conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled The Sleepwalkers about Spanning, Germany with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Spanning some 20 years, the author's epic trilogy of daily life in Germany established him as an important modernist innovator.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Sleepwalkers, Library, Up-Three with the genre: Children's Books, Growing Up & Facts of Life?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Sleepwalkers'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Sleepwalkers
  Sister Mathilde got up. The thunder-clouds were now outlined against the clear sky like a broad black wall.
  Life had gone on in the usual manner; not for a moment had it occurred to Huguenau that as an openly advertised deserter who was already being tracked down he really should take to flight. He had simply stayed where he was. Not only because he was already too much bound up with local affairs, not only because a business conscience cannot bear to see any enterprise abandoned in which a considerable sum of money has been invested, whether one's own or another's—it was rather a feeling of general indefiniteness that kept him where he was and prevented him from admitting defeat, a feeling that compelled him to assert his reality against that of the others. And though it was somewhat nebulous, yet it resolved itself into a very definite idea: that the Major and Esch would get together behind his back and sneer at him. So he stayed where he was, only making an agreement with Frau Esch that meals he did not consume were to be made up to him, thus enabling him to avoid without material loss the hateful midday dinners.
  Of course he knew that the trend of affairs was not favourable to the taking of action against a single insignificant Alsatian deserter; he felt himself relatively secure, and moreover he had positively a strangle-hold on the Major. He knew that, but he preferred not to know it. On the contrary he played with the thought that the luck of war might take another turn, that the Major might again be a power in the land, and that the Major and Esch were only waiting until then to crush him. It was for him to foil them in good time. Maybe it was sheer superstition, but he could not afford to fold his hands, he had to use every minute of his time, he had far too many urgent things to settle; and although he could not have told precisely whither this urgency was driving him, yet he consoled himself with the reflection that it was only their own fault if he laid counter-mines against his enemies.
  Now he was paying out the wages. Lindner regarded the money, counted it over again, looked at it once more and left it lying on the table. The apprentice compositor was standing by, equally silent. Huguenau was puzzled:
  Huguenau had meanwhile considered the matter. Of course Liebel was at the bottom of this with his workshop propaganda. So he was an enemy too. But Liebel was a man to keep in with for the present. He said therefore:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know three more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He entered. The dark room was fitfully illumined from outside and lay in Sabbath-like order and neatness. Huguenau, his rifle between his knees, sat down in front of the press. He felt disappointed; the machine did not repay his exertions; cold and impassive it stood there and merely threw restless shadows which made him feel uncomfortable. If the convict rabble came it would serve the bloody machine jolly well right if they smashed it to pieces. Although it was a beautiful little machine... he laid his hands on it and was angry because the iron felt so cold. Merde, why should he get angry about that? Huguenau shrugged his shoulders, gazed out into the courtyard, across at the barn where the Sunday meetings were held. Would Esch be preaching there again next Sunday? Haïssez les ennemis de la sainte religion. Pious hypocrites. An empty barn, that was all their stock in trade... what had a man like that to lose! A man like that should have his bones broken for him. He had no worries... preached on Sunday, and now he was sitting upstairs with his wife and they were comforting each other, while a fellow had to sit down here beside this bloody machine.
  Once more he forgot why he had come. He leant his rifle against the printing-press. Standing in the courtyard he sniffed: again a smell of meat cooking was wafted to him. To-night of course there would be no supper, but upstairs they would be having something all right—she would see that Esch didn't want.
  When he reached the landing above he started back, for the door of his room was lifted out of its hinges. That wasn't as it should be. The door was jammed too, only with a great effort was he able to push it open, and inside in his room things looked still more desolate: the mirror no longer hung above the washing-table, but lay on the top of the broken crockery. A wilderness. Incomprehensible and disturbing, it reminded one of splintered bones. Huguenau sat down on the sofa, he wanted to realize what had happened but he did not want to think... someone should come to explain it all to him and comfort him... stroke his hair.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The dark room was fitfully illumined from outside and lay in Sabbath-like order and neatness. Huguenau, his rifle between his knees, sat down in front of the press. He felt disappointed; the machine did not repay his exertions; cold and impassive it stood there and merely threw restless shadows which made him feel uncomfortable. If the convict rabble came it would serve the bloody machine jolly well right if they smashed it to pieces. Although it was a beautiful little machine... he laid his hands on it and was angry because the iron felt so cold. Merde, why should he get angry about that? Huguenau shrugged his shoulders, gazed out into the courtyard, across at the barn where the Sunday meetings were held. Would Esch be preaching there again next Sunday? Haïssez les ennemis de la sainte religion. Pious hypocrites. An empty barn, that was all their stock in trade... what had a man like that to lose! A man like that should have his bones broken for him. He had no worries... preached on Sunday, and now he was sitting upstairs with his wife and they were comforting each other, while a fellow had to sit down here beside this bloody machine.
  Once more he forgot why he had come. He leant his rifle against the printing-press. Standing in the courtyard he sniffed: again a smell of meat cooking was wafted to him. To-night of course there would be no supper, but upstairs they would be having something all right—she would see that Esch didn't want.
  When he reached the landing above he started back, for the door of his room was lifted out of its hinges. That wasn't as it should be. The door was jammed too, only with a great effort was he able to push it open, and inside in his room things looked still more desolate: the mirror no longer hung above the washing-table, but lay on the top of the broken crockery. A wilderness. Incomprehensible and disturbing, it reminded one of splintered bones. Huguenau sat down on the sofa, he wanted to realize what had happened but he did not want to think... someone should come to explain it all to him and comfort him... stroke his hair.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
  This masterpiece is an utterly absorbing chronicle of four generations of a German mercantile family. As Thomas Mann charts the Buddenbrooks' decline, he creates a world of exuberant vitality and almost Rabelaisian earthiness.
