#germans

Just as the British subject loves England despite her faults, so we must insist that all Germans who were part of the old Germany and helped shape her, recognize the greatness and worthiness of present-day Germany. ↗

— Gustav Stresemann

#despite #england #faults #germans #germany

For if the Germans do not help defend the West, American and Canadian troops must cross the seas to do the job, and I venture to believe that the troops - if not the statesmen - regard this as an interference at least in their own domestic affairs. ↗

— Arthur Hays Sulzberger

#american #believe #canadian #cross #defend

There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it. ↗

— Charles Guggenheim

#camp #decided #digging #finally #further

[Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out. ↗

— Courtney Love

#germans #germany #ireland #irish #jews

Germans make nice cars. ↗

— Jason Behr

#germans #make #nice

It was the noise Of ancient trees falling while all was still Before the storm, in the long interval Between the gathering clouds and that light breeze Which Germans call the Wind's bride. ↗

— Charles Godfrey Leland

#before #between #breeze #bride #call

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anonymity #born-again #clean-slate #extinction #family