Europe Diaries Quotes

With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn’t felt since my first months in Europe—a mixture of ignorance and a loose, “what the hell” kind of confidence that comes on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line toward an unknown horizon.

Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I’d felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion.

Struck by the ugliness of the German women on the streets and in restaurants and cafés. As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to. Off to Danzig tonight.

Surely the Germans must be the ugliest-looking people in Europe, individually. Not a decent-looking woman in the whole Linden. Their awful clothes probably contribute to one’s impression.

For a time, the word Weltpolitik seemed to capture the mood of the German middle classes and the national-minded quality press. The word resonated because it bundled together so many contemporary aspirations. Weltpolitik meant the quest to expand foreign markets (at a time of declining export growth); it meant escaping from the constraints of the continental alliance system to operate on a broader world arena. It expressed the appetite for genuinely national projects that would help knit together the disparate regions of the German Empire and reflected the almost universal conviction that Germany, a late arrival at the imperial feast, would have to play catch-up if it wished to earn the respect of the other great powers. Yet, while it connoted all these things, Weltpolitik never acquired a stable or precise meaning. Even Bernhard von Bulow, widely credited with establishing Weltpolitik as the guiding principle of German foreign policy, never produced a definitive account of what it was. His contradictory utterances on the subject suggest that it was little more than the old policy of the "free hand" with a larger navy and more menacing mood music. "We are supposed to be pursuing Weltpolitik," the former chief of the General Staff General Alfred von Waldersee noted grumpily in his diary in January 1900. "If only I knew what that was supposed to be.

On the plane from Paris I heard a man say, “The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is order a Big Gulp. I’m going to supersize everything!” He said he’d been thirsty the entire time he was in Paris, and though I’d never thought about it, if you’re used to carrying a trash-can-size cup filled with crushed ice and soda, I suppose it would be hard to spend a few weeks in Europe.

So since my parents got divorced when I was young, my dad moved to this weird place in Europe. He also got married and sadly got cancer. He and his wife can’t have kids either.” (Page 25)

Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

The truth, however, is that – to speak only of what I know personally – if I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the Socialist movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the word “heroism” constantly on his lips. But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist newspaper – and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone – has the same history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition.

In Moscow last night Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a treaty and a declaration of purpose. The text of the latter tells the whole story: “After the German government and the government of the U.S.S.R., through a treaty signed today, definitely solved questions resulting from the disintegration of the Polish state and thereby established a secure foundation for permanent peace in eastern Europe, they jointly voice their opinion that it would be in the interest of all nations to bring to an end the state of war presently existing between Germany and Britain and France. Both governments therefore will concentrate their efforts, if necessary, in co-operation with other friendly powers, towards reaching this goal. “Should, however, the effort of both governments remain unsuccessful, the fact would thereby be established that Britain and France are responsible for a continuation of the war, in which case the governments of Germany and Russia will consult each other as to necessary measures.” This

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ concludes Alan Bullock’s study of Hitler: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ The division of Germany, the exhaustion of British power, the entrenchment and paranoia of Soviet Russia, the denials of freedom in the Eastern half of Europe, the entanglement of America in the Western half, the creation of the State of Israel and the consequent instability of the Middle East – all, in a sense, have been bequeathed to us by Adolf Hitler.

Thousands of Jews in the ghetto came to their library to borrow books. Reading gave both hope and consolation to the inhabitants, as a fifteen-year-old boy, Yitzhak Rudashevski, wrote in his diary on the same day that the library celebrated its hundred thousandth book loan: 'Hundreds of people read in the ghetto. Reading has become the ghetto's greatest pleasure. Books give one a feeling of freedom; books connect us to the world. The loan of the hundred thousandth copy is something the ghetto can be proud of.

the ground.’ In his war diaries he described the pandemonium that arose then among these experienced politicians from all parts of the political spectrum. ‘Quite a number seemed to jump up from the table and come running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is no doubt that had I at this juncture faltered at all in the leading of the nation I should have been hurled out of office. I was sure that every minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in.

As Japan negotiated with the Axis Powers in Europe, Vichy France, and the Soviet Union for settlements that would allow for easier territorial expansion in Southeast Asia, the US cut off negotiations with Japan. Washington, according to historian Richard Storry, became convinced that Japan was “redrawing the map of Asia so as to exclude the West.”142 As sanctions tightened, American ambassador to Tokyo Joseph Grew insightfully noted in his diary, “The vicious circle of reprisals and counter reprisals is on . . . The obvious conclusion is eventual war.”143

GENEVA, July 5 Avenol, Secretary-General of the League, apparently thinks he’ll have a job in Hitler’s United States of Europe. Yesterday he fired all the British secretaries and packed them off on a bus to France, where they’ll probably be arrested by the Germans or the French. Tonight in the sunset the great white marble of the League building showed through the trees. It had a noble look, and the League has stood in the minds of many as a noble hope. But it has not tried to fulfil it. Tonight it was a shell, the building, the institution, the hope—dead.

