Austria Is A Land Quotes

amused them with the story of his Romanian grandmother who jumped out a window to avoid marrying a Haskalah Jew, only to land atop a Hasidic rabbi from Austria. “She knocked him to the mud,” he exclaimed. “When he looked up, she was reading his palm. So they got married.

This absolute triumph over the arrogant pretensions of the austrians was also, unusually in the circumstances, a triumph for common sense, because, however much blood might have been spilled in castelo rodrigo, any war between portugal and austria would be, not only absurd, but impracticable, unless the two countries were to rent an area of land in France, for example, more or less halfway between the two contenders, so that they could martial their respective armies and organise a battle.

It is no wonder that Mary loves our day and age. Thanks to persecution, we are giving more to her Son than any other age or day since Calvary. The Nazis in Germany, Austria, and Poland; The Reds in all the Balkan lands, Russia, and now in China, have done more for heaven than ever did the Roman Caesars, the kings and queens of England, or the madmen of the French Revolution. They have done more for the earth, too. For while peopling heaven with martyrs, they have also spread far and wide the grace of Christ Jesus, thanks to the oneness of His mystical body.

All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.

The canton of Uri, the place of the birth and residence of William Tell, shook off the yoke of Austria in 1308, and, with Schwitz and Underwald, laid the foundation of the perpetual alliance of the cantons, in 1315. The canton consists only of villages and little towns or bourgades, and the whole is divided into ten genossamen, or inferior communities. It has no city. Altdorf, where the general assemblies are held, and the Land-Amman and regency reside, is the principal village.

But old tensions and enmities persisted. Britain’s King George V loathed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s supreme ruler; and Wilhelm, in turn, envied Britain’s expansive collection of colonies and its command of the seas, so much so that in 1900 Germany began a campaign to build warships in enough quantity and of large enough scale to take on the British navy. This in turn drove Britain to begin an extensive modernization of its own navy, for which it created a new class of warship, the Dreadnought, which carried guns of a size and power never before deployed at sea. Armies swelled in size as well. To keep pace with each other, France and Germany introduced conscription. Nationalist fervor was on the rise. Austria-Hungary and Serbia shared a simmering mutual resentment. The Serbs nurtured pan-Slavic ambitions that threatened the skein of territories and ethnicities that made up the Austro-Hungarian empire (typically referred to simply as Austria). These included such restive lands as Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Croatia. As one historian put it, “Europe had too many frontiers, too many—and too well-remembered—histories, too many soldiers for safety.

The reader may ask me why I did not try to escape what was in store for me after Hitler had occupied Austria. Let me answer by recalling the following story. Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them? I pondered the problem this way and that but could not arrive at a solution; this was the type of dilemma that made one wish for “a hint from Heaven,” as the phrase goes. It was then that I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, “Which one is it?” He answered, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.” At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.

13. SOVIET UNION, FRANCE, AND UNITED KINGDOM VS. GERMANY Period: Mid-twentieth century Ruling powers: Soviet Union, France, United Kingdom Rising power: Germany Domain: Land and sea power in Europe Outcome: World War II (1939–45) Adolf Hitler led a simultaneous recovery of Germany’s economic power, military strength, and national pride, abrogating the Treaty of Versailles and flouting the postwar order maintained by France and the United Kingdom. Seeking Lebensraum, or living space, Hitler methodically expanded Nazi dominance over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Recognizing his ambitions too slowly, France and the UK declared war only after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, unable to stop German domination of the Continent until millions of Soviet and American forces turned the tide at the end of World War II.

