Germany Travel Quotes

Coordination' occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbtsgleichschaltung, or 'self-coordination.' Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern.

Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with all these children,' the rabbi replied. 'Haven't you heard about the population problem?'the woman sniffed. 'How many more children do you want to have?' Rabbi Teller paused and looked the woman in the eye: 'About 6 million,' he said.

One odd thing Yencken noticed was how much blonder the nation had become since he was last there. According to official statistics over 10 million packets of hair dye were sold in 1934

I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about “Your country’s never been invaded.” And so I said, “Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can’t hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

Eating in Germany is easy, because there is basically only one kind of food, called the “wurst.

I have never been to Japan. I have never been to India, or to Morocco, or to Germany, or to most of the places Arthur Less has traveled to over the past few months. I have never climbed an ancient pyramid. I have never kissed a man on a Paris rooftop. I have never ridden a camel. I have taught a high school English class for the best part of a decade, and graded homework every night, and woken up early in the morning to plan my lessons, and read and reread Shakespeare, and sat through enough conferences and meetings for even those in Purgatory to envy me. I have never seen a glowworm. I do not, by any reckoning, have the best life of anyone I know. But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Because it is also mine. That is how it goes with love stories.

The Netherlands, for all its faults, was happier than Britain, more efficient than France, more tolerant than America, more worldly than Norway, more modern than Belgium and more fun than Germany.

This book describes what happened in Germany between the wars. Based on first-hand accounts written by foreigners, it creates a sense of what it was actually like, both physically and emotionally, to travel in Hitler’s Germany.

It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah the peddler. But Jeremiah travelled to earn his bread, and these other sorts of men are rich enough already. They go on voyages because they are curious. They amble around the world and stare at things, they sail across the oceans as if there's nothing to it at all, and if it goes ill with them in one place they simply pick up and move along to another.

Africans find it hard to forgive us slavery, don't they?" He took my hand and said, "I thought you would have known that. My dear, they can't forgive us, and even more terrible, they can't forgive themselves. They're like the young here in this tragic country [Germany]. They will never forgive their parents for what they did to the Jews, and they can't forgive the Jews for surviving and being a living testament to human bestiality.

We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalize over Italy and ecstacise over Spain- but England we love.

Things to do before I die: Travel the world, meet incredible people, have insightful conversation, live, love and carry on.

Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in the spring of 1984. Like Orwell when he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was in her early forties and she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The novel originated with a file of newspaper cuttings she had begun collecting while living in England, covering such topics as the religious right, prisons in Iran, falling birth rates, Nazi sexual politics, polygamy and credit cards. She let these diverse observations ferment, like compost, until a story grew out of them. Her travels in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where she experienced “the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information,” nourished the novel, too, as did her adolescent obsession with dystopias and World War Two.

Following World War II, trials against War Crimes took place in Nuremberg, Germany, commencing in 1945. But before the famous Nuremberg Trials even started, a stealthy purveyor of Nazi atrocities managed to escape the hands of justice by disguising himself as a woman and setting sail across the Atlantic. His masquerade only became known to authorities when a Philadelphia resident, an Italian-American dressmaker, journeying home from the War himself, recognized the criminal of insidious deeds, while traveling on board the same vessel. Luigi D’Alonzo was an instant hero among the passengers and crew alike. But his luck was about to change.

For all that, I don’t think Gypsies ought to be likened to birds of ill-omen. They return evil for evil, and good for good. One hundredfold. Their powers seem to exceed them. I knew some in Spain who could read the stars; in Germany, who could heal burns; in the Camargue, who tended horses and could lessen the birthing pains of both women and beasts. There are some human beings who are not bound by human laws. The sad thing is perhaps they’re not all aware of it. Meanwhile, here’s an idea I volunteer: the day when the borders of Europe and elsewhere become, as they once were, open to the movement of nomadic tribes that some regard as ‘worrisome’, it would be interesting if researchers qualified in astronomy (yes, indeed), with calenders and terrestrial and celestial maps to hand, were to examine the routes travelled by wandering Gypsies. Maybe they’ll discover that these slow and apparently aimless journeys are related to cosmic forces. Like wars. And migrations. The Gypsies were persecuted, in France and elsewhere, with cyclical regularity in a vicious, inept and stupid manner. Almost as much as the Jews.

In my life I’ve been very lucky to travel around the world and see students and teachers in nearly two dozen countries—but the most awe-inspiring experience I’ve ever had was two years after 9/11 when I had the chance to attend a conference in Manhattan and personally meet many of the heroic teachers who persevered under conditions that in our worst nightmares we could never have imagined. In my opinion there’s not been nearly enough written about those teachers, and I hope that changes soon.

The haughty nephew ... and an even haughtier wife, both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the world. Aunt July would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain had been appointed to the same post by the same authority. Were both these loud-voiced parties right? On one occasion they had met, and Margaret ... had implored them to argue the subject out in her presence. Whereat they blushed and began to talk about the weather. ... Margaret then remarked: "To me one of two things is very clear; either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else these do not know the mind of God." A hateful little girl, but at thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life without perceiving.

The complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism,” writes Peter Drucker, “has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”9 No less significant

The French would do whatever it took to get Britain to commit itself. In 1909 they produced a carefully faked document, said to have been discovered when a French commercial traveler picked up the wrong bag on a train, which purported to show Germany’s invasion plans for Britain.

TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example, Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.

News, like men, traveled slowly; intelligence of Barbarossa’s death in Cilicia took four months to reach Germany.16 Medieval man could eat his breakfast without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world; or those that came to his ken were fortunately too old for remedy.

Humans vote with their feet. In my travels around the world I have met numerous people in many countries who wish to emigrate to the USA, to Germany, to Canada or to Australia. I have met a few who want to move to China or Japan. But I am yet to meet a single person who dreams of emigrating to Russia.

In 1959 Corrie was part of a group that visited Ravensbruck, which was then in East Germany, to honor Betsie and the 96,000 other women who died there. There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber. When I heard Corrie speak in Darmstadt in 1968, she was 76, still traveling ceaselessly in obedience to Betsie’s certainty that they must “tell people.” Her work took her to 61 countries, including many “unreachable” ones on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To whomever she spoke—African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary, factory workers in Uzbekistan—she brought the truth the sisters learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory. John and I made some of those trips with her, the only way to catch this indefatigable woman long enough to

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer.

