Austrian Author Quotes

Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. Even the sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence. Certain commodities came to be money quite naturally, as the result of economic relationships that were independent of the power of the state.

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys.

Waiting or pausing takes enormous skill and practice. However it is a skill that for you has become an essential way of being in the world without being so overwhelmed by it. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, went even further when he famously said, 'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response likes our growth and our freedom.' Waiting in the Light enables you to create a space for grace.

One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. “We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let’s hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.

13 September. Again barely two pages. At first I thought my sorrow over the Austrian defeats and my anxiety for the future (anxiety that appears ridiculous to me at bottom, and base too) would prevent me from doing any writing. But that wasn’t it, it was only an apathy that forever comes back and forever has to be put down again. There is time enough for sorrow when I am not writing. The thoughts provoked in me by the war resemble my old worries over F. in the tormenting way in which they devour me from every direction. I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it. When I shall have grown weak enough –it won’t take very long –the most trifling worry will perhaps suffice to rout me. In this prospect I can also see a possibility of postponing the disaster as long as possible.

There is magic in this world,” said the woodsman to his son. “If you see, truly see, an acorn grow into a tree, and that tree be turned to lumber, and that lumber be turned into a house, you cannot doubt that magic is real.” “But, that is boring,” said the boy. “And that is the nature of magic. True magic is boring. And that is why so few people bother to do it.” - An excerpt from the Austrian collection of tales The Wisdom of the Woods, author unknown.

The contemporary progressive mantra considers it laudable to argue that different races, cultures, or religions possess distinct ways of knowing. However, not too long ago, the idea that people of different races or classes possessed distinct ways of thinking and reasoning, was reserved for racists and other miscreants. Ludwig von Mises, a leading figure of the Austrian School of Economics and a staunch defender of classical liberalism, coined the term polylogism to capture this exact folly. Mises differentiated between Marxian polylogism and racial polylogism. In the former case, an individual’s method of thinking was determined by his social class while in the latter case, race was the guiding factor. Mises was well aware of the illogical nature of this premise when he remarked: “A consistent supporter of polylogism would have to maintain that ideas are correct because their author is a member of the right class, nation, or race. But consistency is not one of their virtues. Thus the Marxians are prepared to assign the epithet ‘proletarian thinker’ to everybody whose doctrines they approve.

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself. Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self." "The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude." Officially, Asperger's disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger's is now grouped under the umbrella term Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD.

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.

Within My Power By Forest E. Witcraft (1894 - 1967), a scholar, teacher, and Boy Scout Executive and first published in the October 1950 issue of Scouting magazine. I am not a Very Important Man, as importance is commonly rated. I do not have great wealth, control a big business, or occupy a position of great honor or authority. Yet I may someday mould destiny. For it is within my power to become the most important man in the world in the life of a boy. And every boy is a potential atom bomb in human history. A humble citizen like myself might have been the Scoutmaster of a Troop in which an undersized unhappy Austrian lad by the name of Adolph might have found a joyous boyhood, full of the ideals of brotherhood, goodwill, and kindness. And the world would have been different. A humble citizen like myself might have been the organizer of a Scout Troop in which a Russian boy called Joe might have learned the lessons of democratic cooperation. These men would never have known that they had averted world tragedy, yet actually they would have been among the most important men who ever lived. All about me are boys. They are the makers of history, the builders of tomorrow. If I can have some part in guiding them up the trails of Scouting, on to the high road of noble character and constructive citizenship, I may prove to be the most important man in their lives, the most important man in my community. A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove. But the world may be different, because I was important in the life of a boy.

Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46. At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie[1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, "the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler," whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, "creating an SS vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."   "In

We have thus succumbed to a blind faith in bureaucratic authority over natural processes.

