The German Genius

our physical skyline by German architects.
    —A LLAN B LOOM
    The Germans dive deeper—but they come up muddier.
    —W ICKHAM S TEED
    For those [Germans] born during and after the Second World War the cultural history of Germany before 1933 is that of a lost country, one that they never knew.
    —K EITH B ULLIVANT
    For countless Americans, Germany remains the ultimate metaphor of evil, the frightening reminder of the fragility of civilisation.
    —D EIDRE B ERGER
    The German, at odds with himself, with deep divisions in his mind, likewise in his will and therefore impotent in action, becomes powerless to direct his own life. He dreams of justice in the stars and loses his footing on earth…. In the end, then, only the inward road remained open for German men.
    —A DOLF H ITLER
    The Nazis are un-German.
    —V ICTOR K LEMPERER
    Patriotism for the Frenchman is such that it warms his heart dilating it and expanding it, so he embraces in his love not only those closest to him but the whole of France, the entire country of his civilisation. The patriotism of the German on the contrary is such that his heart becomes narrower and shrinks like leather in the cold. He hates foreigners and no longer wishes to be a citizen of the world, but a mere German.
    —H EINRICH H EINE
    People in England want something to read, the French something to taste, the Germans something to think about.
    —K URT T UCHOLSKY
    The Germans are not bastardised by alien people, they have not become mongrels. They have preserved their original purity more than many other peoples and have been able to develop slowly and quietly from this purity according to the lasting laws of time; the fortunate Germans are an original people.
    —E RNST M ORITZ A RNDT
    It was [Hippolyte] Taine, the Frenchman, who said that all the leading ideas of the present day were produced in Germany between 1780 and 1830.
    —J OHN D EWEY
    The Planet is in flames…Only from the Germans can come the world-historical reflection, provided that they find and preserve their German element.
    —M ARTIN H EIDEGGER
    We see in Germany, even more than elsewhere, a division of labour between genius and tradition; nowhere are the types of the young rebel and the tireless pedant so common and so extreme.
    —G EORGE S ANTAYANA
    I cannot think of a nation that is more torn than the Germans, you see workmen but no human beings, masters and servants, young people and sedate, but no human beings…
    —F RIEDRICH H ÖLDERLIN
    Anyone who still said that they liked Caspar David Friedrich stood accused for decades of not being sufficiently critical with regard to German history.
    —F LORIAN I LLIES
    Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian…
    —H ANNAH A RENDT
    German suffering and Jewish suffering are not equal…They are, however, both real.
    —S TEVE C RAWSHAW
    In several respects, American intellectual life is today closer to the German than the British.
    —H ENRI P EYRE
    The German language unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to de-claim from behind a woollen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term.
    —E RWIN P ANOFKSY
    Freud is better in German.
    —F RANK K ERMODE
    Death is a master from Germany.
    —P AUL C ELAN
    Whoever begins to question this society [Germany], eventually questions himself out of it.
    —R ALF D AHRENDORF
    German problems are rarely German problems alone.
    —R ALF D AHRENDORF
    It has always struck me as particularly interesting that so many of the great debunking analysts of modern culture have been German or Austrian, not English or French.
    —F RITZ R INGER
    The Allies won [the Second World War] because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.
    —S IR I AN J ACOBS, MILITARY SECRETARY TO W INSTON C HURCHILL
    As a result of the Second World War, being German became an international stigma that had to be borne stoically and, at best, could be attenuated through good behaviour.
    —K ONRAD J ARAUSCH
    The cultural legacy of German Jewry is German.
    —B ARBARA J OHN , B ERLIN F OREIGNERS C OMMISSIONER
    But under what suspicion one comes, if one says, the Germans are now a completely normal people, a regular society.
    —M ARTIN W ALSER
    There is too much music in Germany.
    —R OMAIN R OLLAND
    And the world may finally be healed by Germanism.
    —E MANUEL G EIBEL
    The way Germans confront their history