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Latest comment: 18 years ago by Jeffq

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Germany page.

if someone even mentions germany people think of: nazis, hitler innocent jews hopelessly murdered. if people just knew that whats past is past and just forget about it and also anyone who likes nazis well....see you in hell losers!

It is true that the sole current quote in this article is not exactly kind to Germans (even though its sting should be lessened by the fact that it's a joke, coming from a comedy centered around an ill-mannered Briton). But rather than complain about it here, it is much more effective to contribute reliably-sourced positive quotes about Germans and Germany, which certainly exist. The same is true for any Wikiquote article. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:24, 2 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

its true the germans are turely cool


Isn't this page kinda "onesided"? I only see quotes like "nazis-yadda-yadda"..

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  • The Teutonic reputation for brutality is well-founded. Their operas last three or four days. And they have no word for "fluffy".
    • Captain Blackadder, Blackadder Goes Forth, Episode 4: Private Plane.
  • To the English I say this: be grateful for the Germans. Were it not for them, you would be the most hated people in Europe.
  • To think about Germany is to think about Auschwitz.
    • Original (German): An Deutschland zu denken, heißt an Auschwitz zu denken.
    • Theodor Adorno

Quotes requiring work/to move elsewhere

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  • A reformation of relations between the Soviet people and the German people is not possible along the lines pursued by the authorities of the Soviet zone of Germany. The Germans in that zone have come to hate and despise those who violate them in so inhuman a manner. And they must be having similar feelings towards those who support that system. The closing of the border is an unprecedented admission of bankruptcy. It shows that the people who are compelled to live in that part of Germany can be prevented only by the use of physical force from leaving that paradise of workers and farmers. There is but one possibility of placing relations between the Soviet and German peoples on a new foundation: the German people must be given back the right, denied to no people on earth, to form, through a free and uninfluenced expression of their will, a government which would then be truly entitled to speak, act and decide on behalf of the whole German nation.
  • The French fear of German resurgence which caused France to press for a policy of dismemberment of Germany seemed to be altogether exaggerated. After 1945 Germany lay prostrate - militarily, economically and politically - and in my opinion this condition was a sufficient guarantee that Germany could not again threaten France. In the future United States of Europe I saw great hope for Europe and thus for Germany. We had to try to remind France, Holland, Belgium, and the other European countries that they were - as we were - situated in Western Europe, that they are and will forever remain our neighbours, that any violence they do to us must in the end lead to trouble, and that no lasting peace can be established in Europe if it is founded on force alone.
  • After twelve years of National Socialism there simply were no perfect solutions for Germany and certainly none for a divided Germany. There was very often only the policy of the lesser evil. We were a small and very exposed country. By our own strength we could achieve nothing. We must not be a no-man's land between East and West for then we would have friends nowhere and a dangerous neighbour in the East.
  • An unsteady nation has no friends. The German people seriously worry me. The only thing I can say for them is that they have lived through too much. They have not found peace of mind and stability since the war of 1914-18.
    • Konrad Adenauer, as quoted in "Adenauer 1876-1967" (28 April 1967) by James Bell, Life, Vol. 62, No. 17
  • I started this war killing Germans in Africa. Then France. Then Belgium. Now I'm killing Germans in Germany. It will end, soon. But before it does, a lot more people gotta die.
    • Fury (2014), written by David Ayer, spoken by Don Collier
  • Perhaps they know that they are in danger as much as anybody. They simply would rather see American men and women, rather than French and German men and women, dying to preserve their safety. Far better, from this cynical perspective, to signal that you will not take on the terrorists, so as to earn their good will amidst the uncertain times ahead.
  • When I came to Germany in 1990, I thought our relations would be more difficult. During the Cold War years, we were taught that this country was an enemy and that our job was to fight the enemy. I came here still holding this cold-war mentality. I think I made a great mistake, and that all Soviet citizens were wrong as far as Germany is concerned. The Germans made the same mistake about the Soviets. I think both sides now realize this. Our relations are really quite cordial.
  • If we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs in other fields which have greatly contributed to the instability of our period by their propensity for holding up progress.
    • Donald Ewen Cameron on the Germans, in Life is For Living in Father, Son and CIA, by Harvey Weinstein p. 100