A Wrong Planet Chef always take an interest in the origins of the food he cooks. A particular dish of vegetables, herbs and spices could, for instance, have begun life 5000 years ago on the Indian subcontinent, perhaps in Central India where vegetarian Hindi food is considered as God (Brahman) as it sustains the entire physical, mental, emotional and sensual aspects of the human being. The dish may then have migrated to the Punjab region of the Indian-Pakistan border - The Land of Five Waters - around 250 BC, and from here could have moved on to Western Asia or North Africa as soldiers and merchants moved west with their families into the Eastern parts of the Roman empire, where the cooks would have experimented with new combinations of food, adding fruits, shellfish or poultry to the exotic dish. The dish could then have travelled in any direction heading North through Germany or Sweden to Britain or maybe migrating through Persia or North Africa to Spain and Portugal, creating two very distinct and separate menus but meeting once again in France

Hitler, in fact, was not at all doomed to lose the war. In summer 1940, peace reigned in Europe. The greatest European conflict, that between Germany and France, had already been settled, and only the British were still fighting a rearguard action against German supremacy. What is more, in 1940 Hitler was still riding on an enormous groundswell of goodwill.

Hitler’s regime maintained its generally accepted authority in Germany almost until the bitter end. In fact, large parts of the population supported that regime enthusiastically. Resistance was so uncommon that it could easily be nipped in the bud. Propaganda was readily believed, repression was a matter of loving one’s country, obedience was the rule, informing on neighbours a patriotic duty.

Next week we are off to Germany and Switzerland, and as we shall travel fast, I shall only be able to give you hasty letters. I keep my diary, and try to 'remember correctly and describe clearly all that I see and admire', as Father advised. It is good practice for me, and with my sketchbook will give you a better idea of my tour than these scribbles. Adieu, I embrace you tenderly. "Votre Amie.

East Germany brought down their wall in 1989 as a sign of surrender. The Soviet experiment had failed, and the Eastern bloc realized they couldn't win the Cold War. The falling Berlin Wall was their white flag. The walls I'd visited, though, expressed the opposite. The rising of these walls was the surrender. The walls stood as evidence that their conflicts were unwinnable and permanent. When diplomacy and negotiation crumbles, when the motivation to find solutions wanes and dies, when governments resign themselves to failure, the walls go up. Instead of trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we build a wall. Instead of finding a way for Catholics and Protestants to live together in Belfast, we build a wall. Instead of addressing the despair that leads migrants across our borders, we build a wall. The walls admit our defeat. We throw up a wall right after we throw up our hands.

A historian once speculated on what would happen if a time-traveller from 1945 arrived back in Europe just before the First World War, and told an intelligent and well-informed contemporary that within thirty years a European nation would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and exterminate nearly six million in the process. If the time-traveller invited the contemporary to guess which nation it would be, the chances were that he would have pointed to France, where the Dreyfus affair had recently led to a massive outbreak of virulent popular antisemitism. Or might it be Russia, where the Tsarist 'Black Hundreds' had been massacring large numbers of Jews in the wake if the failed Revolution of 1905. That Germany, with its highly acculturated Jewish community and its comparitive lack of overt or violent political antisemitism, would be the nation to launch this exterminatory campaign would hardly have occurred to him.

One story that circulated about (U.S. Minister to Russia Charles S.) Todd concerned his conversation with a lady-in-waiting at an Imperial reception in the Winter Palace. In his bad French with a Kentucky accent, he mispronounced the word for year, so that an explanation of his travels came out: "I was an ass in Paris, part of an ass in London, almost an ass in Germany, and I am two asses here." To which the lady reportedly responded, "And you will be an ass wherever you go.

THE MAN WHO, MORE than any other private citizen, helped unite the country behind the idea of aiding Britain and opposing Germany spent the war promoting the importance of international cooperation after the conflict. Although he rejected an attempt by FDR to bring him into his administration, Wendell Willkie, whom one newspaper labeled “a vocal and patriotic alarm clock,” became a sort of ambassador-at-large for Roosevelt, traveling around the globe to meet with Allied heads of state, soldiers, and ordinary citizens.

In Superman number one, published in 1939, Clark and Lois Lane travel to a thinly disguised Nazi Germany, where Lois ends up in front of a firing squad, until Superman rescues her. In Superman number two, also from 1939, Clark Kent visits faux Germany again and meets Adolphus Runyan, a scientist clearly modeled on Adolf Hitler, who has discovered a gas so powerful “it is capable of penetrating any type of gas-mask.” The front cover of Captain Americanumber one, published in March 1941, shows the hero smashing Hitler across the face.

Doing time is a real test of friendship. None of my old friends passed that test. Maybe none of them had even noticed that I was missing. To me, that made it even more special that people I had never met before came to visit me and did stick by me. Most of the travellers who had visited me were just passing through La Paz and couldn’t visit more than once or twice. However, many of them stayed in contact by letters and email. I glued the postcards they sent me from all over the world onto my wall. I received mail from the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, England, Israel, Turkey and Japan. Whenever I felt sad, I would read what the tourists had written to me, and I would soon feel better again. Even though I only met many of these people once, I knew that they were real friends. You know how? I had nothing to give them. I couldn’t give them money, I couldn’t give them status, I couldn’t take them to fancy places and buy drinks for them. All I had were my stories and who I was, and that was enough for them to want to stay in contact. For the first time in my life, that was enough.

The issue that many travellers (and we were no different) face when visiting Australia is that they picture it as just another country, much like India or Germany or even the USA. However, Australia is most certainly not just another country but rather a vast continent; an immense landmass that spans three time zones. Until the eighteenth century, the existence of this mega-landmass was a fancy hypothesis, albeit with some merit: ‘Surely there has to be a giant continent somewhere in the southern hemisphere to balance all the landmasses in the northern hemisphere?

