Bavarian Quotes

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery. People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.

Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.

The“b” word and the “n” word are like poison, whether you take poison from a vial or pour it into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.

As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be ok. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.

Today I look at Munich and see a city empty of all significance, invaded by Prussians and stripped of its Bavarian spirit.

Yes, even old American writers are dancing like it is still the eighties in San Francisco, like the sexual revolution has been won, like the war is over and Berlin has been liberated, one’s own self has been liberated; and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone—even Arthur Less—is loved.

Verstiegenheit: Low-Bavarian for something like ‘wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,’ supposedly.

Modern Germans were created from the merger of Saxons, Prussians, Swabians, and Bavarians, who not so long ago wasted little love on one another.

The couples were dancing with hands on each other's hips, yelling in each other's faces, streaming with sweat. An orchestra in Bavarian costume whooped and drank and perspired beer. The place stank like beer

Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of a snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah'd and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love- don't let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of lovem it's awful, we're stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama- lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow- the secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under fall leaves.

As Harold took a bite of Bavarian Sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be okay. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy...there are Bavarian Sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren't any cookies we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin...or a kind and loving gesture...or a subtle encouragement...or a loving embrace...or an offer of comfort.... And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties which we assume only accessorize our days, are in fact here for a much nobler and larger cause. They are here to save our lives.

Heute ist die gute, alte Zeit von morgen.

Was man liebt, betoniert man nicht.

1785: The Bavarian government outlaw the, “Illuminati,” and close all the Bavarian lodges of the Grand Orient.

A Bavarian is mixture between an Austrian and a human being." -Otto von Bismarck  

Before him, also, was the memory of how John Paul II had chosen to die in public; there was an almost carnivalesque atmosphere to those final dying days of which the austere reserved Bavarian disapproved.

Sirach calls the people who dwelt at Shechem a foolish people (Ecclus. 50:26), just as the Germans are accustomed to judge concerning the Swabians and the Bavarians. They were a proud people given to luxury.

It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself.

The Kissingers descended from Meyer Löb (1767–1838), a Jewish teacher from Kleineibstadt who in 1817 took his surname from his adopted home of Bad Kissingen (complying with an 1813 Bavarian edict that required Jews to have surnames).47 By his first wife he had two children,

And the clubs everywhere, only just getting started, where even middle-aged married folk are sniffing lines of ketamine off black bathroom tile, and teenagers are dosing each other’s drinks. In the club, as he later recalls, a woman gets onto the dance floor and really lets go during a Madonna song, really takes over the floor, and people are clapping, hooting, she’s losing her mind out there, and her friends are calling her name: “Peter Pan! Peter Pan!” Actually, it isn’t a woman; it’s Arthur Less. Yes, even old American writers are dancing like it is still the eighties in San Francisco, like the sexual revolution has been won, like the war is over and Berlin has been liberated, one’s own self has been liberated; and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone—even Arthur Less—is loved.

Elisabeth "has always been strange and has followed only her whims and wishes, and now shyness and melancholia have been added. Who among gifted people who enjoy unlimited freedom is entirely normal? The Empress is, as we all are, the product of conditions." (Bavarian lady-in-waiting)

When she opened her eyes they were confronted by a musical box against the opposite wall - one of those early Bavarian toys where mechanical figures perform to the tune. 'How odd,' she thought. The little stage showed a group of fiddlers, two couples in costumes like those of the ball she had just quitted, and in a doorway at the side, a gypsy or beggar man. Very faintly the distant waltz came to her ears, but no footsteps ringing in the abandoned halls. With her hand pressed to her unsteady heart, acting under a sudden compulsion, she pushed down the lever. Delicate plucked music started up; the fiddlers sawed with their clumsy arms in time to an ethereal waltz. The couples moved jerkily out and each raised an arm to clasp its partner. To various clicks and rumbles from under the floor they began to revolve with each other and to orbit round the room. Their movements were sinister because of being both reluctant and predestined. Here they were and this is was what they must do. ("Many Coloured Glass")

On the strength of his promise of good behavior (Hitler was still on parole) Held had lifted the ban on the Nazi Party and its newspaper. “The wild beast is checked,” Held told his Minister of Justice, Guertner. “We can afford to loosen the chain.” The Bavarian Premier was one of the first, but by no means the last, of Germany’s politicians to fall into this fatal error of judgment.

{*} Karl Marx was hired by a mysterious group who called themselves the League of Just Men to write the Communist Manifesto as demogogic boob-bait to appeal to the mob. In actual fact the Communist Manifesto was in circulation for many years before Marx' name was widely enough recognized to establish his authorship for this revolutionary handbook. All Karl Marx really did was to update and codify the very same revolutionary plans and principles set down seventy years earlier by Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Order of Illuminati in Bavaria. And, it is widely acknowledged by serious scholars of this subject that the League of Just Men was simply an extension of the Illuminati which was forced to go deep underground after it was exposed by a raid in 1786 conducted by the Bavarian authorities.

If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor - or maybe because of it - we were carried away by nature's beauty

Something new is blowing. On a downtown Kingston wall: IMF—Is Manley Fault. General election called for October 30, 1980. Somebody is driving you through Bavaria, near the Austrian border. A hospital sprouting out of the forest like magic. Hills in the background tipped with snow like cake icing. You meet the tall and frosty Bavarian, the man who helps the hopeless. He smiles but his eyes are set too far back and they vanish in the shadow of his brow. Cancer is a red alert that the whole body is in danger, he says. Thank God the food he forbids, Rastafari had forbidden long time. A sunrise is a promise. Something new is blowing. November 1980. A new party wins the general election and the man who killed me steps up to the podium with his brothers to take over the country. He has been waiting for so long he leaps up the stairs and trips.

