WEBVTT

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For the next one, you don't
have to think of anything.

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You don't have to imagine
smokers and airplanes--

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such an odd idea.

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It's 20 years ago--

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I think back that
could have happened.

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This one is called
"Meditations on Starch."

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"Potatoes-- Mr. Spud
opened at the local mall

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and hired my high school
boy for his first job.

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He was saving for a trip to
Europe, where he has relatives.

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He's been taught to do
amazing things with potatoes.

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They're just a shell
of their former selves.

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No longer prize
for snowy yields,

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for understated
contributions to stews,

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now, they're just parka-like
pockets waiting to be stuffed.

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It's the fate of blandness
in the mall-managed world,

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I tell him, to be
upscaled into glamour,

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like pita bread and
bagels, chicken and veal,

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stuffed with yogurt, sour
cream and cottage cheese,

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spread with peppers,
cheese and broccoli,

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topped with Thousand Island
dressing and bacon bits.

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What wizard thought this up?

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Mother, I still like
mashed potatoes,

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even the name is
honest and reassuring,

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after the geposhtket
concoctions with alfalfa sprouts

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and garbanzo beans--

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butter-topped, cream-colored
bins of heroic self-indulgence

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inviting a finger-dip the way
a full can of white enamel

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compels a brush.

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Is there a taste explosion
in the world finer

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than the first lick of
the Dairy Queen cone--

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the roughened vanilla
from a freshly opened tub,

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the drowning in
concentrated carbohydrate

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where fats and starches come
together in snowy concupiscene.

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Corn-- my son never
knew his grandmother,

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whose presence comes back to
me as I stand at the Mr. Spud

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toppings bar.

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She only exists in
these sharpened moments,

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triggered by significant images
that otherwise baffle me.

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Mother, I murmur, what
do you make of this?

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Questions to my mother
or questions to history.

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Answers from her are brief
parables of the 20th century.

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Don't you know, she tells me,
the yearning for a clean, quick

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anonymous bite is universal.

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My mother found herself
in Prague in 1933.

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Her art school in Germany
had just been closed.

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One of her professors offered
escape with him to Rio.

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Many were in Paris.

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Many went to Paris and Brussels.

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These weren't the
big-time Bauhausers--

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New York and LA
weren't in the cards.

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These were commercial designers,
but not designing enough,

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my mother would joke.

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Shanghai, Istanbul, Alexandria,
Stockholm, with the leaders

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taking off for Caracas and Rio.

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One got to Veracruz.

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Maybe eventually, some of them
made their way to America.

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My mother gone to Montreal.

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I was a stamp collector.

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I knew the tales behind
those thick letters

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with the high
denomination stamps,

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the elegant handwriting, and
black ink turning to olive.

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Canceled stamps are
less valuable than mint,

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but I treasured them for the
urgency of their cancelation.

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My mother had known a time
when the germ of genius

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was clustered in the back
streets of Dresden, and Weimar,

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and Dessau, before the Big
Bang flung into tin shacks

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on the shores of Maracaibo.

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The poles of her
existence can move me

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to tears, the B.
Traven world of artists

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from the heartland of order
and austerity, rotting

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in the rat-infested tropics.

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She showed me photos
of an art college,

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hand-painted signs
on a tin roof shack,

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Herr Professor in
jodhpurs and a bush shirt,

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teaching from a
canvas deck chair.

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Poor old, Dieter, she'd say.

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She'd wanted a career
in fashion design.

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Her surviving portfolios
from an art school

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feature ice skaters
and ballerinas.

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She was the Degas of
Dresden, but the faces

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of her skaters and
dancers seemed grafted on,

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dark and heavy like hers.

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The eyes are shadowed in the
movie fashion of the day.

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They stopped just
short of grotesquerie,

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for those girls will
never soar, never leap.

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She could get the bodies,
but not the faces.

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I can't tell if it's
expressionism, autobiography,

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or mild incompetence.

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I don't know if those were
the drawings she kept out

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of fondness, or the
ones that didn't sell.

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Others found their
way into magazines.

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The idea of my mother
influencing the Prague spring

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collection of 1934
fills me with wonder.

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Or do I read too much
into those drawings,

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too much into
everything about her?

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Had she somehow
secretly read Kafka?

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The idea of her Europe,
of pre-war Central Europe,

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tugs at me.

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The continent I missed
by the barest of margins.

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There was no concept of
Eastern or Western Europe

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in those days.

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Warsaw and Prague were
as western as Paris.

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Russia and Spain, of
course, didn't count.

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They were Asian or African.

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Budapest and Bucharest
had reputations

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for pervasive dishonesty,
deriving perhaps

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from the perversity
of their languages.

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So the stories I grew up
with and passed on to my son

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were of an idea of Europe that
hasn't existed in 80 years--

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a Holy Roman Empire, in
which a single language

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and a single passport
dominated all others,

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and the rest of the world
suffered paroxysms of exclusion

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for not being European
and specifically, German.

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When he was 12, I
asked my boy what he

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wanted to be when he grew up--

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a European, he answered.

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In Prague, she got a job
painting commercial signboards

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to hang over doorways,
like British pub placards.

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One of the first
signs she painted

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was for something
called "Indian Corn"--

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a corn cafe, nothing
but stubby ears of corn,

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cut in half, standing in pools
of butter in Prague in 1933.

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She had never eaten corn.