  • By 2040, France and Germany are going to be has-beens, historically. Between population crises and the redefinition of the geopolitics of Europe, the French and Germans will be facing a decisive moment. If they do not assert themselves, their futures will be dictated by others and they will move from decadence to powerlessness. And with powerlessness would come a geopolitical spiral from which they would not recover.
  • I find it difficult to say whether the leadership's 'second echelon' could have preserved the German Democratic Republic. Helmut Kohl later told me he had never believed that Egon Krenz was capable of getting the situation under control. I do not know - we are all wiser after the event, as the saying goes. For my part, I must admit I briefly had a faint hope that the new leaders would be able to change the course of events by establishing a new type of relations between the two German states - based on radical domestic reforms in East Germany.
  • A German-Russian partnership is a key element in any serious pan-European integration process. It is my ardent wish that Russia and Germany may manage to preserve all the positive achievements of the late 1980s and early 1990s in today's difficult times.
  • Anyone who thinks of the Germans as a naturally bellicose people should recall that Prussia-Germany was the only one of the continental powers in the run-up to 1914 whose elite seriously feared that if they had their war, their people might refuse to fight it.
  • Not so long ago we Germans thirsted after blood. We had half the world in trenches crawling through the mud. Victory was in our reach as we launched U-boat fleets. Back at home our women starved or else they worked the streets. From Attila on we've had a steady line of heroes. So how come we got stuck this time with a bunch of zeroes. Then a naval mutiny made it clear for all to see the status quo just had to go in Germany. Oh, how we wish that we were kids again. How pure we were back then when we were young. Back then we played at war on soft green grass. We fought with make-believe, not poison gas. And now that we have seen the face of war. We're not the same men that we were before, and we can say without hypocrisy, now we want the world to be safe for democracy.
  • As President Biden explained, the current U.S.-orchestrated military escalation (“Prodding the Bear”) is not really about Ukraine. Biden promised at the outset that no U.S. troops would be involved. But he has been demanding for over a year that Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S. suppliers.... So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices, above all to the detriment of Germany. In addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. oil companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy. Thus looms the third time in a century that the United States will have defeated Germany – each time increasing its control over a German economy increasingly dependent on the United States for imports and policy leadership, with NATO being the effective check against any domestic nationalist resistance.
  • The reaction to the sabotage of three of the four Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in four places on Monday, September 26,[2022] has focused on speculations about who did it and whether NATO will make a serious attempt to discover the answer. Yet instead of panic, there has been a great sigh of diplomatic relief, even calm.
    ... Disabling these pipelines ends the uncertainty and worries on the part of US/NATO diplomats that nearly reached a crisis proportion the previous week, when large demonstrations took place in Germany calling for the sanctions to end and to commission Nord Stream 2 to resolve the energy shortage...
    The German public was coming to understand what it will mean if their steel companies, fertilizer companies, glass companies and toilet-paper companies were shutting down. These companies were forecasting that they would have to go out of business entirely – or shift operations to the United States – if Germany did not withdraw from the trade and currency sanctions against Russia and permit Russian gas and oil imports to resume, and presumably to fall back from their astronomical eight to tenfold price increase... If policymakers were to put German business interests and living standards first, NATO’s common sanctions and New Cold War front would be broken.     Italy and France might follow suit. That prospect made it urgent to take the anti-Russian sanctions out of the hands of democratic politics.
  • While I was in Germany, I met a student. He told me that I am a Muslim, that I am a terrorist. I told him that he is the German, that he burned people. I said "Why are you talking to me? I didn’t burn anybody." I told him also that I didn’t terrorize anybody, and that I was the first person to condemn what Osama bin Laden did to America on 9/11. I told him that we, the Shia people, in Iraq we were the first victims. Saddam killed civilian people, he cut off our heads, he blew up our houses. I told him that Hitler burned the Jews. Nobody in the world has done what he did. Then I told him we are the same. You are German, and you are not Hitler. I am a Muslim, but I am not Osama bin Laden.
    • Sayyed Mohammad Ali El Husseini, as quoted in "The Liberal Cleric of the Dahiyeh"] (14 January 2007), by Michael J. Totten, World Affairs Journal
  • It's common in Germany, and elsewhere in continental Europe, for football to be just one of many sports a club fields teams in. Bayern, for instance, even have a chess team.
  • I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a communist.
  • It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it's wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It's wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it's wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself.
