The Führer bunker

Fifty years after the fall of the Nazi Third Reich and V-E Day, BOA Editions, Ltd. is proud to present W. D. Snodgrass's The Fuebrer Bunker: 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.