Moss And The German Quotes

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.

C. S. Lewis called it the “inconsolable longing” for we know not what, or Sehnsucht, a German term based on the words das Sehnen (“the yearning”) and sucht (“an obsession or addiction”). Sehnsucht was the animating force of Lewis’s life and career. It was “that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.” He’d felt it first as a young boy, when his brother brought him a toy garden in the form of an old biscuit tin filled with moss and flowers, and he was overcome by a joyous ache he couldn’t understand, though he would try for the rest of his life to put it into words, to find its source, to seek the company of kindred spirits who’d known the same wondrous “stabs of joy.

There was one other anti-invasion tactic that was never admitted officially, at the time or later.[212] Churchill ordered his military chiefs to investigate the possibility of drenching the beaches with mustard gas if the Germans landed.

Britain had an asset that became increasingly important as the war went on, the existence of which was only disclosed thirty years after the war ended (Churchill did not mention it in his history of the war). With the help of Polish intelligence, the British had acquired the basic German military coding machine, called Enigma.

Trees were erected by German immigrants in Texas in the 1840s, and by the 1850s they had become naturalized and were decorated with local produce: moss, cotton, pecans, red pepper swags and, an American innovation, the popcorn string, as well as Old World red berries, biscuits and sweets.

And so Paris is not merely the largest town in France, not merely the political and intellectual capital where all the smartest and most ambitious people from the provinces go to seek fame and fortune. If the origins of many of the Parisians lie in La France Profonde, the origins of the French identity nonetheless lie in Paris. Le tout Paris in this sense means something more than the gathering of the small number of people in town who count moss socially, though of course it does mean that as well. It also suggests that to be Parisian' is to have an identity that transcends social class, economic distinction it is to belong to a world apart, to an intellectual and moral category, nor or class, race, or gender, but of a qualitative difference from the rest, an essential worldliness, a heightened expectation--as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in a different context- of the possibilities of life. Many people, foreigners who belonged to Paris and Parisians exiled from it, put it their own way. Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, identified Paris as the place where the elan vital, Bergson's phrase for the life force, is stronger than elsewhere. "Elan vital," Rilke asked, "is it life? No. Life is calm, vast, simple. It is the desire to live in haste, in pursuit; it is the impatience to possess all of life right away, right there. Paris is full of this desire; that is who it is so close to death." Victor Hugo, the great novelist and poet, exiled for many years of his life, meant the same thing when he wrote: "Ever since historic times, there has always been on the earth what we call the City. . .. We have needed the city that thinks. ... We have needed the city where everybody is citizen. … Jerusalem unleashes the True. Athens the Beautiful; Rome the Great. Paris is the sum of all three of these great cities.

brief, German Jews were prisoners of what George L. Mosse analysed as an insurmountable contradiction between Bildung and Sittlichkeit, the former being increasingly Judaized, while the latter remained ever unattainable, even by individuals as rich and powerful as the banker Gerson Bleichröder or the industrialist Walther Rathenau.