Most of the wine in the world sells for two dollars a bottle. Quite a bit sells for four dollars to five dollars a bottle, and there are many that sell for ten dollars a bottle. Then you have wines that sell for three hundred dollars a bottle. What the world needs is a beer that's worth five dollars a bottle. I think that would be great. If all beer prices are forced down to the level of Busch Bavarian, none of us will be there.

The National Revolution has begun!” Hitler shouted. “This building is occupied by six hundred heavily armed men. No one may leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun posted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and a provisional national government formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and police are occupied. The Army and the police are marching on the city under the swastika banner.

Lola pushed aside the sentries and entered his room anyway. In the process, the front of her dress somehow got torn (perhaps by her, perhaps by one of the sentries), and to the astonishment of all, most especially the king, her bare breasts were brazenly exposed. Lola was granted her audience with Ludwig. Fifty-five hours later she made her debut on the Bavarian stage; the reviews were terrible, but that did not stop Ludwig from arranging more performances.

He is against politics in general and longs for the restitution of the monarchy. They have seen nothing but rioting and inflation in the five years since Wilhelm II abdicated. And Ania knows not to mention the Communists. Her father has not recovered from the shock of their brief takeover of Bavaria, which, for a few weeks in 1919, became the Bavarian Soviet Republic. If he begins on the subject, no one will hear of anything else for days. For Doktor Fortzmann all was better under the kaiser.

Little known fact: One bee sting begets others. When a honeybee stings you it simultaneously releases a pheromone cocktail that lets the hive know it needs defending. The dominant ingredient in this pheromone, incidentally, is something called isoamyl acetate, which is a common ingredient in certain kinds of candy because it tastes like bananas. It’s also used in Hefeweizen beer. In other words, don’t eat banana-flavored Runts or drink a wheat Bavarian beer before rummaging around in beehives.

The Hohenstaufen army besieged the Bavarian rebels in the town and fortress of Weinsberg; there, says an old tradition, the rival cries “Hi Welf!” and “Hi Weibling!” established the names of the warring groups; and there (says a pretty legend), when the victorious Swabians accepted the surrender of the town on the understanding that the women alone were to be spared, and were to be allowed to depart with whatever they could carry, the sturdy housewives marched forth with their husbands on their backs.

Had the German staff behaved well or was one supposed to read into the letter of Gilberte the contagious effect of the spirit of the Guermantes who were of Bavarian stock and related to the highest aristocracy in Germany, for Gilberte was inexhaustible about the perfect behaviour of the staff and of the soldiers who had only asked “permission to pick one of the forget-me-nots which grew at the side of the lake,” good behaviour she contrasted with the unbridled violence of the French fugitives who had traversed the estate and sacked everything before the arrival of the German generals.

Have you ever run twenty miles without stopping? Ever done it in the summer? Yeah, me too. And without all the sordid details, running clothes (including underwear) get funky. That about captures it: funky. Crusty is excessive, but not by much. When I run, I don’t perspire or glow or any of that happy horseshit women are supposed to imply politely over lemonade after tennis. Nope. I sweat like an obese Bavarian trombone player. I sweat and my underwear gets nasty and my socks smell like a North Jersey mafia hit. I often have dried snot on the left shoulder of my shirts and dried chocolate in the hollow cups of my sports bra.

On our third day at Gooden-Baden, as I lay abed waiting for my morning tea tray to arrive, Edward went for a soak in the medicinal tar pits. He never came back. All they found was his Bavarian hunting hat, floating on the surface of the tar, with those jaunty feathers sticking up and a sweet little sprig of edelweiss pinned to the hatband. A sticky trail of bubbles and a ruined hat. That was what was left of my husband. The hat was new, too; he had only just purchased it in the gift shop. . . .” The widow was overcome by emotion and had to pause. “Poor hat,” said Beowulf with feeling, perhaps missing the deeper meaning of the widow’s tears.

Back at my hotel I lay down on my bed and folded my arms under my head. There could be no prospect of sleep. From the terrace came the noise of the music and the confused blathering of the revellers, most of whom, as I realised with some dismay, were compatriots of mine. I heard Swabians, Franconians and Bavarians saying the most unsavoury things, and, if I found their broad, uninhibited dialects repellent, it was a veritable torment to have to listen to the loud-mouthed opinions and witticisms of a group of young men who clearly came from my home town. How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or, better still, to none at all.

The next morning, of course, Betsy made a list. Lists were always her comfort. For years she had made lists of books she must read, good habits she must acquire, things she must do to make herself prettier—like brushing her hair a hundred strokes at night, and manicuring her fingernails, and doing calisthenics before an open window in the morning. (That one hadn’t lasted long.) It was fun making this list, sitting in bed with her breakfast tray on her lap…hot chocolate, crisp hard rolls, and a pat of butter. Hanni had brought it to her after closing the windows and pushing back the velvet draperies. Betsy felt like a heroine in one of her own stories; their maids always awakened them that way. 1. Learn the darn money. 2. Study German. (You’ve forgotten all you knew.) 3. Buy a map and learn the city—from end to end, as you told Papa you would. 4. Read the history of Bavaria. You must have it for background. 5. Go to the opera. (You didn’t stay in Madeira because Munich is such a center for music and art???) 6. Go to the art galleries. (Same reason.) 7. Write! Full of enthusiasm, she planned a schedule. First, each morning, she would have her bath, and then write until noon. After the midday dinner she would go out and learn the city. She would go to the galleries, museums, and churches. She would have coffee out—for atmosphere. “Then I’ll come home and study German and read Bavarian history. And after supper…” she tried not to remember the look of that dining room…“I’ll write my diary-letter, except when I go to the opera or concerts.