The July 1934 Putsch and Dollfuss's assassination could have been prevented. Since 29 May of that year clear evidence of the planned Nazi conspiracy was available to the Austrian authorities. It came from a number of highly reliable sources. The warnings were passed to the senior security officials who were charged with the protection of the state, the government and the Chancellor. Without doubt some of them collaborated with the Nazi conspirators. Also without doubt some of the others acted with typical Austrian Schlamperei. They did not take the warnings seriously.

In his System of Subjective Public Laws, published in 1892, the Austrian public lawyer Georg Jellinek analysed what he called ‘the normative power of the factual’. By this he meant the tendency among human beings to assign normative authority to actually existing states of affairs. Human beings do this, he argued, because their perceptions of states of affairs are shaped by the forces exerted by those states of affairs. Trapped in this hermeneutic circularity, humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning to them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things.

There is a psychological dimension to the deniers’ and minimizers’ objectives: The general public tends to accord victims of genocide a certain moral authority. If you devictimize a people you strip them of their moral authority, and if you can in turn claim to be a victim, as the Poles and Austrians often try to do, that moral authority is conferred on or restored to you. -- Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, pages 7-8

considering that lexicons and dictionaries are practically a high art form in German- speaking countries. The entry merges Essad Bey and Wolfgang von Weisl into one person. It explains that “Wolfgang (von) Weisl” also used the pseudonyms Leo Noussimbaum, Essad Bey, and Kurban Said—and hence the Austrian journalist, who otherwise had only a travel book and a book on Austrian artillery to his credit, suddenly was the prolific author of approximately twenty works of fiction and nonfiction

As early as January 1923 the ‘pitiless extermination’ of Austrian Jews was threatened in letters being widely distributed with the help of district officials of lower Austria, demanding the Jews leave Austria voluntarily. The penalty for not complying with the threat would be all manner of violent deaths. A letter handed over to the authorities by the Wiener Morgenzeitung (WM) declared: In the near future the Aryan people will arise and mercilessly put an end to the Jewish domination. The Jews will first of all be stricken down, then indiscriminately murdered, exterminated and hung, their bodies being thrown in the Danube. Then and then only shall Vienna be free of this vampire. Help us, oh God of the Germans, in this task.2

Hayek was never a popular author to the extent that everyone was reading him at the corner newsstand. But the Austrian refugee showed how the roots of Hitler’s tyranny and the bases of Marxist collectivism were one and the same. His work had a profound influence on a generation of freedom loving young conservatives. Even

Much sooner, and to a much greater extent than in Britain, the German and Austrian authorities had to turn to their central banks for short-term funding.

In 1933, the regional elections held in many parts of Germany, overwhelmingly favored the NAZI Partei. The full name of this vile group was the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and actually was originally abbreviated NSDAP, not NAZI. With what seemed to be decisive popular approval, the Reichstag endorsed Hitler. On the morning of January 30, 1933, at the Presidential Palace, Hindenburg swore in Adolf Hitler as the Reich Chancellor of Germany, a title equivalent to that of the Prime Minister of England. However, as the Reich Chancellor, Hitler was in a relatively stronger position of authority than the Prime Minister of England. Everything being equal, it would be much more difficult to remove him from power since the Chancellor of Germany remains in office until the majority of the Bundestag can agree on a successor, whereas the Prime Minister serves at the whim of his party. Hindenburg publicly denounced any responsibility for appointing this “Austrian Corporal” to the Reich Chancellery, while he prudently caved in to Adolf Hitler’s popular demands. On the other hand, Hitler frequently referred to Hindenburg as “that old fool.” Although the men maintained an appearance of cordiality to each other in public, Hitler did not respect the “Old War Horse” and there was definitely no love lost between them. During the following summer, Hindenburg grew increasingly concerned about the radical Nazi rallies in Nuremburg, and the political demonstrations that were being carried out throughout Germany. During the summer of 1934, the elderly German President became extremely ill and was close to death at his mansion in East Prussia. Having contracted lung cancer, he had been incapacitated and bedridden for several months, thereby giving Hitler enough time to plan and impose his next move. On August 2, 1934, at 9:00 a.m., the long awaited demise of 86-year-old Hindenburg finally occurred in the town of Neudeck, near Rosenberg, East Prussia. Within hours after the announcement of Hindenburg’s death, Hitler seized total control of Germany by establishing himself in the contrived, dictatorial and ultimate position of “der Führer.” It was in this way that he became the supreme leader of Germany, ruling until 1945.

