Germans

Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry, culture and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans.

Quotes

B

The Brits look to provoke. The Italians occasionally imagine conversations, though not maliciously. The Germans veer from confrontational to nationalistic.
- Chris Ballard, "The Reflection, Future and Duality of Post-USMNT Jurgen Klinsmann" (16 May 2018), Sports Illustrated

We [Germans] want to prove that we are good people. Even if no one wants to be reminded of this, the good that we do has to be seen in relation to the crimes that we initiated.
- Arnulf Baring, as quoted in "Migrant crisis brings out big-hearted ‘Generation Merkel’" (9 September 2015), by James Shotter and Jeevan Vasagar, Financial Times

We Germans have a far greater and more urgent duty towards civilization to perform than the Great Asiatic Power. We, like the Japanese, can only fulfil it by the sword.
- Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the next War (1911), Chapter XIII

[W]hen people ask me are you, as a German, feel responsible for the Holocaust? No, because I'm born 1965 and it would be completely un-logical to say I'm responsible, but as a country we are responsible.
- Uwe Boll, interview (2010), Lopta Film, Lopta and Moist

C

For, after all, survey the remaining forces of civilisation; they are overwhelming. If only they were united in a common conception of right and duty, there would be no war. On the contrary, the German people, industrious, faithful, valiant, but alas! lacking in the proper spirit of civic independence, liberated from their present nightmare, would take their honoured place in the vanguard of human society. Alexander the Great remarked that the people of Asia were slaves because they had not learned to pronounce the word “No.” Let that not be the epitaph of the English-speaking peoples or of Parliamentary democracy, or of France, or of the many surviving liberal States of Europe.
- Winston Churchill, broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938)
The victors imposed upon the Germans all the long-sought ideals of the liberal nations of the West. They were relieved from the burden of compulsory military service and from the need of keeping up heavy armaments. The enormous American loans were presently pressed upon them, though they had no credit. A democratic constitution, in accordance with all the latest improvements, was established at Weimar. Emperors having been driven out, nonentities were elected. Beneath this flimsy fabric raged the passions of the mighty, defeated, but substantially uninjured German nation. The prejudice of the Americans against monarchy, which Mr. Lloyd George made no attempt to counteract, had made it clear to the beaten Empire that it would have better treatment from the Allies as a republic than as a monarchy. Wise policy would have crowned and fortified the Weimar Republic with a constitutional sovereign in the person of an infant grandson of the Kaiser, under a council of regency. Instead, a gaping void was opened in the national life of the German people. All the strong elements, military and feudal, which might have rallied to a constitutional monarchy and for its sake respected and sustained the new democratic and parliamentary processes, were for the time being unhinged. The Weimar Republic, with all its liberal trappings and blessings, was regarded as an imposition of the enemy. It could not hold the loyalties or the imagination of the German people. For a spell they sought to cling as in desperation to the aged Marshal Hindenburg. Thereafter mighty forces were adrift; the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast – Corporal Hitler.
- Winston Churchill, The Second World War Volume I: The Gathering Storm (1948), ISBN 0-395-41055-X

And now it's time for me to meet Europe's "cuddly teddybears"... the Germans. Germany as a country has only been in existence for just over a hundred years. But in that time they've started two world wars, they've had two military coups, they've been brought on the brink of starvation two times, and they've invaded almost all of their neighbours.
- Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear: Jeremy Meets the Neighbours (2002)

E

I thought that the essential factor we have to remember in deciding on our plans and policy for the future is that in the German character the unquestioned authority of the State is what counts for most. The average German is the instrument of the State to an extent which is incomprehensible to us. He belongs to the State, and the State does not belong to him. I see no signs of that in this country, and I believe that the authority we enjoy in the world to-day is precisely because we represent the complete antithesis of the German State conception. This acceptance of the State, since the days of the Prussians, has made Germans ready to aid any leader who wants to guide them into fields of aggression. With the German, the larger the State the more remote and the more majestic is the authority he is prepared to follow into battle or wherever he is led. Germans believe that it is the destiny of their race to be the dominating Power in Europe; that is far more important to them than either the freedom of the individual or the dignity of any particular man or woman. Unless we are seized of that we do not understand the foundation on which Nazi doctrine was so easily superimposed. It was acceptable to the average German because it expressed in aggressive forms the belief which the average German has had for 200 years or more.
- Anthony Eden, speech in the House of Commons (1 December 1944)

D

To no class of our population are we more indebted for valuable qualities of head, heart, and hand, than to the German. Say what we will of their lager, their smoke, and their metaphysics, they have brought to us a fresh, vigorous and child-like nature; a boundless facility in the acquisition of knowledge; a subtle and far-reaching intellect, and a fearless love of truth. Though remarkable for patient and laborious thought, the true German is a joyous child of freedom, fond of manly sports, a lover of music, and a happy man generally.
- Frederick Douglass, "Our Composite Nationality" (7 December 1869), Boston, Massachusetts

F

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
- Benjamin Franklin, 1751 Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind

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.
- George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), Doubleday, p. 151

G

The German government and European rights organizations have been unwilling to change Berlin’s approach [to Germans in the Russian Federation], and so an initiative group led by Vyacheslav Bodrov, one of the so-called “Russian Germans,” is appealing to religious groups found among the Germans still in Russia, including the Mennonites who are headquartered in the US.
- Paul A. Goble, "Ethnic Germans Step Up Efforts to Leave Russia Because of War in Ukraine But Find It Almost Impossible to Emigrate to Germany", Window on Eurasia (March 5, 2024)

He who thinks as a German must despise the Jew. The one determines the other.
- Joseph Goebbels, "Warum sind wir Judengegner?", Der Angriff. Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (1935), Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, pp. 329–331

G

Germany is dear to my heart. I have often felt a bitter pain at the thought of the German people, which is so respectable in the individual and so miserable in the collective.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Luden, Heinrich (1847). Rückblicke in mein Leben (in German): p. 119.