  • The post-Nazi German experience, frequently cited and mistakenly seen as normal, is actually a massive exception to the general rule. The Germans are indeed all but unified in their disgust for the Nazi past, but we should not forget that de-Nazification was first forced upon the Germans by the victorious Allies under an occupation regime and then strengthened by the objective circumstances of the post-war European political and social environment... One should be reminded about the East German post-unification experience. According to a 2009 poll, cited by Spiegel, 57 percent of ex-East Germans were positive about East Germany. In a poll, 49 percent agreed with the following statement: "The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there', while 8 percent went even further and agreed with the statement: 'The GDR had, for the most part, good sides. Life there was happier and better than in reunified Germany."
  • Germany is as good an example of the practical blessings and drawbacks of democracy as any country can give. The Weimar Constitution of 1919 has been described by that distinguished historian, Dr. G. P. Gooch, as ‘a consistent democracy’ and he adds that ‘the commentators who describe it as the most democratic constitution in the world are not exaggerating its character.’ Germany now has universal suffrage for men and women over twenty; in fact, over half the population possesses the vote, and there are neither legal nor practical impediments in the way of the vote being used. Such democratic quackeries as proportional representation, the referendum, and the initiative have all been adopted. I t would take more than one generation to enable any people to settle down with so democratic a constitution, and yet it is less than sixty years since the Germans became a united people, and up to 1919 they lived under a constitution that lacked every essential of democracy. There is no tradition of democracy, and without that an ultrademocratic constitution is a rash experiment.
    It is too early yet to answer the question whether the Germans can make a success of democracy. The country is not politically happy and yearns for a leader, as was amply illustrated by the pathetic election of the elderly Hindenburg as President. The type of statesman thrown up by Germany’s ultrademocratic system is not one that satisfies the German people, always prone to follow a big man. Up to the present, those who would be Napoleons have been kept quiet for fear of those who would be Lenins, and between the two democracy has had a fairly even course. But, as one who knows Germany and the Germans fairly well, I believe that Germany will have to pay for her sudden dash to democracy in 1919. The craving of the people for leadership will not indefinitely be suppressed, and the mediocrities which the democratic system exalts will not long be tolerated when the control of Germany’s late enemies finally ceases. The election of Hindenburg was a portent not to be ignored. One can only hope that a compromise will be possible, but I feel sure that in that compromise, if it comes, there will be many departures from the pure democracy of 1919.
  • The United States is not an island but for much of its history it was protected on either side by two great oceans and had as neighbours the much weaker Canada and Mexico. As a result detachment, even isolation, from the rest of the world and limited land forces made sense. German military planning in the twentieth century, by contrast, was fixated on the possibility of a two-front war opened up by having a hostile France in the west and Russia, later the Soviet Union, in the east. Israel too for much of its short history has lived with the fear of being surrounded by enemies. In the lead-up to the Second World War Britain could invest heavily in long-range bombers to be launched against Germany’s infrastructure and cities from the relative safety of its islands, but the Germans had to think of how to support their ground troops against their opponents. As a result Germany favoured short-range planes capable of bombing and strafing the enemy forces rather than longer-range ones, something that stood it in good stead in the rapid, blitzkrieg opening stages of the Second World War.
  • Remember that Moses led his people through the desert for forty years, and that after twenty years people began to complain... they told Moses that life in the desert was too difficult, and that at least while they were slaves they had had food and water and places to sleep. Moses's friends asked him how long he thought people would be complaining like this, and he replied, "Until the last person born under slavery has died". Our situation is very similar. The psychological gap between eastern and western Germany will last for at least a generation, or perhaps until the last person born under Communism has passed away.
  • Now, this (2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage) was an act of war, pure and simple... against Germany. And...President Joseph Biden, at a press conference in the presence of the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, said this is going to happen if Russia invaded Ukraine. And, of course, he was asked, well, how do you do this? I mean, how can you how can you be so confident that Nordstrom will be killed and Biden said, well, just, you know, trust me, it’s going to happen.
    And so she, bilingual, the Reuters reporter, turned to Scholz – and this is not widely available now for obvious reasons – and she said, well, I mean, do you agree with that? I mean, hello, how do you feel about this? And this hack, this political hack said: we do everything together. We do everything together. We will be together on this now. So... that interview is available in Germany....