[William Edward Burghardt] Du Bois saw things rather differently. He argued that it was entirely because of Hitler that Germany had in fact already ‘lapsed into Bolshevism’. In his view, the Nazi government was copying the Soviet Union to such an extent that there was now almost no difference between their two systems. He cited ‘its ownership and control of industry; its control of money and banking, its steps toward land ownership and control by government; its ordering of work and wages, its building of infrastructure and houses, its youth movement and its one party state at elections’.

As for “global Islam,” it attracts mainly those who were born in its lap. While it may appeal to some people in Syria and Iraq, and even to alienated Muslim youth in Germany and Britain, it is hard to see Greece or South Africa—not to mention Canada or South Korea—joining a global caliphate as the remedy to their problems. In this case too, people vote with their feet. For every Muslim youth from Germany who traveled to the Middle East to live under a Muslim theocracy, probably a hundred Middle Eastern youths would have liked to make the opposite journey and start a new life for themselves in liberal Germany.

Coordination” occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or “self-coordination.” Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern.

The retaliation came in all varieties. One variety came largely from the Soviet soldiers. When they entered East Prussia in January, their propaganda officers hung up huge banners: ‘Soldier, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’ The village of Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoya) was taken by the 2nd Red Army Guard, a few days later German troops launched a counteroffensive and entered the town again. They found bodies everywhere: refugees crushed under tanks, children shot in their gardens, raped women nailed to barn doors. The cameras rolled, the images were shown all over Germany: this is what happens when the Russians come in.

First Edition: January 2018 In honor of Martin Nils “Marty” Richert, my uncle and a retired Air Force colonel.  A kind and humble man, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery during the rescue of a Marine pilot in the Vietnam War.  Marty later served with distinction in Berlin, Germany before the Berlin Wall came down.  He regularly traveled into the former East Germany and has told me many fascinating tales that captivate me to this day.  I credit Marty for planting the initial seeds of my love and fascination for Germany.  He’s a great man. Never was anything great achieved without danger. ​-Niccolo Machiavelli PART ONE The Call CHAPTER

The guide–book warmly recommends the seashore when the wind is in the east (which it was) as the quickest and firmest route from Göhren to Thiessow; but I chose rather to take the road over the plain because there was a poem in the guide–book about the way along the shore, and the guide–book said it described it extremely well, and I was sure that if that were so I would do better to go the other way. This is the poem — the translation is exact, the original being unrhymed, and the punctuation is the poet’s — Splashing waves Rocking boat Dipping gulls — Dunes. Raging winds Floating froth. Flashing lightning Moon! Fearful hearts Morning grey — Stormy nights Faith! I read it, marvelled, and went the other way.

countries under the unyielding rule of Berlin and the discipline of the SS and the Gestapo. It was Churchill in particular who opposed all compromise, who talked to his fellow cabinet members for days on end and finally won over Chamberlain, who, after 1938, was also convinced of Hitler’s evil intentions. ‘Hitler’s terms, if accepted, would put us completely at his mercy,’ Churchill believed. And: ‘Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.’ In May 1940 it would have been blindly optimistic to think that Great Britain could defeat the Germans without massive support from the Soviet Union and the United States. But the British were persuaded that Germany would once again encounter difficulties due to

was possessed of clear judgement and great discernment. She committed her European experiences to paper in 1942 under the title Athene Palace, the name then of today’s Bucharest Hilton, where she lived and worked for seven months. For years Rumania had had its own violent fascist movement, the Iron Guard. From 1938 the country was ruled by strict anti-Semitic legislation. At the same time, King Carol II was trying to make himself Rumania’s dictator, as Miklós Horthy had done in Hungary in 1920 and Ioannis Metaxas in Greece in 1936. Since spring 1940, Bucharest had been run by a coalition of fascists and generals led by Marshal Ion Antonescu. In September, Germany more or less took over the country, which was crucially important for the Reich’s energy supplies.

in any way concealing her own Jewish background. What struck her most of all during those months was the enormous élan of almost all the Germans she met, ‘the dynamism of the National Socialist revolution, the dynamism which went through the entire military and bureaucratic machine of Hitler’s Germany.’ It was like an intoxication, she wrote. ‘All said that they never felt as free in their work as they did now.’ At the same time, their diplomacy was less than brilliant. ‘The Nazis were good at conquering, but deplorable at exploiting their conquests, even for their own good, not to speak of the good of the conquered.’ She also knew full well that this young, intellectual generation of Germans would, sooner or later, end up in conflict with the limitations of party

governments, their parliaments, their economies, their colonies, the whole lot. The two countries could then no longer surrender independently. In the worst case, the 250,000 French soldiers still fighting in the west of the country could be evacuated to England, and fight on under the flag of the new union. The French fleet, by the same token, could sail to British ports and begin the struggle anew from there. Operating jointly, Monnet reasoned, France and Great Britain had so many more resources than Germany that, in the longer term, they could never lose the war. Especially not if they could count on support from the United States. Monnet’s intentions were more than a mere gesture born of desperation. ‘For us,’ he stated later, ‘the plan was not simply an opportunist

its lack of natural resources. In that same month, the British general staff came up with a war plan that anticipated a deep crisis in Germany beginning in late 1941, followed by that country’s collapse. The British, therefore, did not need to prepare for a war fought in huge battles like those of 1914–18. From 1942 onwards they would be primarily engaged in terminal care for a Nazi empire disintegrating of its own accord. In the end, Churchill succeeded in winning over all twenty-five members of his government. ‘I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon

Rumania ceded large parts of its territory to Hungary, King Carol abdicated, real power was transferred to Antonescu and the Iron Guard was given free rein and organised one bloody pogrom after another. In June 1941, Rumania committed itself completely by joining Germany’s foray into the Soviet Union. In 1940, however, the country was still neutral, and in June all of Europe was sitting side by side in the lobby of the Athene Palace, as though nothing untoward was going on: the old Rumanian dignitaries, the leaders of the new radical right-wing government, the American journalists and diplomats, the despondent French ambassador. The ‘elegantly bored’ British – diplomats, oil men, journalists and intelligence officers – had their own table, the young Rumanian nobility sat at the bar,

inhabitants. While resistance groups in other parts of Europe could count on the silent acquiescence of the rest of the population, Hitler’s regime maintained its generally accepted authority in Germany almost until the bitter end. In fact, large parts of the population supported that regime enthusiastically. Resistance was so uncommon that it could easily be nipped in the bud. Propaganda was readily believed, repression was a matter of loving one’s country, obedience was the rule, informing on neighbours a patriotic duty. In his reconstruction of the workings of Nazi terror, Eric Johnson – using recovered Gestapo dossiers – described the sophistication of the system of informing in a town like Krefeld, close to the Dutch border: a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl was turned in for having a

