Annette Dumbach > Quotes

“The beast in man had lifted its mask and the time of euphemistic niceties and rationalizations was over.”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

“German and Russian intellectuals and literati regarded the emerging industrial bourgeoisie as a threat to the true orders of noble, artisan, and peasant, and both groups saw their respective nations as the civilizing - if retrogressive - vanguard that would bring truth back to Europe, the truth lost in the centuries of exploration and modernization since the Renaissance, the truth of a pure and "whole" life as in the preindustrial world of peasants and priests.”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

“The state is never an end in itself. It is important only as a means by which humanity can achieve its goal, which is nothing other than the advancement of man’s constructive capabilities.”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose

“In Reference to Germany + Russia - The hunger for national unification, for national importance, and the desire for a special 'spiritual' kind of freedom unknown in the West, were not the only traits that the two most autocratic societies in Europe had in common: in the post-Napoleonic era, they both rejected the values and body of beliefs of the Enlightenment coming out of Western Europe; both turned ferociously against the French Revolution with its emphasis on the leveling of classes and the fraternite of equal men; both rejected the idea of parliamentary democracy, which they saw as a triumph of numbers over values, of quantity over quality. Indeed, for both Germany and Russia, Western Europe was a marketplace that destroyed integrity and principles for the sake of compromise and gold (the word they used for this notion was "corruption". And both societies turned away from the idea of the private man, living anonymously in the city, freed from the moral pressures of community, village, and town (they saw this as "alienation").”
― Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose