions and modus operandi.
In the 1990s, poetry as performance art revived among young people in slams recalling the hipster clubs of the Beat era. As always, the return of oral tradition had folk roots - in this case the incantatory rhyming of African-American urban hip-hop. But it's poetry on the page - a visual construct - that lasts. The eye, too, is involved. The shapeliness and symmetry of the four-line ballad stanza once structured the best lyrics of rhythm and blues, gospel, Country and Western music, and rock'n'roll. But with the immense commercial success of rock music, those folk roots have receded, and popular songwriting has grown weaker and weaker.
My title comes from a poem in this book, John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV": "That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new." Donne is appealing to God to overwhelm him and compel his redemption from sin. My secular but semi-mystical view of art is that it taps primal energies, breaks down barriers and imperiously remakes our settled way of seeing. Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.
The sacred remains latent in poetry, which was born in ancient ritual and cult. Poetry's persistent theme of the sublime - the awesome vastness of the universe - is a religious perspective, even in atheists like Shelley. Despite the cosmic vision of the radical, psychedelic 1960s, the sublime is precisely what poststructuralism, with its blindness to nature, cannot see. Metaphor is based on analogy: art is a revelation of the interconnectedness of the universe. The concentrated attention demanded by poetry is close to meditation.
Commentary on poetry is a kind of divination, resembling the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams. Poets speak even when they know their words will be swept away by the wind. In college Greek class, I was amazed by the fragments of Archaic poetry - sometimes just a surviving phrase or line - that vividly conveyed the personalities of their authors, figures like Archilochus, Alcman and Ibycus, about whom little is known. The continuity of Western culture is demonstrated by lyric poetry.
Another of my unfashionable precepts is that I revere the artist and the poet, who are so ruthlessly "exposed" by the sneering poststructuralists with their political agenda. There is no "death of the author" (that Parisian cliché) in my world view. Authors strive and create against every impediment, including their doubters and detractors. Despite breaks, losses and revivals, artistic tradition has a transhistorical flow that I have elsewhere compared to a mighty river. Poems give birth to other poems. Yet poetry is not just about itself: it does point to something out there, however dimly we can know it. The modernist doctrine of the work's self-reflexiveness once empowered art but has ended by strangling it in gimmickry.
Artists are makers, not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building. I maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object; it is not just a mist of ephemeral subjectivities. Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species. In writing about a poem, I try to listen to it and find a language and tone that mesh with its own idiom. We live in a time increasingly indifferent to literary style, from the slack prose of once august newspapers to pedestrian translations of the Bible. The internet (which I champion and to which I have extensively contributed) has increased verbal fluency but not quality, at least in its rushed, patchy genres of e-mail and blog. Good writing comes from good reading. All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader. Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing. Technical analysis of a poem is like breaking down a car engine, which has to be reassembled to run again. Theorists childishly smash up their subjects and leave the disjecta membra like litter.
For me, poetry is speech-based and is not just an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle. I sound out poems silently, as others pray. Poetry, which began as song, is music-drama: I value emotional expressiveness, musical phrasings, and choreographic assertion, the speaker's theatrical self-positioning toward other persons or implacable external forces. I am not that concerned with prosody except to compare strict metre (drilled by my Greek and Latin teachers) to the standard songs that jazz musicians transform: I prefer irregularity, syncopation, bending the note.
My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape. Many critics counsel memorising poetry, but that has never been my habit. To commit a poem to memory is to make the act of reading superfluous. But I believe in immersion in and saturation by the poem, so that the next time we meet it, we have the thrill of recognition.
We feel (to quote singer Stevie Nicks) the hauntingly familiar. It's akin to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love.
This is an edited version of the introduction to 'Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems', published by Pantheon Books