25 May, as the extent of the French defeat became apparent, Lord Halifax carefully began sounding out the Italian ambassador to find out what concessions would be needed to ‘bribe’ Italy from entering the war. Gibraltar, perhaps, or Malta? He hoped that Italy could provide the initiative for a peace conference with Hitler, leading to a ‘general European arrangement’. England was to keep the sea and its empire, while Germany could do as it pleased on the continent. Hitler would probably have agreed to such a proposal: it was roughly the same division of roles Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers had contemplated in 1914. As a result, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark and Norway – the lion’s share of Europe – would have been transformed into a federation of Nazi

Someone has described a drinking fountain in Germany, where, every morning or noon, the villagers throng to enjoy the flowing water as it pours through numerous statues, the figures representing all the forms of human life. The farmer drinks from the fountain adorned with figures of waving grain, from which are traced the words, "I am the bread of life" (John 6:35). The shepherd comes up and drinks from the outstretched hands of a shepherd holding a lamb in his bosom, and exclaims, "I am the good shepherd" (John 10:11). The traveler sees a guide holding a lamp in his hand, as he cries, "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12). The gardener drinks from a fountain where the waters seem to be crushed from the clusters of the grapes that hang above it in the stone, almost hiding the letters, "I am the true vine" (John 15:1).

I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents--peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them--felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain.

He generally traveled to Europe four or five times a year. The pharmaceutical empire he ran had research centers in Germany, Switzerland, and France, and huge laboratories and factories in England. It was always interesting coming over here, exchanging ideas with their research teams, and exploring new avenues of marketing, which was his real forte. But this time it was far more than that, far more than just a research trip, or the unveiling of a new product. He was here for the birth of “his baby.” Vicotec. His life’s dream. Vicotec was going to change the lives and the outlook of all people with cancer. It was going to dramatically alter maintenance programs, and the very nature of chemotherapy the world over. It would be Peter’s one major contribution to the human race. For the past four years, other than his family, it was what he had lived for. And undeniably, it was going to make Wilson-Donovan millions. More than that, obviously, their studies had already projected earnings in the first five years to well over a

During the hostage crisis we sent a number of secret delegations into Iran, which was fairly easy to do because the Iranian leaders wanted to maintain as normal an environment as possible and relished all the favorable publicity that resulted from visits by foreign news media. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini gave personal interviews to American journalists. On one occasion we had a few CIA agents in Tehran who were traveling with false German passports, since many Iranian leaders had been educated in Germany. As our people were leaving, one of them had his credentials checked and was waved past by the customs officials. He was called back, however, and the official said, “Something is wrong with your passport. I’ve been here more than twenty years and this is the first time I’ve seen a German document that used a middle initial instead of a full name. Your name is given as Josef H. Schmidt and I don’t understand it.” The quick-thinking agent said, “Well, when I was born my given middle name was Hitler, and I have received special permission not to use it.” The official smiled, nodded, and approved his departure.

In May of 1945, only a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the States, where I spent the remainder of the war with a training company at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Along with the rest of the Ninth Army, I had been racing across Germany so swiftly during the late winter and spring that when I boarded the plane, I couldn't believe its destination lay to the west. My mind might inform me otherwise, but there was an inertia of the spirit that told me we were flying to a new front, where we would disembark and continue our push eastward-eastward until we'd circled the globe, marching through villages along whose twisting, cobbled streets crowds of the enemy would watch us take possession of what, up till then, they'd considered their own. I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant. I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman's heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing.

As we lifted off, China growing ever more distant from the window-seat, the endless ocean opening up before us, I was torn between the excitement of something new and leaving that which I'd grown to love. In that moment, I understood we may never come back; that we were floating there suspended between two worlds, above the world. There was no logic in where we would go from here, nor any limitation. We had each other, and we knew now of what adaptation we were capable. Their faces flashed through my mind, and I wondered if we'd ever find a country like that again, or if we'd ever be as open with new friends, knowing now what it was like to leave them. Like a first love lost. I hoped we'd have the courage to love Germany so that the day we'd leave our hearts would also break. For what is life except that kind of attachment? And isn't it true that one can live in a place all their life, surrounded by comfort and familiarity, and never feel this longing? As the last view of China slipped off the horizon, I promised myself that I would always dare to love, squeezing Patrick's hand, and seeing that in our love for each other, we'd always have the strength to let go.

It was a unique education for the little girls. The haughty nephew would be at Wickham Place one day, bringing with him an even haughtier wife, both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the world. Aunt Juley would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain had been appointed to the same post by the same authority. Were both these loud-voiced parties right? On one occasion they had met, and Margaret with clasped hands had implored them to argue the subject out in her presence. Whereat they blushed and began to talk about the weather. “Papa,” she cried—she was a most offensive child—“why will they not discuss this most clear question?” Her father, surveying the parties grimly, replied that he did not know. Putting her head on one side, Margaret then remarked: “To me one of two things is very clear; either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else these do not know the mind of God.” A hateful little girl, but at thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life without perceiving. Her brain darted up and down; it grew pliant and strong. Her conclusion was that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied.

WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere. The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

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

TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example, Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.” Now here was the nation’s vice-chancellor claiming not to understand why the United States had entered the world war against Germany. Dodd looked at Papen. “I can tell you that,” he said, his voice just as level and even as before. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.” Papen looked stunned. His wife, according to Sigrid Schultz, looked strangely pleased. A new silence filled the table—not one of anticipation, as before, but a charged emptiness—until suddenly everyone sought to fill the chasm with flecks of diverting conversation. In another world, another context, it would have been a minor incident, a burst of caustic banter readily forgotten. Amid the oppression and Gleichschaltung of Nazi Germany, however, it was something far more important and symbolic.