The choice of 'eastern Europe' as a frame of reference requires a word of explanation. The term is used here in a provisional manner and indeed a rather arbitrary one, with the lower-case form intended to underline this. The travellers set out from places that stretch from Kiev to Rijeka, and from Gdansk to Crete. The eastern Europe that they represent includes the lands that lie between the Baltic in the north and the Mediterranean in the south; between Russia in the east and Italy, Austria and Germany in the west. These boundaries were set in part by the limits of the possible: had resources permitted, accounts by travellers from the Baltic countries or by Austrian Germans, among others, might equally well have been included here. My aim has been to assemble a representative selection of travel writings from this region: the anthology includes accounts from some twenty languages, by more than one hundred authors, written over a period of more than 450 years, beginning in the sixteenth century and finishing with a book published in 2004. The writers travel to Ireland in the west, to Istanbul in the east—and any number of places in between. But why group these particular east European travels through Europe together, in a single volume? The answer lies partly in eastern Europe's relationship to the idea of Europe itself.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

Whatever their other differences, French Gaullists, Christian Democrats and Socialists shared a common faith in the activist state, economic planning and large-scale public investment. Much the same was true of the consensus that dominated policy-making in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, Austria and even ideologically-riven Italy.

Size and homogeneity are of course not transferable. There is no way for India or the USA to become Austria or Norway, and in their purest form the social democratic welfare states of Europe are simply non-exportable: they have much the same appeal as a Volvo—and some similar limitations—and may be hard to sell to countries and cultures where expensive virtues of solidity and endurance count for less.

Brothers, beseech our Lord God, that he comfort Holy Christianity with His Grace, and His Peace, and protect it from all evil. Pray to Our God for our spiritual father, the Pope, and for the Empire and for all our leaders and prelates of Christianity, lay and ecclesiastical, that God use them in His service. And also for all spiritual and lay judges, that they may give Holy Christianity peace and such good justice that God’s Judgement will not come over them. Pray for our Order in which God has assembled us, that the Lord will give us Grace, Purity, a Spiritual Life, and that he take away all that is found in us or other Orders that is unworthy of praise and opposed to His Commandments. Pray for our Grand Master and all the regional commanders, who govern our lands and people, and for all the brothers who exercise office in our Order, that they act in their office of the Order in such a way as not to depart from God. Pray for the brothers who hold no office, that they may use their time purposefully and zealously in worship, so that those who hold office and they themselves may be useful and pious. Pray for those who are fallen in deadly sin, that God may help them back into his Grace and that they may escape eternal punishment. Pray for the lands that lie near the pagans, that God may come to their aid with his Counsel and Power, that belief in God and Love can be spread there, so that they can withstand all their enemies. Pray for those who are friends and associates of the Order, and also for those who do good actions or who seek to do them, that God may reward them. Pray for all those who have left us inheritances or gifts that neither in life nor in death does God allow them to depart from Him. Especially pray for Duke Friedrich of Swabia and King Heinrich his brother, who was Emperor, and for the honourable burghers of Lübeck and Bremen, who founded our Order. Remember also Duke Leopold of Austria, Duke Conrad of Masovia, and Duke Sambor of Pomerellia . . . Remember also our dead brothers and sisters . . . Let each remember the soul of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters. Pray for all believers, that God may give them eternal peace. May they rest in peace. Amen.

The rolling hills we traveled through were lined with rows of crisscrossed crops- apple and pear trees, vines of grapes, and maize- creating bafflingly precise geometries. In the forested areas, the branches on the trees drooped lugubriously like the long sleeves of Druid priests. Jonathan pointed to the curved roads that cut through the hillsides and valleys. "Forged by Romans, Mina!" he said. "So many civilizations have come and gone on this land- Celts, Romans, Normans, Mongols, French. Who knows how many more?

