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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, July 19.1966
Dangerous Genie
On TV and giving
This summer's managing editor being a pleasant and charming young woman who doesn't keep telling her professors how stupid they are, the Summer Session Kansan's editorial page has been relatively bland. The heat has helped, and so has the laziness that all of us tend to attach to the season. Anyway, it's time for a burning issue, so the paper's summer news adviser will blast off at the movies and television.
Let's start with television. That's always a good target, and in view of the fact that nothing much good has been seen on it (except for old movies) since the days of the Show of Shows and Playhouse 90, it's also a safe one. Last week I sat down with my family to watch an old (eight years old) movie called "Damn Yankees. And somebody did it. They did it. They succeeded in making the thing look as though baseball was only incidental to it.
Because of the commercials, probably. We have to watch the birds fly in the window and the White Knight gallop and the smokers exhibit their black eyes and the pills dissolve in the stomachs. This is now an essential part of our culture, and why does it matter that something good is shredded so that someone may work in these insiping documents of art?
"DAMN YANKEES" should have been sponsored by a Kansas City meat-packing firm. Hollywood has been good, recently, at cutting out most of the good music in its versions of Broadway plays ("Bye, Bye Birdie" and "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" come to mind at this point). But it wasn't Hollywood that cut "Heart," "Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo" and "The Game." Somebody either in Kansas City or on the network did that.
These were the great songs sung—and danced—by the baseball players. Easily, too, the best things in the musical. How anybody could cut "You Gotta Have Heart" from "Damn Yankees" is difficult to understand. But anything can be done these days for the sponsor. After all, Channel 4 sliced into the minister's prayer at the wedding in 'The Best Years of Our Lives' (three commercials every six minutes, timed by this viewer) to show us a gal tossing her hair around and a housewife holding up daddy's clean shorts.
Now for the other gripe. This one stems from "Arabesque," which wasn't much of a movie. But the gripe centers around one of the short subjects, in which Alfred Hitchcock unctuously came on and in his elephantine way announced that we were about to be submitted to the bite. The house lights were about to come on and little Boy Scouts would pass the can for money to subsidize, among other things, an antiTB vaccine.
THE ADS DIDN'T say a thing about it. We knew that we'd probably start with a look at somebody's clothing after it had spent a few days at a local cleaning establishment. We knew that there might be scenes from the world premiere of a new 20th Century-Fox movie, plus the ubiquitous trailers for coming attractions. But not the drive for funds. This wasn't in the ads. We sat there and passed that tin can around as we participated in the great American custom of giving—giving whenever anybody says "give."
Nothing else to complain about at the moment. We didn't go to see Gary Lewis at the Starlight; that's why this editorial's complaints can be restricted to the electronic and film end of the mass media. CMP
Breslau now only a memory
BY EDWARD J. SHIELDS United Press International
WROCLAW, Poland—(UPI)—A city named Breslau once flourished here. Except for a few reconstructed monuments, it exists now only in the memories of middle-aged Germans long in exile.
Breslau was destroyed by the Germans as much as by the Russians. Today Wroclaw is the hub of the crucial German-Polish argument over ownership of the Oder-Neisse territories.
WROCLAW to Poles symbolizes their own occupation of those territories—they argue that historically it is really a regaining of their own land—and the creation of a new Poland from the horror and destruction of the Nazi occupation.
The nostalgic memory of Breslau to millions of Germans stands for the territories from which they were evacuated in 1945 after the Third Reich's collapse.
Breslau died in flames and shellfire 21 years ago.
Its fate was sealed when Allied armies began their victorious march on Hitler's heartland from east and west, but the city's selfimmolation was the decision of the Nazi commander, Gauleiter Karl Hanke.
HANKE decreed as the Red Army swept across the Polish plain in January, 1945, that Breslau would become a fortress to block its advance.
About 800,000 Germans, including 300,000 refugees, were jammed into the city. Hanke ordered them all into the four below zero winter to tear down buildings and erect barricades for "Festung Breslau" (Fortress Breslau).
The onrushing Polish and Russian troops ringed the city with artillery and the main attack flowed around it and on towards Leipzig.
Inside the city of Hanke refused to surrender. Shells and bombs fell unceasingly, the people grew emaciated on starvation rations, water was scarce and foul.
No Surrender
HANKE turned his forces on the Grunwald district,razing whole blocks of homes and two churches and bulldozing a landing field for an airlift that never came.
An estimated 90,000 people died in building the airstrip alone.
It was used once—on May 2,
when Gaulerite Hanke climbed into a small Fieseler Storch artillery spotter plane and fled.
Behind him he left 400,000 dead and a city 60 percent destroyed.
Whole districts were reconstructed from the shell-poked ruins. The cathedral, the town hall and market square were restored.
THE SURVIVORS of Fortress Breslau joined the refugee stream moving west. Poles—many of them from the areas around Lwow which passed under Russian domination—moved in and began to create their city of Wroclaw.
Modern apartments in recent
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Still Scarred
But even today no Polish city shows so clearly the scars of war.
years have been going up at the rate of 10,000 annually. The old canal through the city has grassy banks again, the flowers bloom in the parks and along the main streets.