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Her parents considered
it servants' food,

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part of a cuisine beneath
serious cultivation.

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Nothing that required labor in
the eating, and corn on the cob

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looked like work.

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It was part of their diet.

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My grandparents, whom
I of course never met,

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favored pre-Nouvelle cuisine
French cooking, which

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meant soft, smothered, simmering
things-- the mashed potatoes

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of their day, short on fiber,
low on spices, long on labor,

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and quickly digested.

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Much favored were compotes
and warm puddings,

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since they detested anything
cold, as well as anything hot.

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Worst of all were the
still-churning molten messes

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that had become chic in Germany
with the rise of Mussolini,

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upscaling the lowly pasta.

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My grandfather's
response to history

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is summarized in a single
gastronomic grumble--

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why couldn't Il Duce
have been a Frenchman?

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At least, we would
have eaten properly.

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My grandmother,
no less patrician,

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responded, be grateful, he
could have been Hungarian.

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Of all the stories
I want to know,

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of all the things
my mother told me

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of the secret lives
of complicated people,

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I remember only these
ridiculous little lines.

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She paints, so she
painted her cob--

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half a cob, and the cobs
weren't big in those days--

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standing up like a stubby
candle in its pool of butter.

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Each kernel was treated like a
window in an apartment tower,

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radiating a buttery light.

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It wasn't easy before acrylics,
before the conventions

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of magic realism,
being a German artist

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to devote herself to
a humble corn cob.

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I didn't know anything
at first or maybe

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I discovered it as I worked.

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It was love for America,
that's how she put.

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It a craving for Indian
corn saved my life.

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Franz Kafka had been living
a few blocks away just

00:07:48.600 --> 00:07:49.530 align:middle line:90%
a decade earlier.

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He'd written Amerika under
the same mysterious craving,

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though it didn't save his life.

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Maybe America worship
was in the air,

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at least among
those who professed

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no longing for Germany.

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For my mother, Prague was just
another provincial German city,

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with an interesting
Slavic component

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to be respected,
but faintly pitied.

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She couldn't imagine
civilized discourse

00:08:09.390 --> 00:08:11.850 align:middle line:84%
in any language but German,
with the possible exception

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of French in well-defined
circumstances.

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French and German divided the
dignified world between them,

00:08:17.580 --> 00:08:19.710 align:middle line:84%
the spheres of
pleasure and labor,

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though her French years
were still in the future.

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Her boss had a son
named Jurgen Jaeger--

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a good movie name, and
he had dabbled in films

00:08:28.740 --> 00:08:30.510 align:middle line:90%
like many Germans in the '20s.

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He still thought of himself as
a set designer, a property man,

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but not a man of
property, he joked.

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And the joke has
survived them all

00:08:37.350 --> 00:08:40.110 align:middle line:84%
because my mother
jotted it down.

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He also identified strongly
with Hitler's Sudeten policy,

00:08:43.620 --> 00:08:46.800 align:middle line:84%
feeling himself mightily
abused by the majority Czechs,

00:08:46.800 --> 00:08:49.200 align:middle line:90%
with their dirty mongrel ways.

00:08:49.200 --> 00:08:51.960 align:middle line:84%
I'm making him sound
unappealing, a Hitler of sorts,

00:08:51.960 --> 00:08:54.960 align:middle line:84%
another expansion, a sign
painter with acting ambitions,

00:08:54.960 --> 00:08:57.930 align:middle line:84%
born on the rim of Germany,
but my mother never did.

00:08:57.930 --> 00:09:00.780 align:middle line:84%
His attitudes were
too common to be evil.

00:09:00.780 --> 00:09:05.070 align:middle line:84%
I'm sure most Prague-born German
speakers yearned for ennosis

00:09:05.070 --> 00:09:08.070 align:middle line:84%
with the Fatherland, all other
implications of Hitler-rule

00:09:08.070 --> 00:09:10.650 align:middle line:90%
to be put aside temporarily.

00:09:10.650 --> 00:09:13.470 align:middle line:84%
This, then, was my mother's
situation in 1933--

00:09:13.470 --> 00:09:16.500 align:middle line:84%
she was 30, and unmarried,
talented, attractive,

00:09:16.500 --> 00:09:17.520 align:middle line:90%
and stateless.

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She had an admirer whose
rechannelled ambition

00:09:20.070 --> 00:09:22.110 align:middle line:84%
was to join the political
and, if necessary,

00:09:22.110 --> 00:09:25.710 align:middle line:84%
military services of the
greater German Reich.

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I have seen his picture,
the suggestive swagger,

00:09:28.440 --> 00:09:31.590 align:middle line:84%
as I interpret it, of one
leg up on the running board,

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elbows on the windshield, body
tight against the touring car's

00:09:36.240 --> 00:09:36.990 align:middle line:90%
flank.

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No monocle, no dueling
scars, but a leather coat,

00:09:40.380 --> 00:09:42.660 align:middle line:84%
a self-regarding
little blond mustache,

00:09:42.660 --> 00:09:44.520 align:middle line:84%
and a short, elegant
cigarette that

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can only be carried in
a theatrical gold case.

00:09:47.670 --> 00:09:49.890 align:middle line:84%
He strikes the pose
of a big-game hunter,

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even on the Carpathian
picnic in the summer of 1934.

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This is the man who
must be eliminated

00:09:55.830 --> 00:09:58.220 align:middle line:90%
before I can be born."