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.

Although Zolla no longer associated with Julius Evola, he nevertheless arranged for me to meet Italy’s most famous crypto-traditionalist writer who was a very controversial figure because of his espousal of the cause of Mussolini during the Second World War. I had already read some of Evola’s works, many of which are now being translated into English and are attracting some attention in philosophical circles. But based on the image I had of him as an expositor of traditional doctrines including Yoga, I was surprised to see him, now crippled as a result of a bomb explosion in 1945, living in the center of Rome in a large old apartment which was severe and fairly dark and without works of traditional art which I had expected to see around him. He had piercing eyes and gazed directly at me as we spoke about knightly initiation, myths and symbols of ancient Persia, traditional alchemy and Hermeticism and similar subjects. While he extolled the ancient Romans and their virtues, he spoke pejoratively about his contemporary Italians. When I asked him what happened to those Roman virtues, he said they traveled north to Germany and we were left with Italian waiters singing o sole mio! He also seemed to have little knowledge or interest in esoteric Christianity and refuse to acknowledge the presence of a sapiental current in Christianity. It was surprising for me to see an Italian sitting a few minutes from the Vatican, with his immense knowledge of various esoteric philosophies from the Greek to the Indian, being so impervious to the inner realities of the tradition so close to his home.

NATO paper: Modification of Tropospheric Propagation Conditions, detailed how the atmosphere could be modified to absorb electromagnetic radiation by spraying polymers behind high flying aircraft.  Absorbing microwaves transmitted by HAARP and other atmospheric heaters linked from Puerto Rico, Germany and Russia, these artificial mirrors could heat the air, inducing changes in the weather.  U.S. Patent # 4253190 describes how a mirror made of “polyester resin” could be held aloft by the pressure exerted by electromagnetic radiation from a transmitter like HAARP.   A PhD polymer researcher who wishes to remain anonymous told researcher William Thomas that if HAARP’s frequency output is matched to Earth’s magnetic field, its tightly beamed energy could be imparted to molecules “artificially introduced into this region.” This highly reactive state could then “promote polymerization and the formation of   new compounds,” he explained. Adding magnetic iron oxide powder to polymers exuded by many high flying aircraft can foster the heat generation needed to modify the weather.  Radio frequency absorbing polymers such as Phillips Ryton F 5 PPS are sensitive in the 1 50 MHz regime, HAARP transmits between two and 10 MHz.                  HAARP's U.S. Air Force and Navy sponsors claim that their transmitter will eventually be able to produce 3.6 million watts of radio frequency power. But on page 185 of an October 1991 “Technical Memorandum 195” outlining projected HAARP tests, there is a call by the ionospheric effects division of the U.S. Air Force Phillips Laboratory for HAARP to reach a peak power output of 100 billion watts. Commercial radio stations commonly broadcast at 50,000 watts.  Some hysterical reports state that HAARP type technologies will be used to initiate

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

Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi.  Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Decades later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters. Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Lauder Schools.  Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at tim@timtigner.com.

As the years go by and I grow older, I feel compelled to record my experiences in wartime Germany. It is important that my children, grandchildren and future generations know about the difficult times we all endured and of the horrors that existed in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Due to my advanced age and present condition, I am aware of the urgency to document my memories. If I fail in this, I will fail those who follow me, for they will never know!” Adeline Perry This book had its origin many years ago when Adeline Perry tried to recount her experiences and found that she would become overcome by her emotions every time she tried. The horrors and trials that she had experienced, plus the responsibility of raising her two daughters proved to be overwhelming. It was not until the twilight of her life when her daughters gently persuaded her to try again so that future generations might hear and perhaps learn from her experiences. In fact a good portion of these manuscripts were written while she was in the care of Hospice and only now survive because of immense personal strength and devotion to her family and the desire that what had happened to her would never happen again. Her daughter, and my wife, Ursula can take a great deal of pride in the effort it took to make these manuscripts a reality. After Adeline’s passing I had the privilege to develop the book Suppressed I Rise. Staying true to her story I gave her the authorship of the first edition of this book, which adhered to, and did not exceed what she had left in her original manuscripts. This book which was printed in limited numbers became an instant success and deserved more exposure. Readers also felt that there were questions that went unanswered requiring a follow-up. How did Adeline justify going to Germany prior to World War II? What happened to her marriage to Richard and how did she resume her own life, as a single mother, when she returned to South Africa! With additional reflections by her daughters Brigitte Grigsby and Ursula Bracker, and travel to the areas discussed in Suppressed I Rise, I expanded the book to include the prewar years. I also corrected minor contradictions and factual discrepancies that were inadvertently caused by the passage of time. Talking to people in Germany I confirmed some of what had happened including the hanging of the Russian prisoner of war. The book has now become a powerful example of not only personal courage but also of human tragedy. It is a book that I am proud to have written and share in the concept that it was a story that had to be told.

Everyone standing on the road as the body went past had been so utterly silent, so still. There was no sound or movement except for the slow steps of the Corpsmen and the steady progress of the corpse. It’d been an image of death from another world. But now I know where that corpse was headed, to the old gunny at PRP. And if there was a wedding ring, the gunny would have slowly worked it off the stiff, dead fingers. He would have gathered all the personal effects and prepared the body for transport. Then it would have gone by air to TQ. And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.

I first traveled to Germany when I was twenty years old on a train from Paris, where I was studying abroad. I still had the memory of falling asleep on the train in France and waking up to the sound of the German language being spoken over the loudspeaker, a conductor calling out the names of the next stops. Hearing these incomprehensible sounds evoked the secular New York Jewish education that I had received from my mother: The Holocaust was the central event of the twentieth century; you had family that was killed in the Holocaust; the Germans, the most civilized of people, did this. Still, on this trip, and on all the trips to come in the years ahead, there was little space for personal reflection. Instead, my energy—emotional and mental—would be channeled into the work I had to do.