Revolution, which is in the blood of Parisians, was not in the veins of the Viennese. In Hans's blood there was the Austrian amiability and the good manners learned in his nursery. He was not radical enough to come directly to final conclusions. Day and night, in his desolate prison barracks, while he was almost despairing of his coming home at all, he struggled to find a compromise. He found it in his decision to convince himself with his own eyes, as soon as he came home; the terrible reports reaching the prison camp might be exaggerated and aimed at convincing the prisoners that their camp was better than their home. But when he did see with his own eyes that it was far more terrible than anything he had heard, he did not allow himself any further evasion. Now at last he was ready for the final outcome. One of the first things to strike him was that people in Vienna did not realize what had happened, and it was like a slap in the face. They went about and expected to continue as usual. But there was nothing to continue! Vienna had been an imperial capital, and an imperial capital cannot do without an empire. But the empire no longer existed. Austria was the concept of a super-national nation uniting nationalities. The concept had been destroyed. “German Austria,” the little land with seven million inhabitants, carved out of an empire of fifty-five million, possessed neither money nor friends. Nevertheless, at St. Germain they had been cynical enough to pile the burden of a succession on them that had no basis for existence. Most incomprehensible of all to this returning prisoner was the attitude of Number 10. They were still calling die people begging in the streets “beggars,” because they either did not know or did not want to know that six out of every ten Viennese were compelled to beg and that Austria itself had been assigned a role which was nothing else than that of an international beggar. They carried on their businesses, continued to go to their offices, went on receiving their pensions.Revolution, which is in the blood of Parisians, was not in the veins of the Viennese. In Hans's blood there was the Austrian amiability and the good manners learned in his nursery. He was not radical enough to come directly to final conclusions. Day and night, in his desolate prison barracks, while he was almost despairing of his coming home at all, he struggled to find a compromise. He found it in his decision to convince himself with his own eyes, as soon as he came home; the terrible reports reaching the prison camp might be exaggerated and aimed at convincing the prisoners that their camp was better than their home. But when he did see with his own eyes that it was far more terrible than anything he had heard, he did not allow himself any further evasion. Now at last he was ready for the final outcome. One of the first things to strike him was that people in Vienna did not realize what had happened, and it was like a slap in the face. They went about and expected to continue as usual. But there was nothing to continue! Vienna had been an imperial capital, and an imperial capital cannot do without an empire. But the empire no longer existed. Austria was the concept of a super-national nation uniting nationalities. The concept had been destroyed. “German Austria,” the little land with seven million inhabitants, carved out of an empire of fifty-five million, possessed neither money nor friends. Nevertheless, at St. Germain they had been cynical enough to pile the burden of a succession on them that had no basis for existence. Most incomprehensible of all to this returning prisoner was the attitude of Number 10. They were still calling die people begging in the streets “beggars,” because they either did not know or did not want to know that six out of every ten Viennese were compelled to beg and that Austria itself had been assigned a role which was nothing else than that of an international beggar.

All the Jews of Polish origin were being sent back to the land of their forefathers, and so the two gentle sisters kissed us and packed and left. We sent them packages in care of the Jewish community in Warsaw, but of course the packages were returned because it was illegal to send anything to Jews. So we took the advice of a wily neighbor, wrote the address in Polish, and like magic the packages arrived.

This entire operation was surreal: men landing by sea, taking a city hostage, calling Austria and being remotely manipulated by handlers who seemed to be in the US. It was unlike anything they had ever imagined. Is that a problem too?, Bharti wondered. Our lack of imagination? He

For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased 130 square feet on which to grow Swedish strawberries. “The land didn’t cost more than four rubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,” wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: “Now it’s war!” And war it certainly was—all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his errand-boy job at Nitroglycerin Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marveled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany. And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Czar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs continued their revolt against the Ottomans…. So “Now it’s war!” was right.