Reck-Malleczewen, whom I mentioned before, tells of a female "leader" who came to Bavaria to give the peasants a pep talk in the summer of 1944. She seems not to have wasted much time on "miracle weapons" and victory, she faced frankly the prospect of defeat, about which no good German needed to worry because the Führer "in his great goodness had prepared for the whole German people a mild death through gassing in case the war should have an unhappy end." And the writer adds: "Oh, no, I'm not imagining things, this lovely lady is not a mirage, I saw her with my own eyes: a yellow-skinned female pushing forty, with insane eyes. . . . And what happened? Did these Bavarian peasants at least put her into the local lake to cool off her enthusiastic readiness for death? They did nothing of the sort. They went home, shaking their heads.

In camp, too, a man might draw the attention of a comrade working next to him to a nice view of the setting sun shining through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods (as in the famous water color by Dürer), the same woods in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant. One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!

Napoleon was unlucky that his time in power coincided with the flourishing of the first fully professional British political caricaturists – James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank – still among its greatest exponents, who all fastened on him as their victim. Gillray fought in the Duke of York’s Flanders campaign and never saw Napoleon, but virtually single-handedly created the image of him as physically small – ‘Little Boney’. Yet even the British caricaturists never reached the level of pure loathing achieved by the Russian Ivan Terebenev or the Prussian Johann Gottfried Schadow, let alone the Bavarian Johann Michael Voltz, whose caricature The Triumph of the Year 1813 depicted Napoleon’s head entirely composed of corpses.52 Of course there were also pro-Napoleon engravings on sale in London for as much as 2s 6d in 1801, a reminder that he had his British admirers.53 Yet overall, British Francophobia easily matched French Anglophobia. The market for highly abusive prints of Napoleon was much larger than for positive images of him, and the standard work on English anti-Napoleonic caricature and satire covers two full volumes, even without

But first Hitler, taken in by Mussolini’s mythmaking, attempted a “march” of his own. On November 8, 1923, during a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler attempted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to support a coup d’état against the federal government in Berlin. He believed that if he took control of Munich and declared a new national government, the Bavarian civil and military leaders would be forced by public opinion to support him. He was equally convinced that the local army authorities would not oppose the Nazi coup because the World War I hero General Ludendorff was marching beside him. Hitler underestimated military fidelity to the chain of command. The conservative Bavarian minister-president Gustav von Kahr gave orders to stop Hitler’s coup, by force if necessary. The police fired on the Nazi marchers on November 9 as they approached a major square (possibly returning a first shot from Hitler’s side). Fourteen putschists and four policemen were killed. Hitler was arrested and imprisoned,8 along with other Nazis and their sympathizers. The august General Ludendorff was released on his own recognizance. Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” was thus put down so ignominiously by the conservative rulers of Bavaria that he resolved never again to try to gain power through force. That meant remaining at least superficially within constitutional legality, though the Nazis never gave up the selective violence that was central to the party’s appeal, or hints about wider aims after power.

[Description of the behind-the-scenes situation of the Beer Hall Putsch] The crowd began to grow so sullen that Goering felt it necessary to step to the rostrum and quiet them. “There is nothing to fear,” he cried. “We have the friendliest intentions. For that matter, you’ve no cause to grumble, you’ve got your beer!” And he informed them that in the next room a new government was being formed. It was, at the point of Adolf Hitler’s revolver. Once he had herded his prisoners into the adjoining room, Hitler told them, “No one leaves this room alive without my permission.” He then informed them they would all have key jobs either in the Bavarian government or in the Reich government which he was forming with Ludendorff. With Ludendorff? Earlier in the evening Hitler had dispatched “Scheubner-Richter to Lud-wigshoehe to fetch the renowned General, who knew nothing of the Nazi conspiracy, to the beerhouse at once. The three prisoners at first refused even to speak to Hitler. He continued to harangue them. Each of them must join him in proclaiming the revolution and the new governments; each must take the post he, Hitler, assigned them, or “he has no right to exist.” Kahr was to be the Regent of Bavaria; Lossow, Minister of the National Army; Seisser, Minister of the Reich Police. None of the three was impressed at the prospect of such high office. They did not answer. Their continued silence unnerved Hitler. Finally he waved his gun at them. “I have four shots in my pistol! Three for my collaborators, if they abandon me. The last bullet for myself!” Pointing the weapon to his forehead, he cried, “If I am not victorious by tomorrow afternoon, I shall be a dead man!” (...) Not one of the three men who held the power of the Bavarian state in their hands agreed to join him, even at pistol point. The putsch wasn’t going according to plan. Then Hitler acted on a sudden impulse. Without a further word, he dashed back into the hall, mounted the tribune, faced the sullen crowd and announced that the members of the triumvirate in the next room had joined him in forming a new national government. “The Bavarian Ministry,” he shouted, “is removed…. The government of the November criminals and the Reich President are declared to be removed. A new national government will be named this very day here in Munich. Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hitler had told a masterful lie, and it worked. When the gathering heard that Kahr, General von Lossow and Police Chief von Seisser had joined Hitler its mood abruptly changed. There were loud cheers, and the sound of them impressed the three men still locked up in the little side room. (...) He led the others back to the platform, where each made a brief speech and swore loyalty to each other and to the new regime. The crowd leaped on chairs and tables in a delirium of enthusiasm. Hitler beamed with joy.

FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.