Immediately after the war, a group of Jewish partisans known as the Nokmim traveled throughout Germany and Austria hunting down former members of the SS. Also known as the Avengers, this band of mercenaries paid by the government of Great Britain made northern Italy their home base.3

Tolstoy twice travelled abroad, visiting Germany, France, and England, and studying the educational systems, which seemed to him very bad. Children born with different tastes and capacities are put through the same course of lessons, just as coffee beans of different sizes are ground to the same grade. And this is done, not because it is best for them, but because it is easiest for the teachers, and because the parents lead artificial lives and neglect their own children.

this amount of helium to Germany. But by early March, Secretary of the Interior Harold LeClair Ickes (1874-1952)72, cancelled delivery of helium for Dr. Eckener’s new airship, based upon the German annexation of Austria and the “Anschluss” of March 12, 1938. Dr. Eckener traveled to Washington D.C. and although

Heidelberg, Germany: That night at the Inn, I noticed that a lint-haired young man at the next table was fixing me with an icy gleam. . . . He suddenly rose with a stumble, came over, and said: “So? Ein Engländer?” with a sardonic smile. “Wunderbar!” Then his face changed to a mask of hate. Why had we stolen Germany's colonies? Why shouldn’t Germany have a fleet and a proper army? Did I think Germany was going to take orders from a country run by the Jews? A catalogue of accusation followed, not very loud, but clearly and intensely articulated. His face, which was almost touching mine, raked me with long blasts of schnapps-breath. “Adolf Hitler will change all that,” he ended. “Perhaps you’ve heard the name?” —MEMOIR OF A BRITISH TRAVELER, DECEMBER 1933

Americans brag about their assault rifles. Germans brag about their exotic vacations.

Now “my Germany” is not only a distant consciousness, but a solid and living part of me that I carry with me wherever I go.

For some time now, Germany has had cruise ships visiting Cuba, such as the MS Deutschland, which can accommodate 513 passengers and has a crew of 260 members. She is known as das Traumschiff or the Dream Ship and is Germany’s television answer to the Love boat. With a displacement of 22,400 GT, the ship brought European tourists with their Euros as stimulus money to Cuba. However, on Monday, February 23, 2015, it was announced, that the operating company had declared bankruptcy. It was expected that finding new investors, and restructuring under the German debtor-in-possession management act, known as Eigenverwaltung, would allow the MS Deutschland to continue her scheduled visits. However, on July 27, 2015 with new owners it was announced that the ship would sail using two distinct names. For one part of the year the ship would be the MS World Odyssey having “Semesters at Sea” for students and for the other part of the year it would sail for the travel company Phoenix Reisen, using its regular name, the MS Deutschland.

It was a glorious experience for the children to travel by rail and the panoramic views of Africa through the big glass window in the rear of the last car of the Blue Train, were beyond description. It was just as you would expect it to be, as described in a vintage National Geographic magazine, with springbok and other wild animals abounding. The distance is approximately the same as from New York City to Chicago and took an overnight. Adeline and Lucia talked late into the night as the children tried to hear what was being said. There was a lot of catching up to do, but it had been a long and exhausting day and the next thing they all knew, it was the following morning and the train was approaching Cape Town or Kaapstad in Afrikaans, affectionately known as the “Tavern of the Seas.

I started my long journey back to Bischoffsheim, by walking from the farm, high on the side of a hill, down to the subterranean railroad station in Überlingen. After the last crest I could see the lake with the magnificent high Alps on the far side. Again, I knew that I was looking at neutral Switzerland but it was a world away from war-torn Germany. It took me well over an hour walking down the steep hill to the village. With me I had two big empty suitcases that I pushed ahead of me as I boarded the train that finally came out of the tunnel. At first the train for Strasbourg was nearly empty, but the farther north we traveled the more people got on. I remember how crowded the Strasbourg Hauptbahnhoff was when the train finally pulled into the station. Not wanting to disturb my sister-in-law Elizabeth again, I stayed at a hotel that night. I didn’t know if I was still wanted by the Nazis but I couldn’t afford to take a chance. This way I could catch the early morning connecting train to Rosheim, which was the closest town to Bischoffsheim.

It is difficult to find outstanding men who are selfless enough to work without knowing what can be gained by it, what can be accomplished in the future; men willing to meditate, to discover and invent, without expecting that their achievement will ultimately find recognition and application in their former profession; men willing to give up their assured high income in order to live in penury in Munich and to travel all through Germany like hunted animals, without any reward other than the inner satisfaction of an altruistic martyr.

An English traveler, James H. Juke, was aghast that a day’s sail could take him from a well-fed nation to an island of the wretched and dying. He saw Irish trying to exist on sand eels, turnip tops and seaweed—“a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he kept.” The potato blight had not spared England, nor Holland, parts of France and Germany. Their crops also failed. But only in Ireland were people dying en masse. The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned. “The terrifying exactitude of memory,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. Famines had come before, epochs of hunger that killed upwards of 70,000 in the worst case. But this starvation reached across the island—it was now the Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, with a fatal toll ten times that of the Great Plague of London in 1665. And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported. The natives were hired hands and witnesses to these money crops, grown by Anglo landlords. Same with cattle, sheep and hogs raised within eyesight of the hollow-bellied. Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.

For CDC chief Redfield the Chinese failure to close down international flights was disastrous. He told colleagues the United States had silently filled with Covid-19 infections “from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium.” All this late-winter travel brought clusters of Covid to the United States. “Also unknown to us that probably half of those clusters weren’t even symptomatic, so you couldn’t find them” with airport screening. “It was difficult to understand how China had aggressive travel restrictions within China, and yet did not move to any travel restrictions” for people who wanted to leave China and go abroad, Redfield said. “If there could have been one major, global action that could’ve really saved hundreds of thousands of lives, it’s if they had just shut down their out-of-China travel at the same time they shut down their intra-China travel. “They really started moving in the latter part of January. That’s where they quarantined people. That’s where they shut down the city. That’s where they stopped the trains. They really locked down all of Wuhan at one point. I think they quarantined over 11 million people. You couldn’t go from Wuhan to Beijing, but you could go Wuhan to London.

