Genres

Munich

Lists

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Best English-Language Books To Read in Europe

33 books — 9 voters

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch

Germany by State: Bavaria / Bayern

93 books — 5 voters

MEIN KAMPF Adolf Hitler by Micky Barnetti

Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories by James Morcan

Jackboot Britain by Daniel S. William Fletcher

Best Books On Hitler And Weimar

7 books — 6 voters

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr

Germany in Juvenile Fiction

236 books — 22 voters

Give My Love to Berlin by Katherine Bryant

First Flight, Final Fall by C.W. Farnsworth

Love from Berlin to Bavaria

16 books — 1 voter

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

Mardi Gras -- Fasching -- Fastnacht -- Karneval -- Carnaval -- Carnival -- Carnevale -- Lent

79 books — 26 voters

Featured News & Interviews

Great New Books to Read for Hispanic Heritage Month

Read »

“ Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read:

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine]

The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between. ...more ”
― Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

12 likes

“ For Reagan,for his contemporaries, and many in the generations after them, the word Munich was understood as code for any nation's stepping back from necessary toughness ...more ”
― Chris Matthews, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked

0 likes

More quotes...