Bavarian city of Augsburg where, in the Jesuit church of Sankt Peter am Perlach, he contemplated a Baroque-era painting from the early 1700s known as Maria Knotenlöserin, “Mary, Untier of Knots,

In rural Bavaria, there were already flickers of revolt. When party bosses removed crucifixes from rural schools, pious women launched a wave of civil disobedience. Often they marched together to replace a crucifix after a Mass for a fallen soldier. In the village of Velburg, five hundred women pushed into the mayor’s house, pinned him down as he reached for his pistol, and forced his wife to hand over the classroom keys. Women rallied their husbands in other villages, where the public squares filled with peasants brandishing pitchforks. Perceiving “a front of psychological resistance” and “almost a revolutionary mood,” the Bavarian government restored the crosses.26 Unarmed women had faced down the world-conquering Nazis. The episode inspired and shamed the Ettal plotters. They now felt compelled to spearhead direct action within Germany itself.

Has dress sense was anything but stylish. He still often favoured his plain blue suit.155 His trilby, light-coloured raincoat, leather leggings and riding-whip gave him – especially when arriving with his bodyguards in the big black six-seater Mercedes convertible he had bought in early 1925 – the appearance of an eccentric gangster.156 For relaxation, he preferred to wear traditional Bavarian lederhosen.157 But even when he was in prison, he hated to be seen without a tie.158 During the heat of the summer, he would never be seen in a bathing costume.

I don’t much like opera, either. Especially Wagner. There’s something about Wagner that’s just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking-top when a woman’s singing a song.

Oliver Pötzsch, born in 1970, has worked for years as a scriptwriter for Bavarian Public Television. He is himself a descendant of the Kuisls, one of Bavaria’s leading dynasties of executioners. Oliver Pötzsch and his family live in Munich.

Twelve secret presses printed the text in Germany. A clandestine network of couriers carried copies to every parish. Catholic youth used backpack caravans and hiked through the Bavarian Alps, the Black Forest, and along the Rhine. Altar boys pedaled bicycles at night. High school athletes ran across barley farms. Nuns rode motorcycles to remote villages. In church confessional booths, the couriers delivered their cargo to priests. The priests locked the text in their tabernacles, and on Palm Sunday, they read it from every pulpit in the Reich.29

Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis.

One eventually had to confront it. Wasn’t Hitler’s own struggle to express himself in German the crucial subtext of his massive ranting autobiography, dictated in a fortress prison in the Bavarian hills? Grammar and syntax. The man may have felt himself imprisoned in more ways than one.

Jade Bay, the future site of Wilhelmshaven, is a huge semi-circle of land on the North Sea which, just to look at for a few moments from a blustery esplanade, would make most people lose the will to live, particularly once they have had to get there by walking through a haggard shopping centre featuring a man in Bavarian dress playing 'The Shiek of Araby' on his saxophone.

Hermann Göring sticks boars in the Bavarian Forest

If you are looking for Alpine clichés, Munich will hand them to you in one chic and compact package. But the Bavarian capital also has plenty of unexpected trump cards under its often bright-blue skies. Here, folklore and age-old traditions exist side by side with sleek BMWs, designer boutiques and high-powered industry. The city’s museums showcase everything from artistic masterpieces to technological treasures and Oktoberfest history, while its music and cultural scenes are second only to those found in Berlin.

The Welsh are swine,” said the one-legged man in reply to a question from his son. “Absolute swine. The English are swine, too, but not as bad as the Welsh. Though really they’re the same, but they make an effort not to seem it, and since they know how to pretend, they succeed. The Scots are bigger swine than the English and only a little better than the Welsh. The French are as bad as the Scots. The Italians are little swine. Little swine ready and willing to gobble up their own swine mother. The same can be said of the Austrians: swine, swine, swine. Never trust a Hungarian. Never trust a Bohemian. They’ll lick your hand while they devour your little finger. Never trust a Jew: he’ll eat your thumb and leave your hand covered in slobber. The Bavarians are also swine. When you talk to a Bavarian, son, make sure you keep your belt fastened tight. Better not to talk to Rhinelanders at all: before the cock crows they’ll try to saw off your leg. The Poles look like chickens, but pluck four feathers and you’ll see they’ve got the skin of swine. Same with the Russians. They look like starving dogs but they’re really starving swine, swine that’ll eat anyone, without a second thought, without the slightest remorse. The Serbs are the same as the Russians, but miniature. They’re like swine disguised as Chihuahuas. Chihuahuas are tiny dogs, the size of a sparrow, that live in the north of Mexico and are seen in some American movies. Americans are swine, of course. And Canadians are big ruthless swine, although the worst swine from Canada are the French-Canadians, just as the worst swine from America are the Irish-American swine. The Turks are no better. They’re sodomite swine, like the Saxons and the Westphalians. All I can say about the Greeks is that they’re the same as the Turks: bald, sodomitic swine. The only people who aren’t swine are the Prussians. But Prussia no longer exists. Where is Prussia? Do you see it? I don’t. Sometimes I imagine that while I was in the hospital, that filthy swine hospital, there was a mass migration of Prussians to some faraway place. Sometimes I go out to the rocks and gaze at the Baltic and try to guess where the Prussian ships sailed. Sweden? Norway? Finland? Not on your life: those are swine lands. Where, then? Iceland, Greenland? I try but I can’t make it out. Where are the Prussians, then? I climb up on the rocks and search for them on the gray horizon. A churning gray like pus. And I don’t mean once a year. Once a month! Every two weeks! But I never see them, I can never guess what point on the horizon they set sail to. All I see is you, your head in the waves as they wash back and forth, and then I have a seat on a rock and for a long time I don’t move, watching you, as if I’ve become another rock, and even though sometimes I lose sight of you, or your head comes up far away from where you went under, I’m never afraid, because I know you’ll come up again, there’s no danger in the water for you. Sometimes I actually fall asleep, sitting on a rock, and when I wake up I’m so cold I don’t so much as look up to make sure you’re still there. What do I do then? Why, I get up and come back to town, teeth chattering. And as I turn down the first streets I start to sing so that the neighbors tell themselves I’ve been out drinking down at Krebs’s.