H

Austria's two achievements were to have persuaded the world that Hitler was German and that Beethoven was Viennese.
- Christopher Hitchens, "The 2,000-Year-Old Panic" (March 2008), The Atlantic

If the Providence has so willed that the German people cannot be spared this fight, then I can only be grateful that it entrusted me with the leadership in this historic struggle which, for the next 500 or 1,000 years, will be described as decisive, not only for the history of Germany, but for the whole of Europe and indeed the whole world. The German people and their soldiers are working and fighting today, not only for the present, but for the coming, nay the most distant, generations. A historical revision on a unique scale has been imposed on us by the Creator...
- Adolf Hitler, speech before the Reichstag (11 December 1941)

K

Let us sterilize all Germans and wars of world domination will come to an end!
- Theodore N. Kaufman, as quoted in "Hitler Will Be Nothing But A Rosebud Says Author 'Germany Must Perish!'. One Man's Plan For Peace Forever" (26 September 1941), by Harold U. Ribalow, The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, p. 5

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.
- Nikita Khrushchev, quoted in Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev: A Career (1966), p. 12.

L

These people were of all races, colors, and creeds. French were in the north and in the Carolinas. Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State. Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia. Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia. Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures. Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves. Also they were intermarried with the American Indians.
- Rose Wilder Lane, §1 of "The Third Attempt," ch. V of Pt. Two of The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (New York: The John Day Company, 1943), pp. 153–154.

In regard to Germans and foreigners, I esteem foreigners no better than other people, nor any worse. They are all of the great family of men, and if there is one shackle upon any of them, it would be far better to lift the load from them than to pile additional loads upon them.
- Abraham Lincoln, speech to Germans at Cincinnati, Ohio (12 February 1861)
- Alternate version: In regard to the Germans and foreigners, I esteem them no better than other people, nor any worse.

Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win.
- Gary Lineker after losing the 1990 FIFA World Cup semifinal to West Germany by a penalty shootout, as quoted in Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France, by Laurent DuBois, p. 79

M

In Germany, it's, let's say it's 5:59 and you're heading for the bakery or whatever and it's due to close at 6. The German will walk right up to that door and close it right in your face, they will lock it on the other side of that glass door with a shrug, like "sorry".
- Brian Reynolds Myers, interview with Colin Marshall (February 2015)

P

Stan: Dude, what the fuck is wrong with German people?
- South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (30 June 1999), by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Paramount Pictures

Germans are the only decent people in Europe.
- George S. Patton, as quoted in Patton: The Man Behind The Legend, 1885-1945 (1985) by Martin Blumenson, New York: William Morrison, p. 281

R

Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don't explain the real guilt we share; that we lost.
- Hanna Reitsch, as quoted in "The first astronaut: tiny, daring Hanna", by Ron Laytner, The Deseret News (19 February 1981), pp. C1+, p. 12C

Germans read the most fine literature in the world!
- Dorit Rabinyan, Interview (2019)

S

For many Germans, self-determination was both persecution and promise. About ten million speakers of the German language, former subjects of the Habsburg monarchy, remained beyond Germany’s borders. Some three million such people inhabited the northwestern rim of Czechoslovakia, right at the border of Czechoslovakia and Germany. There were more Germans in Czechoslovakia than there were Slovaks. Almost the entire population of Austria, resting between Czechoslovakia and Germany, were German speakers. Austria was nevertheless required by the Treaty of St. Germain to exist as a separate state, although much of its population would have preferred accession to Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party established in 1920, was an Austrian and an advocate of an Anschluss: a unification of Austria and Germany. Such goals of national unity, dramatic as they were, actually concealed the full measure of Hitler’s ambitions.
- Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

T

Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion- science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. ... The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth- science- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book IX, Chapter Ten

V

It will be a long time before I hear whether I qualify for German citizenship. Nothing will replace an extended family I will never know, nothing will displace the dark spaces inside my complex father, but I am anxious to see what does change if I become a German citizen.
- Peter Van Buren, "Considering My Nazi Reparations" (28 July 2020), The American Conservative

W

I'm not German, I'm Austrian and Austrians have a wonderful sense of humour, Germans, not so much.
- Christoph Waltz, as quoted in "'Austrians have humour, Germans not so much'" (28 February 2013), The Local

[T]here is the notion of sonderweg, literally the "special path," down which the German people are fated to wander. ... [W]hether viewed from within or without, left or right, the Germans could be seen through such a lens to possess some collective essence — a specialness — capable of explaining everything. In this way, one could speak of a trajectory “from Luther to Hitler” and interpret history not as some chaotic jumble but as a crisp, linear process.
- Thomas Chatterton Williams, "How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power" (6 October 2017), The New York Times, New York

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval.
- Woodrow Wilson, address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany (2 April 1917)

External links

Encyclopedic article on Germans on Wikipedia