Fifty years after the fall of the Nazi Third Reich and V-E Day, BOA Editions, Ltd. is proud to present W. D. Snodgrass' The Fuebrer The Complete Cycle. These dramatic monologues are spoken by members of the German High Command - Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, Hermann Goering - their wives and mistresses, including Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels, during the last month of the European campaign of World War II, before many of them, along with their Fuehrer, committed suicide in his bunker. Dramatizing the end of the horrible psycho-drama that was Hitler's Reich, The Fuehrer Bunker shows much of the paranoia, self-indulgence, degradation and rage that consumed the German leaders. Snodgrass uses a variety of forms - villanelles, letters and sonnets, and nonceforms - triangles, inverted triangles, platoons and squads, American popular songs and a game of solitaire - which intensify the internal conflicts. Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and minister of armaments, for example, speaks and thinks in geometric forms, which, as Hitler's mania and Germany's losses increase, break down. Framing the monologues are the songs of Old Lady Barkeep who is both Chorus and Mistress of Ceremonies. She sings of the High Command's deceit and of the people's disillusionment with their leaders.
Author
William De Witt Snodgrass, pseudonym S. S. Gardons, is an American poet and a 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner. Snodgrass' first poems appeared in 1951, and throughout the 1950's he published in some of the most prestigious magazines: Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Hudson Review. However, in 1957, five sections from a sequence entitled Heart's Needle were included in Hall, Pack and Simpson's anthology, New Poets of England and America, and these were to mark a turning-point. When Lowell had been shown early versions of these poems, in 1953, he had disliked them, but now he was full of admiration. By the time Heart's Needle was published, in 1959, Snodgrass had already won the The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. However, his first book brought him more: a citation from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and, most important of all, 1960's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. It is often said that Heart's Needle inaugurated confessional verse. Snodgrass disliked the term. Still, it should be pointed out that the genre he was reviving here seemed revolutionary to most of his contemporaries, reared as they had been on the anti-expressionistic principles of the New Critics. Snodgrass' confessional work was to have a profound effect on many of his contemporaries, amongst them, most importantly, Robert Lowell.