  The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
  During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Sleepwalkers
  Upstairs in the Alexander Haus, he was shocked to discover the damage inflicted by a plague of these troops just before dawn this morning. All the Jewish offices had been broken into, desks overturned, typewriters smashed, papers scattered through the halls. Where had the police been? Outside. Guarding the doors. Poor Bessie Yoskowitz hadn't been spared. Her entire workshop had been ransacked, her chemicals strewn about, valuable documents trampled.
  Back outside, the crowds of unemployed milled about in the sunshine, moving unconsciously to the rhythm of the Nazi chants. Willi leaned against an advertising column and opened the envelope.
  Yoskowitz had done her job gorgeously, completely lifting the white ink off the black, leaving a legible list of Meckel's associates from the Institute for Racial Hygiene. There were six. Five he'd never heard of. But the third—well, well. Dr. Oscar Schumann. Associate surgeon of orthopedics at Charité Hospital. It didn't prove much, he told himself, slipping it back in the envelope and turning toward the Police Presidium. Only that Meckel and Schumann had worked together. But it definitely was a step forward. He reached Entrance Six and pulled open the doors. Now all I have to do is figure out what this Institute for Racial Hygiene is.
  The blood was pounding through Willi's skull. He couldn't stop picturing those ransacked offices and the pain-filled face of Bessie Yoskowitz. Where would all this end?
  It was a copy of a transport order. Eighty-five inmates of the Berlin-Charlottenburg Asylum to be transferred for "Special Handling" to a place called Sachsenhausen. No address listed. A black stamp underneath read simply, IRH.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs? End with the sentence ' An odd choice, Willi thought, hanging up.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Willi spent all morning with the documents, finding himself quickly absorbed not only in the complex layout of the old facility, but the fascinating rationale behind its construction. Built in 1866 under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Oranienburg Asylum for Lunatics and the Feebleminded had, he learned, been the first in Europe designed according to principles of one Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, an American proponent of environmental determinism. Rational buildings, the good doctor had firmly believed, made for rational people.
  According to Kirkbride, an ideal asylum ought to be built in a beautiful setting, along the water or on the crest of a hill, housed in a single giant building of multiple wings dropping back to form shallow V-shapes, so that all the patients could enjoy tranquil views and fresh cross-breezes. A highly structured healthy environment, the doctor had been convinced, would restore a "natural balance of the senses" and create a sense of "family life." Diet, exercise, and work were essential to his therapy. He'd had his patients out tilling fields, milking cows, feeding pigs. A radical departure from the millennium-old belief that incarceration was the only solution for the insane, Dr. Kirkbride's philosophy had represented the most advanced thinking of his age—that the mentally ill could actually be treated.
  For fifty years Oranienburg had been the foremost asylum in Germany, housing up to two thousand inmates at a time—until the Great War and Allied blockade, when it became unfeasible to maintain such a giant facility on so isolated an island. In 1916, Willi was actually sad to read, it was stripped of all usable metal and abandoned to the elements. Until, he thought, last year, when the Institute for Racial Hygiene moved in.
  The phone rang, suspending him for a strange moment between asylum and office. Sometimes he wondered how much difference there was between the two. It was Fritz, insisting on lunch. He refused to take no for an answer. Willi sighed and agreed to meet him in half an hour at the Pschorr Haus. An odd choice, Willi thought, hanging up.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs? End with the sentence ' The bare bones of Kempinski's Haus Vaterland, once the "Jolliest Place in Berlin," twirling and dancing with a pinwheel of neon, twelve restaurants, fifty cabaret acts, the famous Haus Vaterland Girls, a web of mangled girders staring over nothing: just a sign marking the dividing line between the British and Russian sectors.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Now of course he understood he had been lucky to have left when he did. And to have fled France in '38, a year before it became too late. Perhaps, had he never seen those jars of floating brains, those barracks full of deformed prisoners, at Sachsenhausen, he'd never have been impelled to rip his family up a second time and smuggle them to an unknown land. He would have ended up like his boyhood chum Mathias Goldberg, the neon advertising genius, who, when war broke out in '39, got interned by the French for being a German, and again in 1940 by the conquering Germans, for being a Jew. Stamped with the yellow star in '42, he was "resettled east" with his wife and children, to that unspeakable realm presided over by the Angel of Death—Josef Mengele.
  Camp Sachsenhausen, as Mengele had promised, had indeed been rebuilt, a little farther north along the river Havel, bigger and better than before. Nearly one hundred thousand people perished there, while neighbors kept their eyes and mouths and noses shut.
  From Ruta's he took a cab to Tiergarten Strasse to see if he could find Sylvie—but her little villa was gone. No chalk forwarding address. He went to the Adlon to see if he could find Hans, but the chief concierge had been lost in an air raid. The hotel smashed to dust.
  Ernst Roehm, and his whole SA leadership, had, of course, been wiped out in the infamous Night of the Long Knives back in '34, along with Kurt von Schleicher and his wife. Kai, Willi found out through some determined detective work, had been killed at Buchenwald with the rest of the Red Apaches. Gunther, the last week of the war, had been shot as a deserter.
  Potsdamer Platz, once the wildly beating commercial heart of the city, was deceased, too, its arteries vacuous, its walls collapsed. The bare bones of Kempinski's Haus Vaterland, once the "Jolliest Place in Berlin," twirling and dancing with a pinwheel of neon, twelve restaurants, fifty cabaret acts, the famous Haus Vaterland Girls, a web of mangled girders staring over nothing: just a sign marking the dividing line between the British and Russian sectors.