Alma - a monster of the 20th century

Paulus Manker
Alma struggled till the end, and very heroic, too. But she failed, she had to fail probably out of the reasons you have mentioned. Was that the reason that transformed her into a monster? Because once you said, I remember: "To understand the history of our century, the best is to go through the monsters". Maybe she does belong to the monsters? Because what she later did, mainly in the last years, she tried to lie, and to perfume, and make up her life for the posterity. It does not give a very pleasant image of that woman.

Joshua Sobol
I don´t think Alma was a pleasant person. She was one of the monsters of our time. But to understand the history of our century, the best is to go through the monsters. She was a monster in the sense that everything with her is bigger, bigger than life. And she made herself bigger than life. And when she writes about herself in her autobiography you feel that she is possessed by that need to prove that every moment of her life was not ordinary, it was extra-ordinary. Nothing was mediocre, everything was superb. She has that style of exaggerating about everything, which is again not the style of our time. I think that if you take the revolution of the Beatles and the Rock-revolution, which changed the attitude towards poetry, towards language, and we are now looking for simplicity in language and in images, and using everyday language and everyday images in order to describe our feelings, she still belongs to that older generation, where you could not speak about feelings without using enormous words, using superlatives. Everything must be extraordinary, grandious, exciting, schizophrenic, I don´t know what. In that sense she was one of those monsters of the begining of the century.