For weeks, as his mission had moved closer to completion, he had increasingly thought about what he would do then—he had no desire to stay in Germany and no reason to return to Lebanon. Within days, he knew, a modern plague—the black pox was how he thought of it—would burst into the public consciousness. Its presence would start slow, like a match in straw, but it would rapidly become what scientists call a self-amplifying process—an explosion—and the whole barn would be on fire. America—the great infidel—would be ground zero, the kill rate astronomical. Deprived of its protector, Israel’s belly would be exposed and at last it would be left to the mercy of its near enemies. As economic activity fell off a cliff, the price of oil would collapse and the ruling Saudi elite—unable to buy off its own people any longer or fall back on the support of the United States—would invoke a fearful repression and in doing so, sow the seeds of its own destruction. In the short term, the world would close down and travel be rendered impossible, as nations sought safety in quarantine and isolation. Some would be more successful than others and though a billion people had died from smallpox in the hundred years before its eradication, nothing like it had ever happened in the modern world—not even AIDS—and nobody could predict where the rivers of infection would flood and where they would turn.

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia…to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy…good writing stops.

Yoshiro wanted to visit Hildegard in Germany, just once, but the routes from Japan to all foreign countries had been cut off. Perhaps that was why he no longer felt the roundness of the earth beneath his feet. The round earth he could travel across existed only in his head... and there was nothing to do but follow that curve in his mind to the other side of the world.

New York’s German Jews began, in the 1870’s, to say to each other, “We are really more German than Jewish,” and were convinced that nineteenth-century Germany embodied the finest flowering of the arts, sciences, and technology. German continued to be the language the families spoke in their homes. The music children practiced in family music rooms was German music. When a Seligman, Loeb, or Lehman traveled to Europe, he sailed on the Hamburg-America Line; it was the best. When he needed a rest, he took the waters at a German spa—Baden, Carlsbad, or Marienbad. At their dinners they served German wines. When illness struck, the ailing were hurried to Germany, where the best doctors were.

Eva stroked the back of my neck with one hand and ran her other hand up and down my chest. She broke away from my tongue and kissed my lips over and under. Then she sat slightly back and looked at my face. I looked at her presence with a flush of wonder and at her face which was partially hidden by her long, auburn locks, which had fallen in from the sides. She parted her hair away from her face deftly with her hands and then leaned forward and kissed me first under my right eye and then under my left eye. It was the sexiest moment of my life. “You should close the door,” she told me.

Israel, of course, was not a transit country due to its geographical location, but due to its designation as the default destination for Eastern European Jews—not all of whom planned on staying there. In fact, some of them never made it to the Jewish state at all. The logistics of transporting migrants to Israel were more complicated than to Germany; hence, it was more likely that people “got lost” on the way. Organized Jewish migrants used routes that were determined by Jewish Agency travel arrangements. An important relay in this migration arrangement was the port of Naples, where the streams of Eastern European and North African migrants to Israel converged. Naples had replaced Marseilles as the transit station for Jews from the Maghreb by the early 1960s due to the high concentration of North African Arabs in southern France and the resulting fear of friction this caused among the Israeli authorities.

Much to Israel’s concern, in Vienna migrants could quite easily redirect their journey, and there is evidence that some had already tried to do so in the late 1950s.19 Some of those who sought to change their final destination in Vienna contacted the West German embassy with the goal of traveling on to the FRG. However, at that point, the embassy refused to assist them, because the Federal Republic wanted to avoid trouble with Israel, especially given that Israeli representatives tried to prevent such contact.20 Although the available documentation does not reveal how the migrants to Germany who followed this path managed to enter the country, it is clear that some did. Some migrants even asked the expellee authorities to refund their travel expenses, though mostly without success.21

The growth of Israeli influence in Europe presents a curious historical milestone and an unresolved contradiction. After the annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust, Germany has become the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel in October 2021 on one of her final overseas visits before leaving office; it was her eighth trip during her sixteen years in power. She did not travel to the West Bank or Gaza. She praised the Jewish state, despite acknowledging that Israel did not embrace her favored two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, but this did not matter because “the topic of Israel’s security will always be of central importance and a central topic of every German government.

In his report to the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry), Wolff wrote that Husseini said, “Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, antidemocratic state leadership to other countries.” In his view,” current Jewish influence on economy and politics” was “damaging everywhere and needed to be fought.” In the hope of doing economic damage to the Jews, Husseini opined that “Muslims hope for a boycott of the Jews in Germany because it would then be adopted with enthusiasm in the whole of the Muslim world.” Further, he was willing to spread the boycott message among Muslims traveling through Palestine and to “all Muslims.” He also looked forward to trade with “non-Jewish merchants” dealing in German products.3 Husseini’s remarks on March 1933 demonstrated his early enthusiasm for the Nazi regime based on his ideological support for its antidemocratic and anti-Jewish policies.

Zwartendijk issued over 2,000 passports, and between 4,500 and 6,000 Jews were able to travel to Japan using Sugihara’s visas – some accounts give numbers as high as 10,000. At a time when most of the other diplomats in the region did little to help the Jews, these two men took it upon themselves to do all they could to help the refugees escape. But despite the humanitarian efforts of these two men – in the case of Sugihara, acting in direct contravention of the orders he had received from Tokyo – the great majority of Jews were unable to leave, including many who had obtained documentation from either or both men. The Jewish community now comprised the original substantial population of Lithuanian Jews swollen by refugees who arrived from Germany before 1939 and Poland thereafter. They had little choice but to trust that the Red Army would be able to defend the region if war with Germany were to come.

We should hang on to the fact that the Mesnie Hellequin became synonymous with a great racket or din, a noise frequently compared to the tumult of a storm, and, according to Henry Guy, Gaston Raynaut, and Paul Sébillot, one is the personification of the other.28 In both thirteenth-century France and Germany, the Wild Hunt no longer traveled in silence, which distinguished it from other throngs of the dead.

