Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade. - George Steiner

It was a brilliant, mutinous period. Brecht gave back to German prose its Lutheran simplicity and Thomas Mann brought into his style the supple, luminous elegance of the classic and Mediterranean tradition. These years, 1920-33, were the anni mirabiles of the modern German spirit.

A sentence always means more. Even a single word, within the weave of incommensurable connotation, can, and usually does.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.