Germany

Anonymous, French (sometimes wrongly attributed to Max Frisch) - Pire que le bruit des bottes, le silence des pantoufles (Worse than the sound of marching boots: the silence of slippers).

Willy Brandt (10/11/1989) - Es wächst zusammen, was zusammen gehört (What belongs together grows together).

Klaus Staeck illustration

Ian Buruma (in Year Zero: A History of 1945, 2013) - Hitler’s project, based on ideas going back to the first decades of the twentieth century, or even well before, of ethnic purity and nationhood, was completed by people who hated Germany.

Tyler Cowen [July 2010] - Twentieth-century history may help explain German behavior today. After all, the Germans lost two World Wars, experienced the Weimar hyperinflation and saw their country divided and partly ruined by Communism. What an American considers as bad economic times, a German might see as relative prosperity.

Amos Elon (in The Pity of It All, 2004) - Before Hitler rose to power, other Europeans often feared, admired, envied and ridiculed the Germans; only Jews seemed actually to have loved them.

Kaiser Wilhelm II (1907), misquoting Emanuel Geibel (1861) - German values shall cure the world (Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen). Geibel's original poem : Am deutschen Wesen mag die Welt genesen.

Henry Kissinger - Poor Germany, too big for Europe, too small for the world.

Karl Kraus (in The Last Days of Mankind, 1918) - [The Germans] will have forgotten that they lost the war, forgotten that they started it, forgotten that they waged it. For this reason it will not end.

François Mauriac - J’aime tellement l’Allemagne que je suis heureux qu’il y en ait deux (I love Germany so much that I am happy that there are two of them).

Mark Mazower - The coercive powers of the state were never nearly as much in evidence in peacetime Nazi Germany as they were in Stalin’s Soviet Union: Nazi concentration camps in the 1930s housed some 25,000–50,000 prisoners, compared with the millions in the Gulag.

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau (in De la monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand, Vol. 1, Londres, 1788) - La Prusse n'est pas un État qui possède une armée, c'est une armée ayant conquis la nation. (Prussia is not a country that owns an army, it is an army that has taken over a country.)

Proverb - Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei. (Everything has an end, only a sausage has two.)

Proverb - Knapp daneben ist auch vorbei (Coming close is also missing it).

Karl Scheffler - Berlin ist eine Stadt, verdammt dazu, ewig zu werden, niemals zu sein (Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being).

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rec. Nat. habil. Pol. Blog. Dem. Gas. A. Shopenhaua (on Berlunes Blog) - Ellos tienen Mallorca, nosotros tenemos Berlín (They have Mallorca, we have Berlin).

Publius Cornelius Tacitus (in De Germania)- Quis (...) Germania peteret informem terris, asperam caelo tristem cultu aspectuque nisi si patria sit. (Who would (...) repair to Germany, a region hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold or to cultivate, unless it was his native country? - French: Qui est ce qui voudrait (...) venir habiter la Germanie? Les terres y sont incultes; le climat y est rude et fâcheux; le séjour en est triste et ne peut plaire qu'à ceux dont il est la patrie.)

Mark Twain - A German joke is no laughing matter.

Walter Ulbricht (15 Juin 1961) - Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten. (Nobody has the intention to build a wall.)

Voltaire (in Annales de l'Empire depuis Charlemagne, 1756) - Ce corps qui s'appelait et qui s'appelle encore le saint empire romain n'était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire. (That body still called the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.)

Hilde Walter (1968) - It seems the Germans will never forgive us [Jews] for Auschwitz.