And then there is the Löwenmensch – the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel. In the hills between Nuremberg and Munich in Swabian Germany there are caves that have yielded one of the most important works ever crafted by an unknown artist. Around 40,000 years ago, a woman or man sat somewhere in or near that cave, with the detritus of a hunt scattered around. They took a piece of ivory, a tusk from a woolly mammoth, and carefully considered that it might be the right material, shape and size for something that they had been pondering. Now extinct, cave lions were fierce predators at that time, posing a threat to people, and also to the animals that people would hunt and eat. That person thought about the lions, and how formidable they are, and maybe wondered what it would be like to have the power of a lion in the body of a human. Maybe this tribe revered the cave lions out of fear and awe. Whatever the reason, this artist took that mammoth ivory, a flint knife, and patiently carved the tusk into a mythical figure. It is a chimaera, a fantastic beast that is made up of the parts of multiple animals. Chimaeras exist throughout all human cultures for most of history, from mermaids, fawns or centaurs, to the glorious monkey-man god Hanuman, to the Japanese snake-woman nure-onna, to the Wolpertinger, an absurd and mischievous Bavarian part-duck part-squirrel part-rabbit with antlers and vampire teeth. Today, we have reached the ultimate manifestation of a 40,000-year interest in hybrid creatures in genetic engineering, where elements from one animal are transposed into another, and hence we have cats that glow in the dark with the genes of deep-sea crystal jellyfish Aquorea victoria, and goats that produce dragline silk from the golden orb weaver spider in their udders. The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

he looks dorky in Bavarian button-up heavy green wool pants tucked into fleece-lined rubber boots with big tread. He wears a plaid Burberry-type wool sweater buttoned up to his chin, as if he can’t decide whether he will climb a mountain or play golf in Scotland this

Welch became more confident that the press was reporting his words more accurately, but that worked against him because his discourses on the rise of the Illuminati or the Insiders made him sound strange to some, or worse. In September 1973, he sat for the Boston Globe and just purged. He told the reporter that it all began in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, when Baron Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. It's all in a book by John Robinson, Welch explained. But the Illuminati were forced underground when Bavarian authorities raided their headquarters. The reporter's eyes probably widened. But by 1840, the Illuminati was strong and produced the Great Revolution of 1848 and the League of the Just Men, which hired Karl Marx to draft Das Kapital. The conspiracy was on the doorsteps of Russia by 1905, Welch continued, and in 1917, the agents of the Illuminati, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, threw over the czars, with funding from the Rotschilds. Welch was on fire now. The Insiders, he continued, went to Yale and Harvard, grew up with all the advantages, controlled American politics and international banking, and wanted to enslave everyone else. In 1912, the Insiders brought in Woodrow Wilson to drag the country into World War I. They convinced America to fight World War II with assistance from Insiders like President Roosevelt and George Marshall. They master-planned the civil rights revolution, and they work through the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and tax-free foundations. Perhaps the reporter nodded now and then, encouraging him on.

The farm, unlike the highway, was a community, with the only intimation that it might not survive coming in the arrival of a college-educated daughter, “smart, well-dressed, confident, blooming with health and energy, . . . a breath of air from another world.” It seemed unlikely that she would wind up on the farm: the city, “at once so menacing and so promising,” had claimed her for its own. George saw the future himself when he spent the next night in a college town where the streets were empty except for automobiles, each containing a couple or two “bent on pleasure—usually vicarious pleasure—in the form of a movie or a dance or a petting party.” Anyone unlucky enough not to be among these “private, mathematically correct companies” would be alone. “There was no place where strangers would come together freely—as in a Bavarian beer hall or a Russian amusement park—for the mere purpose of being together and enjoying new acquaintances. Even the saloons were nearly empty.” All of this convinced George that the technology industrialization had made possible—automobiles, movies, radio, mass-circulation magazines, the advertising that paid for them—was creating an exaggerated desire for privacy. It was making an English upper-class evil a vice of American society. This was the sad climax of individualism, the blind-alley of a generation which had forgotten how to think or live collectively, of a people whose private lives were so brittle, so insecure that they dared not subject them to the slightest social contact with the casual stranger, of people who felt neither curiosity nor responsibility for the mass of those who shared their community life and their community problems. Americans

Hitler was head of the catchily-named Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). But, like the Cambridge University Netball Team, he hadn’t thought through the name properly. You see, his opponents realised that you could shorten Nationalsozialistische to Nazi. Why would they do this? Because Nazi was already an (utterly unrelated) term of abuse. It had been for years. Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork. The standard butt of German jokes at the beginning of the twentieth century were stupid Bavarian peasants. And just as Irish jokes always involve a man called Paddy, so Bavarian jokes always involved a peasant called Nazi. That’s because Nazi was a shortening of the very common Bavarian name Ignatius. This meant that Hitler’s opponents had an open goal. He had a party filled with Bavarian hicks and the name of that party could be shortened to the standard joke name for hicks.

Research on workplace engagement funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture found that with EEG, it is now possible to classify the type of activity an individual is engaged in—central tasks (e.g., programming, database, web development), peripheral tasks (e.g., setting up a development environment, writing documentation), and meta tasks (e.g., social media browsing, reading news sites).47 As pattern classification of brain wave data becomes ever more sophisticated, employers will be able to tell not just whether you are alert or your mind is wandering but also whether you are surfing social media or developing code.