All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant. S

LEDERHOSEN BACK IN THE SUITCASE – THEY WEREN’T MUCH HELP – I’M READY to leave. I started my journey in the most gorgeous of architectures in Jerusalem, and I end it in the most ravished of places, in Jenin. I started with Kings, David and Herod, and I end with Haifa Refugees. When I started the journey I was awed, when I end it I’m dismayed; when I started my journey laughter was my companion, when I end it a tear joins me; when I started this journey hope was my neighbor, when I end it despair stares me in the face. Witnessing the tremendous investments and endless attempts of the Europeans, not to mention the Germans, all geared to undermine the Jews in this land, in Israel, was an extremely unsettling experience. Being showered with love by the Arabs, just because they thought I was an Aryan, a German, was very discomforting. Watching the Jews and seeing how powerless they are, even now that they have their own state, was distressing. If logic is any guide, Israel will not survive. Besieged by hate from without and from within, no land can survive for very long. Miraculously, the Jews have built one of the most sophisticated, intense, beautiful countries of our time, but what are they doing to keep it? They hate themselves, they belie themselves, they are full of fears and many of them rush to get another passport; they want to go back to Poland, to Austria, to Germany – lands where their forefathers were hunted down and killed. And what am I doing? Just the same: I am going back to Germany. Am I a Jew just like them? Am I not Tobi the German? Am I not Abu Ali? My name is, sorry, Tuvia. Goodness of God. What a joke. A joke, I fear, only the Chosen People will truly comprehend. Adios, my sweet cats. You, of all creatures of this land, have a clear and sensible direction: milk and tuna. I am thankful that we met, for you have provided me with companionship in a land I felt so alone in. I am leaving this land, and I am leaving you. You will fare better here. You are Jewish cats, stay with your kind. Enjoy this land, my stray cats, as long as it lasts. I’ll miss you terribly. Shalom.

Globally, each year some seventy-five billion tons of soil is lost. That would cover about thirty-eight thousand square miles of arable land, an expanse larger than the nation of Austria.

         In the first days of 1950 Israel was a brand new country, in an agitated state, all in motion. Daily, all sorts of boats arrived to its shores bringing immigrants from Europe. The survivors had first gathered in towns in Austria, Germany, France, Romania, Hungary and under the guidance of "shlichim," young men and women organizers, sent from Israel. The homeless proceeded to port cities in Southern Europe, mostly Italy and France, and eventually reached Israel. Whatever boat could keep afloat was leased to transport those desirous to reach the shores of the Land.

In these circumstances, our lives had taken a sharp turn towards grave uncertainties. Sali, too, lost her citizenship and possessed no valid passport to return. In those times, only a fool would have considered returning to Romania. In the West, Hitler had started to engulf his neighbors: Austria, Czechoslovakia. Whoever could find a country of refuge left for faraway lands like Chile, Venezuela, Cuba and others. We just lived from day to day, in the knowledge that a noose might tighten around our necks. The family in the U.S.A. wrote that we should try to emigrate, yet it would take many years to obtain an American visa. In order to go to Palestine, one needed a special certificate. The British, under Arab pressure, had issued a White Paper limiting drastically the settling of Jews in the Mandate territory. We felt powerless.

Das höchste Gebäude war der betonierte Turm des Lagerhauses.

Wie in allen Dörfern, regierte in erster Linie die Angst vor den Nachbarn. Was würden die Nachbarn denken? Was würden sie sagen?

Am meisten hasste er die Leute, die hier lebten und die keine Seele in sich trugen. Sie lachten nie. Sie lebten wie Zombies in riesigen, leeren Häusern. Stumm mähten sie tagelang den Rasen oder schnitten mit hochrotem Kopf die Hecken.

In der Kirche achtete niemand auf den lieben Gott. Einzig die Gläubigen wurden eindringlich gemustert.

his jacket turned inside out on dry land missing a bullet hole’s worth of fabric,

first glance, one might mistake bilberries for blueberries and, indeed, they are actually very closely related. Both are small dark blueish-black berries but where blueberries can be found around the US and other countries, bilberries are typically only found growing wild in northern Europe and parts of northern Asia. Bilberries grow in nutrient poor soil that is rather acidic and are actually kind of hard to grow in the home garden. They’re very delicate and easily damaged so must be eaten soon after pulled from the shrub. In Sweden and Austria people pick them on public as well as private land and consume them right on the spot. Known as the vision fruit, the power of bilberry’s to improve vision was first seen during World War II when many English pilots would use bilberry jam on their toast. It was noticed that pilots eating large quantities of this had much better night vision. Not only that but recent studies show that bilberries may be able to prevent and even reverse macular degeneration which is a form of vision loss that comes with aging.