Of the 600,000 Germans who lived in Breslau in 1939, perhaps 500 remain, city officials say. The local branch of the Social-Cultural Association in Germans in Poland reports only 225 members.
DESPITE the reconstruction of the best of the old, Wroclaw still seems a new—almost frontier—city.
In all the former Oder-Neisse territories there is one German-language newspaper. The Arbeiterzeitung. It was a daily until 1557, then a bi-weekly, then a weekly. Wroclaw is inhabited by 450,000 Poles, one-half of them born there after 1945.
The old opera has been rebuilt. There are half a dozen theatres, cinemas, and a zoo and a race track.
THERE ARE swinging student night clubs in medieval cellars under the old town square and a busy academic life at the Wroclaw University
But the impression remains of a raw, new city which has not yet found its own personality.
Newsroom—UN 4-3646 ---- Business Office—UN 4-3198
The Summer Session Kansan, student newspaper at The University of Kansas, is represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York, N.Y. Class postage is charged at the class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan., every Tuesday and Friday during the Summer Session except University holidays and examination periods. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised in the Summer Session Kansan are offered to all students without regard to color, creed, or nationality.
The opinions expressed in the editorial column are those of the students whose names are signed to them. Guest editorial views are not necessarily the editor's. Any opinions expressed in the Summer Session Kansan are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas Administration or the State Board of Regents.
The Poles moved into the Oder-Neisse territories and part of East Prussia in accordance with the Potsdam agreements which placed the regions under Polish administration until the final terms of World War Two were settled by a peace treaty.
THE TREATY has never been signed.
The Polish people, the Church and the Government find one of their rare points of unanimity in declaring the territories now are permanently Polish. The West German Government and refuge organization say Poland's border on the Oder-Neisse cannot be recognized until a peace treaty is signed.
1966 HELDOCK
WILLIAMSON POST
BOOK REVIEWS
Monet and His World, by Raymond Cogniat (Viking Studio $6.95): A biography, discussion and analysis of the works of Claude Monet, leader of Impressionism. The book is illustrated with 138 paintings in black and white and some photographs supplied by the artist's son Michel.
Monet's life embraced a period that saw the 19th century give way to the revolutionary 20th. He died in 1926 at 86, the last of the impressionists that included Toulouse-Lautree, Gauguin, Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh and Renoir.
Famous in his own lifetime after a difficult youth, he had lived through the whole period of the Impressionist movement and had seen it superseded and relegated to an honored past.
Cogniat's account and interpretations of this long and notable life are readable and sympathetic.
\* \* \*
Toward a Psychology of Art,
by Rudolf Arnheim (University of
California Press $10): What is art—as expressed in painting,
sculpture, music, dancing, architecture, etc.? Definitions, explanations, interpretations are as numerous and various as the artists, teachers, writers, scientists and philosophers who attempt them.
Professor Arnheim's essays gathered in this book are illuminating and easily understood and should lead to clarification of the questions if not the answers. They discuss such subjects as pure form versus subject matter, beauty or ugliness? symbols without roots, the craftsman and the artist. Is Modern art necessary? etc.
The Musician's World: Great Composers in Their Letters, edited by Hans Gal (Arco $12.50). A selection of letters written by the great musicians of the 16th to 20th centuries. They afford an intimate insight into the characters, attitudes, ambitions, triumphs, and failures of such as Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms Debussy, Schonberg, etc. Dr. Gal's running commentaries help put the letters and excerpts into proper perspective.
The author teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the New School for Social Research.
赤 赤 赤
The following is an open letter to the University of Kansas Business Office in charge of STUDENT HOURLY FAYROLLS.
The first week of the month has once again rolled around and all the full-time employees have been paid, cashed their checks, and put them to use. But the first of the month is also when students on the hourly payroll get paid too—or is it? Although this is the understanding that each student has when he is hired by the University, it seems to be becoming less and less frequently the case.
Dear Editor:
To whom it may concern:
Letters...
For once again, a student seeking his check during this, the first week of the month, will be told that they will not be available until the eleventh or later. During another recent pay-period it was the fifteenth of the month before the checks came in. "Big deal!" you say, "so a few students don't get their 'spending money' for an extra week or so. They can always call on Mom or Dad for enough to tide them over."
If this is your thinking, then here is a bulletin for you: Not ALL the students on the hourly
payroll use their wages for leisure spending. In fact, many of us are married and have families who have the unusual habit of liking to eat regularly, enjoying the convenience of a family car, or having a place to sleep at night.
So when the time to meet these expenses comes around, are we to say to our wives and children, "I'm sorry you're hungry, but the payroll office is swamped with work and won't be able to pay us until next week or the week after," or to the leinholder, or landlord, "I'm sorry, but you'll have to wait indefinitely for your money."
Perhaps you have some suggestions as to how those of us with financial obligations to meet can work out a budget on your irregular pay-periods. OR perhaps the responsible persons might exert a little more effort to see that the student hourly payrolls are met on time.
Bill Grimes, Junior in Education
Would you believe?
Sign on the door of microbiologist's office in Snow Hall: "At 3 o'clock in the morning, who's minding the spores?"