This ad in the middle was placed by some arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up a few 're-education' experts. Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the Magna Carta, sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the works of some neurotic Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of the forests at night to leave subversive handbills at door and window—'Anything!' Roger groping back to his narrow quarters, 'anything at all's better than this. . . .

We should think, as we gather riches, as we sit in positions of great honor, as we indulge in luxurious pleasures. All this only a dream, and moreover a short and frivolous dream. When we wake from it, there will be no riches in our hands. What, then is life? To be brief, the period for which human life lasts is only a point on a line, its very nature changeable, during which we see through a glass darkly. Our bodies are unreliable, our moods variable. Riches are a thorn, lust is a poison. Everything bodily is a running river that passes on. Life is a war; the stay of a guest in a foreign city; an existence full of suffering and effort. Great buildings and strong fortifications collapse; their strength does not help them. The hardest of stones erode. The greatest fame is forgotten after a man's death; the greatest worldly titles disappear like smoke. The most beautiful and praiseworthy thing a man can do before he dies is to devote his life to the untiring performance of virtuous acts, constantly seeking to practice prudence, justice, moderation, endurance; faith, hope, and unselfish love.

The author isn’t saying there is some secret international group behind this entire scheme but there is no doubt that there has been in history, groups that have attempted to manipulate and control societies in this exact manner. Knights Templar Freemasons Bavarian Illuminati Skull and Bones Bilderberg

Contrary to what the author of the Donauschwabe article claimed, the German officials in the former embassy did not support the ethnic Germans in their struggle against the obstructive Yugoslav authorities but, rather, tried on several occasions to restrict their access to the Federal Republic of Germany. The Bavarian State Ministry of the Interior even went so far as to demand the restriction of Aussiedler immigration from Eastern Europe altogether.

The Philharmonie am Gasteig was the home of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, widely regarded as one of the world’s finest. Tonight it would be under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, who at that moment was chatting with the orchestra’s first concertmaster.

in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials in 1946. After the executions of Nazi celebrities on 16 October, fourteen bodies, including those of Goering (who had ‘cheated’ by managing suicide), Ribbentrop, Keitel, Rosenberg, Frank, Streicher, Jodl and Seyss-Inquart, were delivered to a Munich crematorium. That same evening a container holding the amassed ashes was driven through the rain into the Bavarian countryside. After an hour’s drive the vehicle stopped and the ashes were poured into a muddy ditch.4 Five or six years before, these men could dominate and intimidate. That night a drizzle washed them away.

Back in Munich. Gerhardt and the Mergers. Mostly German-language covers, but we had original numbers too. We were regarded as being one of the best reggae and rocksteady crews on the Bavarian financial scene.

But this blood, which alone is the creative, from which alone our thinkers, inventors, soldiers, statesmen, teachers of law, from which alone the engineers, the technicians, the eternally inventing, organising spirit of Aryan white humanity sprout, which would die out once this blood had seeped away or been mixed and gone to death. This blood is what we understand by the precious one of our people. And it is this Nordic blood that binds the Bavarian with the pomeranian, the east Prussia here with the man of the Westmark the Schleswig Holsteiner with the man of Styria that gives us the stampf of being a Germanic people.

TO PUT IT SIMPLY, SS-Captain Sebastian “Wastl” Wimmer was a nasty piece of work. A native Bavarian, he was born in 1902 in Dingolfing—a small town some fifty miles northeast of Munich. In 1923 Wimmer joined the latter city’s police department as a patrolman and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant in spite of, or perhaps because of, a reputation for securing quick confessions by beating suspects nearly to death during interrogation. Barely literate, unkempt, and given to violent drunken rages, he

That idea is a survival from conditions which are rapidly being altered. A few centuries ago, war did not operate in the way you describe. A large agricultural population was essential; and war destroyed types which were then still useful. But every advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight. The real importance of scientific war is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.

In the second court hearing, the Bavarian Administrative Court argued that Floris had not made a Bekenntnis to German Volkstum back in Hungary. Although his parents might have been part of the “German linguistic and cultural sphere” (deutscher Sprach- und Kulturkeis)—as he claimed—and his ancestors might have come from German-speaking lands, this did not mean that they were Germans. Liberal Jews in interwar Hungary had cherished German language and culture, but, the court argued, this attitude resulted from a “cosmopolitan stance” (weltbürgerliche Haltung) and was not indicative of a person’s “conscience and will to be German and to belong to no other people.”65 In this court’s view, the plaintiff had not publicly identified himself as German. Rather, he had tried twice—once without success, then successfully—to change his German-sounding surname, Steiner, into the neutral-sounding Floris. The reasons for these actions were arguably economic (only by assuming this name could he continue using the brand name after the war, when the real Floris moved to England), yet the name change made clear that he did not value his German appearance in name. In the Bavarian court’s view, Floris’s emigration from Hungary had also been for economic reasons. Moreover, his wife, Elisabeth, was not clearly German either, even though she credibly stated that her maternal language was German and that she had been a member of the Mozart cultural association in Budapest, where she used to sing German songs and where she met her husband, with whom she always spoke German. She supposedly also lacked the Bekenntnis.66

He waited in the gutter a whole minute, but no one came out. He turned his collar up against the nighttime mist and set out walking back to the hotel. From the corner he saw the guy with the top hat was gone. The evening shift had ended, and the night shift had started. He slowed down and scanned ahead. Habit. There was a guy in a doorway on the other side of the street. Barely visible. He was lit from the side, softly, in green, by a pharmacy sign two units further away. He was wearing a dark parka and a little Bavarian hat. Probably had a feather in the band. He was watching the hotel. No doubt about that. He was face-on to it, wedged in the doorway corner. White, and a little stout. Maybe six feet and two-ten. Hard to say how old. Reacher

