John Kampfner > Quotes

“In an interview with the main tabloid, Bild, in November 2004, shortly before becoming chancellor, she was asked what emotions Germany aroused in her. She replied, ‘I am thinking of airtight windows. No other country can build such airtight and beautiful windows.”
― John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country

“After the Wall”
― John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country

“Many middle- and even some higher-ranking Nazis were restored to their positions. Denazification certifications – dubbed Persilscheine, ‘Persil notes’ – were easy to obtain. Suspicions of Nazi complicity could be washed away with some historical detergent. Suspected Nazi offenders could be exonerated by statements of good reputation. People talked about being washed clean or walking in with a brown shirt and coming out with a white one. A few years later, the new Bundestag passed Article 131, formalizing the process.”
― John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country

“Merkel is the opposite of ostentatious. She has kept her small cottage near her home town of Templin, goes to her customary hairdresser in Berlin and from time to time is seen grocery shopping. She devours art. She sometimes phones her one or two favourite museum directors directly to ask them if they wouldn’t mind staying open a little longer so that she can see a particular exhibition without any fuss.”
― John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country

“On the night the Berlin Wall came down, thirty-five-year-old comrade Merkel didn’t join her friends in their champagne-fuelled celebrations on the unfamiliar streets of the West. She had heard some rumours and so she phoned her mother, Herlind. ‘Watch out mum, there’s something up today,’1 she said. It was a Thursday and she did what she always did on Thursdays – she went to the public sauna with a friend near her two-bedroom flat in Prenzlauer Berg. ‘I didn’t really understand what I was hearing,’2 Merkel later recalled. ‘I figured that if the wall had opened, it was hardly going to close again, so I decided to wait.”
― John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country

“You have to imagine that David Bowie came to Berlin in 1976 to get off drugs.”
― John Kampfner, In Search of Berlin: The Story of A Reinvented City