were ostentatious about it, they were hated even more. It may have been stupid of them, and of course the wiser Jews, especially the older ones, were greatly upset, and remonstrated with the younger, because they foresaw the antagonism their behaviour would create. The Jews probably paid fair prices for what they bought - but that wasn’t the point. Except for my father and many of his generation, people hated the Jews. My father realised that the fault did not lie with the Jews but somehow much higher up. Of course, it would be wrong to give the impression that there were not many impoverished Jews in Budapest and other places who had got things just as wrong as everybody else. Compared with elsewhere, the elite branches of the Hungarian civil service - the Army, the diplomatic corps, and the financial administration - usually maintained the old traditions of integrity; and they suffered for that. The families of senior civil servants who tried to stick to the ethics of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy often met disaster - unless they had land with which to support their convictions - and the attitudes of such parents were often resented by the young who found the maintenance of uncomfortable principles objectionable while their friends’ families were obviously making compromises. Real corruption was found less in the central government than at county level. This was something entirely new. When my father protested about the irregularities that were permitted - the keeping of two sets of books, the acceptance of bribes, the payments in cash, the extra jobs taken on which left less time for official work to be done - the reply was: ‘Your Excellency, will you feed my children?’ There was communal hatred, which was new. There was social resentment, which was new. There was bribery and corruption: that was new. It was the same in Austria and Poland. If you get the same fever, you get the same symptoms.

Although it was never conceptualized by a Czech movement, paradoxically enough, Czech 'organic work' in economic, social, and cultural modernization advanced strikingly during these decades. The Czech lands, politically and administratively subordinated provinces of Austria without any kind of cultural or political autonomy, flourished economically and culturally. The Czech provinces achieved by far the highest level of economic advancement in Central and Eastern Europe. Rapid and successful industrialization, social modernization, and the highest literacy rate in the region made the Czech lands more similar to the West than any other part of it. In other words, Bohemia and Moravia profited a great deal from being a hereditary province of the Habsburg empire and as a consequence enjoyed an equal status with Austria proper. Rapid economic progress certainly contributed to the further failure of Czech national demands during the 1860s and 1870s. The boycott of the imperial Diet and Reichsrat in 1867 in favor of the reestablishment of the statni pravo, or a Rechtsstaat, that is, equal legal-political status with Hungary, was again rejected. The Bohemian Declaration of August 1868 that renewed this demand generated mass rallies of support around the country. The imperial cabinet of Count Karl Hohenwart was ready to accept the concept of a 'trialist' reorganization of the empire and granted cultural autonomy to the Czech people, although not equal status with Hungary, in the fall of 1871. Emperor Franz Josef, a hard-nosed defender of Austro-Hungarian 'dualism,' rejected the 'trialist' Austro-Hungarian-Slav concept, however, and dismissed the Hohenwart cabinet. The Bohemian and Moravian representatives in the imperial Diet renewed their boycott of it. As before, such passive resistance was ineffective. It did not shake the empire, and the prosperous Czech provinces were not ready for violence. The Moravian Czechs gave up the boycott in 1873, and a split in the Czech national movement in September 1874 led to the reentry of the 'Young Czechs,' a newly organized National Liberal party, into parliament. In the fall of 1878, even the 'Old Czech' National party joined. The peaceful Czech national movement lost momentum and dried up for several decades. 'Organic work' nevertheless became more vigorous and successful than ever.

Some countries where these saints once ruled no longer exist today. Also, some saints were born in faraway nations but became patrons of Germanic lands. Additionally included are sections of prayers for the peoples of the countries represented. I enjoyed creating this collection. I traveled back and forth in time to distant lands while learning about heroic virtue. Both the cultures and saints of these nations are truly inspiring.

All five were profoundly shaken by the interwar catastrophe that struck their native Austria.