- But tell me, who was that queer cove with the spool of twine and the German accent? - The Austrian accent? Jeeves gently corrected. I may be mistaken, sir, but I think that was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. - So not an unhinged gardener? - Dr Wittgenstein is the author of the Tractatus. - A short history of farm machinery in the Ukraine? - The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sir, concerns itself with a picture theory of language.

- But tell me, who was that queer cove with the spool of twine and the German accent? - The Austrian accent? Jeeves gently corrected. I may be mistaken, sir, but I think that was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. - So not an unhinged gardener? - Dr Wittgenstein is the author of the Tractatus. - A short history of farm machinery in the Ukraine? - The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sir, concerns itself with a picture theory of language.

Let us begin with the German expression aus dem Amerikanischen, which graces virtually every book or article translated from texts penned by authors that are perceived as “American.”24 What exactly is going on here? “Is ‘American’”—according to Josef Joffe, the American-educated editor of the German weekly Die Zeit—“pronounced differently from ‘English’? That also applies to ‘Austrian’ and ‘Swiss.’”25 But it would never occur to anybody in America, Canada, or Britain to label “a Gottfried Keller translation ‘Translated from the Swiss’ or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as having been ‘translated from the Austrian.’”26 “Why do the Germans want to force a language on Americans that they don’t even speak?

Because they write ‘harbor’ instead of ‘harbour’? Then one would have to attribute a language of their own to the Austrians for saying ‘Sessel’ when they mean ‘Stuhl’ [for chair] or turn ‘Januar’ [January] into ‘Janner.’ Because American slang is spoken differently from British slang? That’s true, but in both countries the standard languages are about as identical as ‘Austrian’ and German.”27 What is “American” supposed to communicate to German readers? An accent? But then writings by an author from Glasgow would have to be titled “from the Glaswegian” or those by a writer living in Manchester as “from the Mancunian.” John Lennon’s books would have to be graced with the formulation “from the Liverpudlian” and those by Woody Allen with “from New Yorkish” or, to be more precise, “from the Brooklynese.” If it’s not about accent, is the criterion perhaps geography? Then Germans would have to use “from the Canadian” or “from the New Zealander

An axiom of the Austrian school was that interest is necessary so that investment and consumption decisions are co-ordinated over time.55 As we have seen, Böhm-Bawerk argued that the rate of interest reflects society’s time preference. He also claimed that the level of interest determines how much capital is tied up in production, and thus the return on capital.fn11 When interest is determined in a free market, he said, time preference and the return on capital should equalize. The danger comes when the authorities interfere with interest rates. When interest rates are pushed too low, credit takes off and bad investments (‘malinvestment’) abound.

Austria’s citizens had welcomed Hitler back to his Heimat after the Anschluss in March 1938, but they now recast themselves as ‘the first victims’ of Nazi aggression. The Austrian authorities were accused of being too lenient with former Nazis and suspiciously negligent in accumulating evidence against alleged mass murderers.

Hitler continued living in Vienna until 1913. He managed to make a living selling paintings after he and his business partner, Hanisch, parted ways. In 1913, he returned to Munich to avoid serving in the military, but he was found by authorities and returned to Austria for conscription into the armed forces. He was rejected for service in the Austrian armed forces,

