#germans

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

After a Polish Pope, whose country was first to be invaded by the Germans in World War Two, we now have someone from the generation drafted at the close of the war. ↗

— Horst Koehler

#close #country #drafted #first #generation

I was glad to be made aware that “Veimke” (jeune fille au pair), is subject to natural law, and can be made fat, by such things as poor diet, and alcohol. ↗

— Roman Payne

#au-pair #diet #germans #humor #humour

The bittersweetness of uncertainty: To win or to lose. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#jews #nazi #world-war #uncertainty

Let us show our fellow countrymen and the entire world what the Germans can do when they work for peace. ↗

— Walter Ulbricht

#entire #entire world #fellow #germans #let us

But as a German - and I am German-born - we Germans are condemned once again to be radical revisionists. ↗

— Ernst Zundel

#am #condemned #german #germans #i

I had an uncle who was a postal official at the Polish post office in Gdansk. He was one of the defenders of the Polish postal service and, after it capitulated, was shot by the Germans under the provisions of martial law. Suddenly he was no longer a member of the family, and we were no longer allowed to play with his children. ↗

— Gunter Grass

#allowed #children #defenders #family #germans

Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State. ↗

— Heinrich Himmler

#firearms #germans #guns #having #join

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. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#fiction #germans #holocaust #nazis #signs-and-symbols

Further, not only the United States, but the French, British, Germans and the United Nations all thought Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction before the United States intervened. ↗

— Jim Gerlach

#british #destruction #french #further #germans