One week into my new Silicon Valley life, and the lesson was this: if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness. I’d soon have trickier situations to negotiate than convincing a cop to let me take a cab. And so will you if you play the startup game. The next morning, I wasn’t merely hungover, but was in fact still mildly drunk. The company all-hands meeting, wherein the entire company gathered to hear about new deals and employees, and generally to get pep-rallied by Murthy Nukala, the CEO, was scheduled for noon that day. I had to be there or risk having my coworkers file a missing persons report, as well as look like a pussy. My frazzled brain was slow to realize my car was still somewhere in San Mateo. One hundred and thirty dollars and too much sunlight later, I was standing beside my four-wheeled Bavarian steed at the scene of last night’s triumph over the rule of law, and fifteen minutes later I was an acceptable five minutes late for the all-hands. As I walked into the company-wide meeting, a murmur was heard from a corner of the assembled crowd, expressing either surprise or amusement at my being both alive and unincarcerated. The company rumor mill had been busy that morning. I probably looked as pickled and embalmed as I felt. Murthy launched into his weekly harangue. The wheels of capitalism ground ever on.

At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman’s men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing—the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his first intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler’s exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.

Dear Human, My Human, the Old Lady (that’s her name) is a Russian scientist. Old Lady made a big scientific discovery: found the key to my eternal youth. Or even to immortality, if we like. Old Lady made herself immortal first. I don’t blame her. Next, Martha-the-White-Rat. Then, me and my sister Milly—we trace our pedigree through the purest blood lines of Bavarian-born Spaniels. But then she stopped. My other siblings look all aged by now. But at my 17, I look no more than three or four. My sister Milly got stuck at puppy age. We watch the photos of our relatives on Facebook, and we are saddened that Old Lady did not make them immortal too. That she keeps it a secret. And I am so worried about my friend Fox Theodore. He is at the hight of his financial and physical might now, but I know he will age. My best friend. I once tried to unlock the Secret. Me and Raccoon. (Raccoon’s a human, but he is sort of my buddy.) That turned out to be my big mistake. Lots other Humans came coveting the Secret too, which resulted in a lot of unpleasant and funny stories. More unpleasant. In the aftermath, Old Lady had to flee and I got misplaced. All my own fault. Now I’m trying to get found. Have you seen my Old Lady? You’d recognize her: her hands and face are way too young, plus she always clips her amber brooch. If you see her, tell her where I stay: 7 White Goose Lane, Ducklingburg, South Duck United State of America P.S. Tell her from me that she is the very finest Human in the whole world and that I am very lonely here without her. Zip, the Spaniel Dog

Munich is the capital of Bavaria. It was founded in the 11th century after a bridge was built across the River Isar, next to a Benedictine monastery, an important crossing place that soon saw the growth of a fortress. Munich’s city centre sits now within these old fortifications. It offers rich shopping and plenty of good cafes, bakeries and restaurants. In addition, these old city walls encircle the Residenz, the former palace of Bavarian kings, which was once moated and has been expanded hugely over the last 700 years. Also in the city centre is the Glockenspiel, a wonderfully theatrical clock that enacts stories from the 16th century at set times during the day.

Bavarian beer to destroy the sympathy of the United States with the French Republic. METZ, October 12.—While examining

WILLIAM, yesterday, he said that he relied upon the growing taste in Hoboken for Bavarian beer to destroy the sympathy of the United States

Most of Ludwig's excesses involved pursuits popular among Bavarians, who shared his love for hiking, drinking, and over the top decorating

My eyes stay on her as she moves slightly closer. She hesitates one last second before her lips tentatively touch mine. I’m not having any of that, though. She’s opened the door, and it might as well be a pair of those gigantic wooden double-doors that grace the front of some huge Bavarian castle because I’m coming in.

Today I function very much in English, but I’m still a Bavarian. Historically speaking, Bavarians have never considered themselves part of Germany. My first language was a Bavarian dialect; my own father sometimes couldn’t understand me, and one time he turned to my mother and asked her to translate.

While Mussolini toiled long hours at his desk, Hitler continued to indulge in the lazy bohemian dilettantism of his art-student days. When aides sought his attention for urgent matters, Hitler was often inaccessible. He spent much time at his Bavarian retreat; even in Berlin he often neglected pressing business. He subjected his dinner guests to midnight monologues, rose at midday, and devoted his afternoons to personal passions such as plans by his young protege Albert Speer to reconstruct his hometown of Linz and the center of Berlin in a monumental style benefiting the Thousand-Year Reich. After February 1938 the cabinet ceased to meet; some cabinet ministers never managed to see the Fuhrer at all. Hans Mommsen went so far as to call him a 'weak dictator.' Mommsen never meant to deny the unlimited nature of Hitler's vaguely defined and haphazardly exercised power, but he observed that the Nazi regime was not organized on rational principles of bureaucratic efficiency, and that its astonishing burst of murderous energy was not produced by Hitler's diligence. Neither an extreme intentionalist view of the all-powerful leader ruling alone nor an extreme structuralist view that initiatives from below are the main motor of fascist dynamism is tenable. In the 1990s, the most convincing work established two-way explanations in which competition among midlevel officials to anticipate the leader's intimate wishes and 'work toward' them are given due place, while the leader's role in establishing goals and removing limits and rewarding zealous associates plays its indispensable role.