Hitler’s electoral success—far greater than Mussolini’s—allowed him more autonomy in bargaining with the political insiders whose help he needed to reach office. Even more than in Italy, as German governmental mechanisms jammed after 1930, responsibility for finding a way out narrowed to a half-dozen men: President Hindenburg, his son Oskar and other intimate advisors, and the last two Weimar chancellors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. At first they tried to keep the uncouth Austrian ex-corporal out. One must recall that in the 1930s cabinet ministers were still supposed to be gentlemen. Bringing raw fascists into government was a measure of their desperation. The Catholic aristocrat Franz von Papen tried as chancellor (July– November 1932) to govern without politicians, through a so-called Cabinet of Barons composed of technical experts and nonpolitical eminences. His gamble at holding national elections in July let the Nazis become the largest party. Von Papen then tried to bring Hitler in as vice chancellor, a position without authority, but the Nazi leader had enough strategic acumen and gambler’s courage to accept nothing but the top office. This path forced Hitler to spend the tense fall of 1932 in an agony of suspenseful waiting, trying to quiet his restless and office-hungry militants while he played for all or nothing. Hoping to deepen the crisis, the Nazis (like the Fascists before them) increased their violence, carefully choosing their targets. The apogee of Nazi street violence in Germany came after June 16, 1932, when Chancellor von Papen lifted the ban on SA uniforms that Brüning had imposed in April. During several sickening weeks, 103 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Von Papen’s expedient of new elections on November 6 diminished the Nazi vote somewhat (the communists gained again), but did nothing to extract Germany from constitutional deadlock. President Hindenburg replaced him as chancellor on December 2 with a senior army officer regarded as more technocratic than reactionary, General Kurt von Schleicher. During his brief weeks in power (December 1932–January 1933), Schleicher prepared an active job-creation program and mended relations with organized labor. Hoping to obtain Nazi neutrality in parliament, he flirted with Gregor Strasser, head of the party administration and a leader of its anticapitalist current (Hitler never forgot and never forgave Strasser’s “betrayal”). At this point, Hitler was in serious difficulty. In the elections of November 6, his vote had dropped for the first time, costing him his most precious asset—momentum. The party treasury was nearly empty. Gregor Strasser was not the only senior Nazi who, exhausted by Hitler’s all ornothing strategy, was considering other options. The Nazi leader was rescued by Franz von Papen. Bitter at Schleicher for taking his place, von Papen secretly arranged a deal whereby Hitler would be chancellor and he, von Papen, deputy chancellor—a position from which von Papen expected to run things. The aged Hindenburg, convinced by his son and other intimate advisors that Schleicher was planning to depose him and install a military dictatorship, and convinced by von Papen that no other conservative option remained, appointed the Hitler–von Papen government on January 30, 1933. Hitler, concluded Alan Bullock, had been “hoist” into office by “a backstairs conspiracy.

There has been - and remains - a discussion whether or not the war formed Hitler most, but there can be no doubt that without it, and the decorations he received in it and which gave him - the Austrian - as Joachim Fest remarked, a claim to front-line credibility, respect and authority in Bavaria, his political career, at least in Germany - a country whose citizenship he would not acquire until 1932 - was simply inconceivable. In this sense only the war made Hitler possible.

The first psychiatrist to look closely at the more extreme forms of sadistic behavior was the eminent German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Besides coining the term “masochism” (named after the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose famous novel, Venus in Furs, deals with a man who craves humiliation), Krafft-Ebing made a major contribution to the literature of morbid psychology with his classic book, Psychopathia Sexualis—a massive compendium of every known perversion, illustrated with hundreds of detailed case histories. At the time of its initial publication in 1886, the book was considered so shocking that its author was nearly expelled from the prestigious British Medico-Psychological Association. Even today, it makes for deeply disturbing reading. Still, it is a significant work, one that clearly demonstrates there’s nothing new about serial murder. Of course, Krafft-Ebing doesn’t use the term “serial murder,” which wouldn’t enter the language for another hundred years. The term he uses is the German word lustmord or “lust-murder.” The essence of this crime is extreme sadistic violence against the victim. The lust-murderer doesn’t just kill his victims. His ultimate pleasure comes from savaging their bodies: disemboweling them, cutting out their genitals, etc. For such blood-crazed sadists, violence is a substitute for sex.