In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

338 CODes
her world perception. A lead article, written outside Germany and published
in the 8 Uhr-Abendblatt on February 4, identifies a similar feeling
of existential insecurity in connection with the German political situation,
and it explicitly questions the value of its own analysis, which
depends on such unstable ground: "There is a prize attached to walking
under palm trees. The further one is from Germany (as it is my privilege
to be these days), the more one begins to perceive, on every possible level,
the volatility of the German situation. What will happen within the next
two or three days? What will have happened before these lines appear
before readers' eyes?" Not surprisingly-yet without any obvious reasons-the
Fascist novelist Mario Puccini sees a male virtue manifesting
itself in situations of stability: "For just as, politically and morally speaking,
few European nations are today on par with us, so we could soon
... give the world a remarkable example of health, of moral, civil, and
intellectual strength. But only if we want to. Other peoples have, at least
for the most part, lost that sense of virile stability and that contact with
reality" (Puccini, 257). [see Male vs. Female] It is in the context of an
obsession with instability that many Argentinian tango lyrics not only
revive the topos of female fickleness but explicitly insist on the contrast
between female inconstancy and the reliability and unselfishness that the
lyric male "I" claims for himself:
Don't let yourself be tricked, my heart,
by her desire, by her lies;
don't go and forget
that she is a woman and that since the day she was born
deceit has been one of her intimate qualities.
Don't believe that it is envy or spite
for all the evil she's done to me
that makes me speak to you this way ...
You know well that there is no envy in my breast,
that I am as I have always been.
(Reichardt, 322f£.)
There are a number of typical everyday experiences-partly new and
partly remembered from times past-that explain why unstable ground
has become such a powerful metaphor. Key among them is the power
with which modern weaponry can transform nature and landscape: "In