In September 1936, Britain's former prime minister, David Lloyd George, spent two weeks in Germany as his guest. He admiringly wrote in the Daily Express how Hitler had united Catholic and Protestant, employer and artisan, rich and poor into one people – Ein Volk, in fact. (The British press magnate Cecil King wrote in his diary four years later, ‘Lloyd George mentioned meeting Hitler and spoke of him as the greatest figure in Europe since Napoleon and possibly greater than him. He said we had not had to deal with an austere ascetic like Hitler since the days of Attila and his Huns.’)

For a time I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man's hope and decency.

Although much has been written of the exploits of Canadians who answered the call to arms in World Wars I and II, nothing has been written about the young men who flocked to join the Cold War. Thanks to Canada's menacing presence, Russia has never invaded Germany. The author menaced Russia, as a fighter pilot based in NATO Europe during the 1950s. Much of the material herein is derived from his diaries of that period. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Accounts have been embellished. No harm or libel is intended. The harm is to the author's self-image. The diaries reveal that he was brash and intolerant. He considers it one of life's miracles that his friends put up with him.

House of Commons: ‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.’ Later this speech was generally cited as a classic example of determination and courage, but the reactions at the time were not all that enthusiastic. In his diary, Harold Nicolson noted: ‘When Chamberlain enters the House he gets a terrific reception, when Churchill comes in the applause is less.’ Many of the British, including King George VI and most of the Conservatives, considered Churchill in those days to be a warmonger and a dangerous adventurer. There was a strong undercurrent in favour of reaching an accord with Hitler.

appeal or a merely formal text: it was an act which, with good luck, could have changed the course of events for the good of Europe. This is still my opinion today.’ Monnet had an excellent relationship with both Churchill and Reynaud, and his idea, unusual though it may have been, was given serious consideration. ‘My first reaction was unfavourable,’ Churchill wrote in his war diaries. But when he introduced the proposal to the cabinet, he saw to his amazement how ‘staid, solid, experienced politicians of all parties engaged themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out.’ Finally, Churchill agreed that the plan should be explored, as did de Gaulle – who had come to England on his own authority – and

mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters. When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack. Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!” Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. “Hands

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

There was nothing for it but obduracy, to soldier on even for those who were not soldiers. “How hard I have become,” an American Red Cross volunteer told her diary in February. “Emotions which formerly would have wracked my soul leave me almost untouched. It’s a hardness of survival.

He had mastered the art of conducting a love affair through all its stages, from infatuation to consummation, wholly within its mind. How could he do that? The indispensable first step was to capture what he called “a living image” of the beloved and make it his own. Upon this image he would then dwell, giving breath to it, until he had reached a point where, still in the realm of the imagination, he could begin to make love to this succubus of his and eventually conduct her into the utmost transports; and this whole passionate history would remain unbeknown to the earthly original. [ On the erotic life ] It all hinged, he replied, on being able to capture, through the closest, most dedicated attention, that unique unconscious gesture, too slight or too fleeting to be noticed by the average eye, by which a woman gave herself away - gave away her erotic essence, that is to say, her soul. The way she turned her wrist to look at her wristwatch, for example, or the way she reached down to pull tight the strap of a sandal. Once that unique movement was caught, the erotic imagination could explore it at leisure until the woman’s every last secret was laid open, not excluding how she moved in the arms of a lover, how she came to her climax. From the giveaway gesture all followed “as if by fate”. [ On the erotic life ] That’s the beauty of thoughts, isn’t it, that distance doesn’t matter, and separation. [ On compassion ] The woman from Lausanne complains above all of loneliness. She has created a protective ritual for herself in which she retires to bed at night with music playing in the background and lies cosily reading a book, immersed in what she tells herself is bliss. Then, as she begins to reflect on her situation, bliss turns to disquiet. Is this truly the best that life affords, she asks herself - lying in bed alone with a book? Is it such a good thing to be a comfortable, prosperous citizen of a model democracy, secure in her home in the heart of Europe? Despite herself, she grows more and more agitated. She rises, dons dressing gown and slippers and takes up her pen. [ On fan mail ]

The 28th Division situation is going from bad to worse,” First Army’s war diary noted on Tuesday. Cota could only agree.

stirring of epitaphs, “Mort pour la liberté.” After viewing a military cemetery near Ste.-Mère-Église, a soldier on August 28 scribbled lines from A. E. Housman in his diary: “The saviors come not home tonight: Themselves they could not save.