Though the medieval witnesses portray Percht (Bercht, Berchta) as equal to Mother Abundia and the fairy women who enter houses on certain nights to grant their inhabitants prosperity if they find a meal prepared for them,16 folk traditions know her as the leader of dead children who had not been baptized. These women and their baby followers would enter houses and eat the food left out for them, most often on Christmas night or Epiphany. In the Eisack Valley in the Tyrol, Percht was accompanied by dogs that represented the souls of these children. This belief was widespread throughout Austria and Bavaria. In other regions of Germany, she was known as Dame Holle (Holl, Holla), and in Switzerland, she was Dame Selten.17 In the Haut-Adige, the night troop was called Corteo della Berta and traveled on the night of Epiphany or St. Martin’s Day.18 In Cadorino and in the Belluno region of northern Italy, the Redodesa corresponded to Percht, and she passed through at midnight of Epiphany night, accompanied by her twelve children (alora passa la Redidesa coi so dodese Reodesegot).

East Germans are the Greeks of Germany,” I say. “Be careful,” she says.

Pisac ovih sećanja na putovanje nema sreću da pripada onim ljudima koji su svesni jasnih razloga za sopstvene postupke; on, takođe, nema sreću da povodom sebe ili drugih veruje u takve razloge. Razlozi su, tako mi se čini, uvek nejasni, kauzalnost se ne pronalazi nigde u životu, samo u mišljenju. Savršeno produhovljen čovek, koji je u potpunosti prerastao prirodu, morao bi biti kadar da u svom životu pronalazi stalnu kauzalnost i imao bi pravo da uzroke i podsticaje dostupne njegovoj svesti smatra za jedine, jer on, dabogme, potpuno postoji samo kroz svest. Ipak, takvog čoveka ili takvog jednog Boga nikada nisam sreo, a što se nas ostalih ljudi tiče, dozvoljavam sebi da budem skeptičan prema svim obrazloženjima dela ili događaja. Ne postoje ljudi koji postupaju zbog "razloga", oni to samo umišljaju, a posebno pokušavaju, u interesu taštine i vrline, da ubede druge u to.

Like me, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy Program, was encouraged to prioritize marriage over career. As she described in The Atlantic, “When I was 27, I received a posh fellowship to travel to Germany to learn German and work at the Wall Street Journal. … It was an incredible opportunity for a 20-something by any objective standard, and I knew it would help prepare me for graduate school and beyond. My girlfriends, however, expressed shock and horror that I would leave my boyfriend at the time to live abroad for a year. My relatives asked whether I was worried that I’d never get married. And when I attended a barbecue with my then-beau, his boss took me aside to remind me that ‘there aren’t many guys like that out there.’ ” The result of these negative reactions, in Gayle’s view, is that many women “still see ambition as a dirty word.”20 Many have argued with me that ambition is not the problem. Women are not less ambitious than men, they insist, but more enlightened with different and more meaningful goals. I do not dismiss or dispute this argument. There is far more to life than climbing a career ladder, including raising children, seeking personal fulfillment, contributing to society, and improving the lives of others. And there are many people who are deeply committed to their jobs but do not—and should not have to—aspire to run their organizations. Leadership roles are not the only way to have profound impact.

Not surprisingly, nearly all Greeks think poorly of their public administration. In a 2012 EU survey, 96 percent of polled Greeks characterized it as “bad”—the worst result in the EU. The sentiment is so pervasive that one can assume most of the public administrators share it. The poll result was similar in the years preceding the financial crisis, and therefore cannot be attributed to subsequent cuts in services. Despite Greeks’ dissatisfaction with the way their government works, public employees in the decade leading up to the crisis received very large pay raises. During that time, public sector wages per employee grew by over 100 percent, near the highest increase in the eurozone, according to a report published by the European Central Bank. By contrast, in Germany, where people were satisfied with the way the state bureaucracy functioned, public wages grew around 13 percent. (That low rate, when one factors in inflation, essentially meant a pay cut.) Greek civil servants also received an array of benefits that sweetened their jobs. Until 2013, when the Greek government put an end to it, those working in front of computers—a condition considered a hardship—received an extra six days off a year in order to provide them some relief.

When I was traveling the world on my quest, I asked the health ministry of each country how many citizens had declared bankruptcy in the past year because of medical bills. Generally, the officials responded to this question with a look of astonishment, as if I had asked how many flying saucers from Mars landed in the ministry’s parking lot last week. How many people go bankrupt because of medical bills? In Britain, zero. In France, zero. In Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland: zero. In the United States, according to a joint study by Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School, the annual figure is around 700,000.3 QUALITY

Aung San spent the rest of 1940 in the Japanese capital, learning Japanese and apparently getting swept away in all the fascist euphoria surrounding him. “What we want is a strong state administration as exemplified in Germany and Japan. There shall be one nation, one state, one party, one leader . . . there shall be no nonsense of individualism. Everyone must submit to the state which is supreme over the individual . . . ,” he wrote in those heady days of the Rising Sun.8 He spoke Japanese, wore a kimono, and even took a Japanese name. He then sneaked back into Burma, landing secretly at Bassein. He changed into a longyi and then took the train unnoticed to Rangoon. He made contact with his old colleagues. Within weeks, in small batches and with the help of Suzuki’s secret agents in Rangoon, Aung San and his new select team traveled by sea to the Japanese-controlled island of Hainan, in the South China Sea. There were thirty in all—the Thirty Comrades—and they would soon be immortalized in nationalist mythology. Aung San at twenty-five was one of the three oldest. He took Teza meaning “Fire” as his nom de guerre. The other two took the names Setkya (A Magic Weapon) and Ne Win (the Bright Sun). All thirty prefixed their names with the title Bo. “Bo” meant an officer and had come to be the way all Europeans in Burma were referred to, signifying their ruling status. The Burmese were now to have their own “bo” for the first time since 1885. But six months of harsh Japanese military training still lay ahead. It wasn’t easy, and at one point some of the younger men were close to calling it quits. Aung San, Setkya, and Ne Win received special training, as they were intended for senior positions. But all had to pass through the same grueling physical tests, saluting the Japanese flag and learning to sing Japanese songs. They heard tales of combat and listened to Suzuki boasting of how he had killed women and children in Siberia.9 It was a bonding experience that would shape Burmese politics for decades to come.

And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.