Into the Woods

Into the Woods: "This happens to be the specialty of one of the novel's more repellent characters, a Nazi named Professor Cheruski. Asked by Heinrich Himmler about the key to understanding a people -- 'to knowing how they think, why they choose to act or not to act in a given situation' -- Cheruski answers: 'It is their literature, Herr Reichsf�hrer. The stories they tell of themselves. . . . The tales that seem to have sprung from the depths of their folk-soul.' Nazism could never have found such a ready purchase had the Germans not become, as one character observes, 'drunk on their own mythology.'"