Caine, Philip D. Aircraft Down! Evading Capture in WWII Europe. Virginia: Potomac Books, 1997. Champlain, Héléne de. The Secret War of Helene De Champlain. Great Britain: Redwood Burn, Ltd., 1980. Chevrillon, Claire. Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance. Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Coleman, Fred. The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 from the Holocaust. Virginia: Potomac Books, 2013. Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line: The Brave Men and Women Who Rescued Allied Airmen from the Nazis During World War II. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Fitzsimons, Peter. Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Foot, M.R.D., and J.M. Langley. MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945. Boston: Little Brown, 1979. Humbert, Agnés. Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2004. Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Litoff, Judy Barrett. An American Heroine in the French Resistance. The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Long, Helen. Safe Houses Are Dangerous. London: William Kimber, 1985. Moorehead, Caroline. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Neave, Airey. Little Cyclone. London: Coronet Books, 1954.

I am on a train passing through Baltimore, where I grew up. I can see vacant lots, charred remains of burned buildings surrounded by rubbish, billboards advertising churches, and other billboards for DNA testing of children’s paternity. Johns Hopkins Hospital looms out of the squalor. The hospital is on an isolated island situated slightly east of downtown. The downtown area is separated from the hospital complex by a sea of run-down homes, a freeway, and a massive prison complex. Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc come to mind. Failed industry and failed housing schemes and forced relocation disguised as urban renewal.

Stephen Spender spent part of the 1930s living in Berlin and reflected on that time in his diary in 1939. Before the ultimate catastrophe had begun he mulled on the Germans he had met while living there. As he wrote, ‘The trouble with all the nice people I knew in Germany is that they were either tired or weak.’ Why were the nice people so tired? Existential tiredness is not a problem only because it produces a listless type of life. It is a problem because it can allow almost anything to follow in its wake.

The United States is the “democratic” country with the most draconian punishment system: in fact, it is a good example of how draconian punishments do not help in stopping crimes. Europe is by far more just and humane, and the rehab programs there work, so the crime rate in Europe is decisively lower than the U.S.

Caine, Philip D. Aircraft Down! Evading Capture in WWII Europe. Virginia: Potomac Books, 1997. Champlain, Héléne de. The Secret War of Helene De Champlain. Great Britain: Redwood Burn, Ltd., 1980. Chevrillon, Claire. Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance. Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Coleman, Fred. The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 from the Holocaust. Virginia: Potomac Books, 2013. Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line: The Brave Men and Women Who Rescued Allied Airmen from the Nazis During World War II. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Fitzsimons, Peter. Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Foot, M.R.D., and J.M. Langley. MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945. Boston: Little Brown, 1979. Humbert, Agnés. Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2004. Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Litoff, Judy Barrett. An American Heroine in the French Resistance. The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Long, Helen. Safe Houses Are Dangerous. London: William Kimber, 1985. Moorehead, Caroline. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Neave, Airey. Little Cyclone. London: Coronet Books, 1954. Ideas for Book Groups Dear Readers, I truly believe in book groups.

Smuts appeared having arrived in the morning, he raised the interesting point as to whether we really wanted to dismember Germany now, or whether a strong Germany in the future might not assist in balancing power in Europe against Russia. He said he had no doubts last year about dismembering Germany, but now was doubtful about it.

The penumbra of dusk moves slowly westward. The owls of Europe are already hunting. The zoo owls will be waking now as the light declines and the grey Victorian brickwork glows with evening gold. Trees drift in the wind above the roar of traffic in the road outside. White mice lie dead on the floor of the cage. The eagle owl will not feed till dusk. He is waking as the people watch him, stretching his neck and uttering a soft call. His sunset-coloured eyes are kindling, the light coming slowly forward from within. The owl looks outward, beyond the watching faces. They have no significance for him. He is waking to his own world, to glooms of spruce or desert rock. He does not see the dull metallic chains that fence us in. His mind is still unscalable, a crag from which he can look down at the captives gazing up at him.

Most meetings of democrats end with the incantation, ‘Let’s complain to Europe.’ Europe, unfortunately, is tired of hearing how wicked Putin is. It would prefer to be fooled and to hear how good he is.

(Back before the internet, libraries were great places to speed; your personal nook in the old magazine racks, where you’d spend hours combing microfilm for references to amphetamines. Taylor Mead, On Amphetamine and In Europe: Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth, Volume Three (Boss Books, 1968, 251 Pages).

New York collections are often a commercial version of what Europe provided for the previous season. It’s what America does so well: the designers turn someone else’s idea into something that makes money.

E. Saenger wrote in his diary in 1943: ‘To be an emigrant means asking oneself every day and every hour when the world will be better.

Europe, so vociferous in her support during the Maidan protests, has subsequently fallen silent and walked away, preferring to profit from trade with Russia. Money matters more than democracy.

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It was simply an outrage to have to go for an entire day without being able to buy cheese crackers or hairspray. You’d think we were in Eastern Europe! For a funeral, shouldn’t half a day’s closure be more than sufficient?