For Girls Only

--all words taken from Dorothy Haskin’s For Girls Only,1956

I. Food Can Be FunIn the midst of the desert He placed: one of the most dated girls
the rich yellow squash, thorny cacti, the fragile
pink blossoms.Susie was pasty-faced, gawky
goes in a vicious circle.
Place both hands on the edge of the table, push back and shake
"I’m naturally fat"
the stout girl excuses. She learned thatfood could be
eggplant, the rich yellow squash, one of
from side to side. Her hands are poems of grace.
made her servant. Flaming red blossoms
He, too, married a charming woman.
II. Your Table of Contents
Study the shape of your face.
a warning against extreme hairstyling
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ You are a temple / the throb of the city.
Girls have to cultivate cleanliness.
she has given her hairstyling a place
Spots, soiled clothing reveal that a girlis not clean.
out of proportion
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ You are a temple / the throb of the city.
And odor offends.
This must be a warning: how a small child
resists being washed!
III. What Will It Cost?
Train yourself: you can look like an autumn leaf.
when he says, "You look so nice." She has learnedthe importance of "being herself."
The Lord must expect
Ugh! Inasmuch as you are a girl, you can look like an autumn leaf.
an ice blue blouse and pink
Even though you are not beautiful, you are well-dressed.
"My, what a pretty dress." Short, dumpy girls. Tall, angular girls.
Florence, who tends to be overweight
The normal girl dresses to please. Train yourselfto think: ice blue blouse, an autumn leaf.
Inasmuch, the Lord must expect, even thoughyou are not beautiful
you are well-dressed.
IV. The Deeper Need
Nancy was shortened to Ann
and she married Adoniram Judson
(That is a good definition. If your spirit is twisted, things which you do to your body are helpful. Makes you a child of God.)
Eunice, Norma, and Valerie
wanted a husband
(She has become a slave to tobacco. The things whichyou do to your body)
and all the dreams
which he symbolized
(makes you a child of God. You, having seen your needof Him: "beauty will radiate." We are all marred in themaking.)
A husband is yours for a lifetime.
Pray for the right one.
(The Christian girl need not have any of them. Chainsher own self, slave to tobacco.)
decided to make it
a duet for life
(That is a good definition. Slave to tobacco, your body)
Time after time,
by girl after girl,
Adoniram Judson,
who painted the world-famous
Head of Christ.
V. To Talk Or Not To Talk
Do you have a smile? Can you cook?
Get your collection in shape
such as making a luscious cake. It is soon playedto death and stale.
The next step: darken your bathroom.
You will hear music _____ from his fingers.
It takes more brains
circulate, percolate. An alertness for news
Tom had a knack
You don’t have to be too intellectual!
china dogs, salt shakers,
Make a hand puppet to use when making announcements. What is
Are you friendly?
What is Communism, anyway?
VI. How Long--Oh How Long?
You will be driven to the Lord.
Men can be perverse! Much to Selma’s friends’ relief, hemarried her. The man was a blur.
Ecstasy and heartache! Sex is a peculiar thing.
The boys sensed something wrong.Men are hold it in your palm.They couldn’t put it in words.
Ask the Lord to show it to you.
Beatrix’s smile grew doleful, and she neverYou’ll get one quicker if you can take ’em or let ’em alone.Camilla never learned.
Our inner beings are seared with loneliness.
Dorcas wasn’t taking any chances.See? You’re not so different.A man’s whole being must be satisfied.
As they are liked, so will you be.
VII. Don’t Walk--Run
The wiener roast will bring out whatever is in him.
VIII. The Thrill
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ in a form-fitting dress, in a hazy light
It is because it is all you have to offer.
She missed the good, clean fun
the singer warbles
lays in his heart
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ your walk, the way you looked at him, the flare to your dress.
Sex, like water and fire
died before they could. Food doesn’t interest a man who has eaten.
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ (the cheaper she is)
like an undigested lump.
"until I lost the power to say no."
The more she is handled,
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ dresses which fit like onion skin over the hips
If anyone tells an off-color joke,
Maybe her life will be ruined!
displayed at the dime store, picked up by anyone.
What does it matter? The path to the altar
ÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝÝ (Cheap jewelry, a deadpan face)
of having it ruined by him!
IX. Tom, Dick or Harold
His selection of lamps made her sad.
1. Where did he come from?
topped with a trip to Europe, Ruth only laughed
Rhoda did.
Love is more than a burning
2. Where is he now?
her tendency toward the modernistic. His selection of lamps made her sad.
If he yaks
Tom, Dick, or Harold, duties of amother.
until after the honeymoon.
3. Where is he going?
repetitious to the point of irritation
blandly entered into marriage.
The one whose jokes you will hear
His selection of lamps made her sad.
His selection of lamps made her sad.
X. Drawbacks
Sheallowedthe LordtouseMarshallfully,timeaftertime.
The patternrepeatsitself.
She is the morepliableofthetwo.
XI. But Satisfied
The Lord needs women.
In contrast, Sybil was beautiful!
as if you were gutted within by a fire.
But the girl who is single
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
"I became my best self and attracted to Tom."
For me to see a baby throb
He will prey on your mind.
mediocre. Sybil was beautiful!
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
She begins to do the sort of things which please him.
limit the Holy One.
her physical best for the Lord.
It needs to be looked at squarely. Sybil
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
invited her places and gave her their love.
The Lord woos us, the Lord needs women.
In contrast, Sybil was beautiful!
Then, there was the
Many, many marriages rich, warm moments in marriage
crumbled in her hand like charred paper.
She joined a week-end walking club.
--Laura Sims