    I describe Olaf Scholz as kind of the epitome of the abused spouse. Stands there and is abused not only by his master, Joe Biden, but also by this hack that he has as foreign minister. Her name is Baerbock. She is the the most vociferous of all the people saying that we are...at war with Russia.... Here it is exactly to the month, 90 years later.
    Will the German people acquiesce in their industry, and then their bodies being frozen out this winter? Or will they rise up and say: “Look, Mr Scholz, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and neither does Baerbock. Get out of here!”, and replace that government?
  • Conspicuous pacifism is especially striking in Germany, a nation that was once so connected to martial values that the words Teutonic and Prussian became synonyms for rigid militarism. As recently as 1964 the satirist Tom Lehrer expressed a common fear at the prospect of West Germany participating in a multilateral nuclear coalition. In a sarcastic lullaby, the singer reassures a baby: "Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, But that couldn’t happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918. And they’ve hardly bothered us since then." The fear of a revanchist Germany was revived in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the two Germanys made plans to reunite. Yet today German culture remains racked with soul-searching over its role in the world wars and permeated with revulsion against anything that smacks of military force. Violence is taboo even in video games, and when Parker Brothers tried to introduce a German version of Risk, the board game in which players try to dominate a map of the world, the German government tried to censor it. (Eventually the rules were rewritten so that players were “liberating” rather than conquering their opponents’ territories. German pacifism is not just symbolic: in 2003 half a million Germans marched to oppose the American-led invasion of Iraq. The American secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously wrote the country off as part of “Old Europe.” Given the history of ceaseless war on that continent, the remark may have been the most flagrant display of historical amnesia since the student who complained about the clichés in Shakespeare.
  • Far from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated fascism. We defeated communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people. And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, 'Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us'? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No. The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead, and that is the kind of nation we are.
  • The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries what are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.
  • Germany, it should be said, was also a typical Western consumer society in many, often quite disarming, ways. However, with the active encouragement of the Nazi governing apparatus, the country was also a pressure cooker of passions. A regime such as Hitler’s, which follows a major peaceful diplomatic victory (the Munich Agreement) in short order with a state-sponsored savage and murderous attack on a law-abiding section of its own population (the Kristallnacht outrages against Germany’s Jews), is not one whose leader’s actions on the international stage can be viewed in a value-free way as ‘pragmatic’. There is, it seems to me, something much more powerful and compulsive at work here in the German national psyche at that time – turmoil within, that eventually became reflected in turmoil without. Piecing together a mosaic of public and private feeling, and judging its often hidden power, seems to me a way of redressing the imbalances of a ‘top-down’ view that can end up looking at major political actors’ machinations in a kind of arid, almost laboratory isolation. Perhaps some similar history will be written years from now about present-day Britain and America – especially the latter – in this fascinating and unnerving context.
    • Frederick Taylor, 1939: A People's History (2020)
  • The Russians are like us... They are fine people. They got along with our soldiers in Berlin very well.
    • Harry S. Truman, statement to a group of four congress freshmen (2 July 1947), as quoted in The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 44.
  • With the creation of a separate West German state, with the conclusion of the Paris Agreements and with the inclusion of West Germany in NATO, the Western powers finally unilaterally broke the Potsdam Agreement, this sole valid document in international law for Germany in the postwar period. It is not coincidental that in connection with this a special occupation status of the three powers was established in West Berlin. By this three-sided occupation status, the Western powers themselves confirmed that they violated the international-legal basis of their occupation regime in West Berlin and that this regime was based only on undisguised military force.
  • Germans circa 1941 were enthusiastic racists who endorsed Hitler’s program of conquest, subjugation, and colonization... Germans at the time held attitudes of casual racism at the very least and a strong sense of imperial entitlement over Jews, Slavs, and others deemed racially and culturally inferior. The series tries to draw a distinction between Nazis and everyday Germans that simply did not exist... Germans believed in the Nazi agenda.
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