I tore into the funnel cake with reckless abandon. I speared a large strawberry with my fork, rubbed it in some cream, and swallowed it in a single bite. It took me another size bites before I hit cake number one. It was red velvet, and the taste of it nearly sent me to Heaven. “Holy shit,” Eric said as he watched me devour the first cake in a couple bites. “It’s only been thirty seconds.” “My Starlight is truly amazing,” Aylin said with a quick glance at him. Then it started to get hard because I realized that there was a layer of Bavarian cream between the first red velvet cake and the next one. I hastily dug into it, and I realized I had a problem. “Eric,” I said around a mouthful of red velvet. “I need a second fork. It’s time to dual-wield this bitch.

One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness. I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler. Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war. Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse. Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t. You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable.

One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness. I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler. Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war. Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse. Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t. You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable. But that wasn’t the fundamental question. The fundamental question was: does fascism represent a force that is so strong and rooted that it has to be uprooted and destroyed? Put like that, the confrontation was indeed inevitable. The only consequential question was when and how. In other words, Chamberlain took a narrow and segmented view – Hitler was a leader, Germany a country, 1938 a moment in time: could he be contained? Actually, Hitler was the product

Ah, I see your point. I did assist on the Okinawa drop, as the British representative. Quite simple, after we’d seen the Berlin effects. Another ground-pounder drop near the top of that mountain, killed the army inside, without too many of the villagers on the mountain’s other side. Precision, rather.” Plus Hiroshima a few weeks later, Karl thought, and so the war ended in crimson blisters. Their crowd grew. Karl saw parading at the head of a column of tourists a Bavarian girl in the traditional garb of apron and knee-length white socks. The Germans were anxiously amiable, voices ringing high in the sweet warm air. If they had been dogs, their tails would have constantly wagged. The swirl and charm of these streets still caught at his heart. As good as it gets, a phrase he had heard somewhere, rang in him. Yet he knew that beyond these blithe provinces the world called the West, the world’s pain played out in the presence of God’s unimpeachable policy of No Comment. The silence of these skies . . . , he thought, and wondered if maybe he needed a glass of something delicious and reassuring. Red, yes. Maybe a Burgundy. The eighteenth-century

anglicized American named Benjamin Thompson who bore the title Count Rumford. Thompson had overlapping careers as fortune hunter, rake, philanderer, spy, military governor, inventor, park designer, scientist, and social reformer, and he can be described fairly as outstanding in all these roles. His title of count (of the Holy Roman Empire) had been bestowed by a grateful elector of Bavaria for transforming the Bavarian army from a rabble into a fit and efficient fighting force—he chose the Rumford part of the title from the town in New Hampshire

Catholic-Jewish dialogue failed because where the Catholics saw Nostra Aetate as a peace offering, the Jews saw it as a weapon in their arsenal of cultural warfare. As I pointed out in my review of Shapiro’s book: The thinly-veiled aggression behind Jewish enthusiasm for conciliar documents becomes apparent when Shapiro claims that “it was only after Oberammergau was caught between the anvil of Vatican II and the hammering criticism of Jewish groups that serious changes were grudgingly made.” The Bavarians, Shapiro seems to be telling us, were getting hammered, and they were getting hammered only because of Nostra Aetate [the document which launched Catholic-Jewish dialogue]. Without that document they could have easily deflected the Jewish blows. With it, the Jews could now play the bishop off against his flock as the best way to eviscerate the play of anything in the gospels which the Jews found repugnant.[108]

Hitler in 1919 took a position in the Communist run Bavarian Soviet Republic, wearing in public a red armband, according to a number of historians including Thomas Weber. And a little later after the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Hitler claimed to be a ‘social democrat.

OBATZDA—BAVARIAN CHEESE SPREAD Mix room temperature Camembert with cream cheese, soft butter, amber beer, finely diced onions, paprika, cumin, salt, and pepper until smooth. Serve with red onion or chives on dark bread or with pretzels.

Later, sat in rows on slat-backed chairs, they saw it: the flickering black-and-white image of Auguste holding his baby daughter up to a fishbowl, balancing the child on her feet so that she might look down at the water inside, the tumbling elision of the film's frames making manifest inside the winter darkness a months-old summer afternoon — and at the same time, 600 miles away in the Bavarian city of Wurzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, chair of physics, ran through the streets to hand over a paper to the president of the university's Physical Medical Society, a first description of the X-ray.

dropped out of the Illuminati in August, presented to the Bavarian Duchess Maria Anna a document which detailed the activities and goals of the Illuminati. He had an ax to grind because he felt he had been promoted too slowly, and was constantly prodded to prove his loyalty to the organization. The Duchess took the information and gave it to the Duke of Bavaria. It is through actions like this that have been passed down in history to us that we have been allowed access to the goals of the Illuminati. Duke Karl Theodore Dalberg, the Elector Palatinate of Bavaria, after discovering from the Utzschneider document that the

Guests came and went as they pleased, filling their gold-banded plates with hot breads, poached eggs on toast, smoked quail, fruit salad, and slices of charlotte russe made with sponge cake and Bavarian cream. Footmen crossed through the entrance hall as they headed outside with trays of coffee, tea, and iced champagne. Ordinarily this was the kind of event Cassandra would have enjoyed to no end. She loved a nice breakfast, especially when there was a little something sweet to finish off, and charlotte russe was one of her favorite desserts. However, she was in no mood to make small talk with anyone. Besides, she'd eaten far too many sweets lately... the extra jam tart at teatime yesterday, and all the fruit ices between dinner courses last night, and that entire éclair, stuffed with rich almond cream and roofed with a crisp layer of icing. And one of the little decorative marzipan flowers from a platter of puddings.