Lena > Recent Status Updates

Phipps re: Goering “the chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Goering, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child… And then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.”

Assiduity = constant or close application or effort; diligence; industry.

Here was the kicker: “It would be better for him and it would be better for us if he no longer existed.”

On voting to repeal treaty of versailles: … there was this item in the Sunday morning edition of the official Nazi newspaper, Voelkischer Beobachter: “In order to bring about clarity it must be repeated again. He who does not attach himself to us today, he who does not vote and vote ‘yes’ today, shows that he is, if not our bloody enemy, at least a product of destruction and that he is no more to be helped”

Klemperer wondered, Do you talk with such blind rage “if you are so sure of this endurance and this annihilation”? He left the theater that day “with what amounted to a glimmer of hope.”

Mellifluous = sweetly or smoothly flowing; sweet-sounding: mellifluous tones.

Propinquity = proximity, kinship, similarity

Mowrer and his family made it safely to Tokyo. His wife, Lillian, recalled her great sorrow at having to leave Berlin. “Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany,” she wrote. “Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad-and do horrible things.”

Nice days were still nice. “The sun shines,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, “and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends… are in prisons, possibly dead.” The prevailing normalcy was seductive. “I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and I am shocked to see I am smiling. You can’t help smiling in such beautiful weather.”