Quotes from Lion Feuchtwanger

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific.

An experience opens many windows," an Anglo-Saxon writer once said.

If the government, by its sloth and criminal irresponsibility, had brought us, guests of France, into the dangerous situation that now faced us, the French people were doing their utmost to help us out of it.

Those who came from internment camps in Belgium told how they had been transported across France in sealed cars. No one had paid any attention to the trains and the occupants had been left without food or water. Their Belgian guards had robbed them of everything they possessed.

sort. The authority of sober reason is being undermined. The paltry varnish of logic is being scraped away. An epoch is at hand during which the large, partially hyperdeveloped animal, known as man, will revert to his fundamentals. Aren't you thrilled to be living during these times?" Quietly, he turned his

From Luxembourg, for instance, came a seventy-nine-year-old man with two grandsons, one fourteen, the other fifteen. They were now sharing the same luck, the same hardships, the same worries.

It is not altogether an easy matter to undress and get ready for the night when you have no chair, no bed, no table, no water, only a little straw, and are thrown in with numbers of other people in a dark room.

Most absurd of all was the fact that we, the "oldest inhabitants," the permanent residents, considered ourselves the aristocrats of the camp and looked down in utter scorn on this flotsam of strange faces that came drifting in.

Why should the Nazis do anything to me? Just because I have a little lingerie shop in Nice and my name is Gustav Kohn? What interest can Hitler possibly have in me? Don't you think I ought to stay?

A man of fifty-six, who has been all his life accustomed to his own room and a clean bed, does not find it very easy to sleep on the floor on a pile of dirty straw. He simply cannot master the technique of the thing.

Absurdly enough, not even Central Europeans who had served in the Foreign Legion had been exempted from internment.

It is easy to possess a conscience, Monsieur, when one only needs to talk or write about it. But the man, who has to act is constantly faced with the necessity, if he wishes to deal justly with one person, of being unjust to somebody else.

We rattled on, away from Les Mille, and we racked our brains as to where they could be taking us. To the Pyrenees? To one of the camps in the East Pyrenees? Or farther away toward the west? Maybe to Gurs, where our wives were?

What history had taught him was Amazement. A tremendous amazement that each time those in jeopardy had been so slow in thinking about their safety.

It was truly extraordinary how many men there were who felt the need of organizing something, of being important.

Paris had by now extended its internment decree to include Austrian and Czecho-Slovakian refugees, so in the days that followed hundreds of new arrivals appeared in our camp.

Some twenty straw piles from mine slept the writer Walter Hasenclever, one of the founders of German expressionism.

In the course of my fifty-six years I have had dealings with thousands of men of all sorts and conditions. I no longer have any curiosity about people.

The trouble was that he happened to possess a very special faculty—a faculty for telling a person's character simply by smelling of him. He could smell out the innermost souls of people.

Yes, after all, in spite of one's exhaustion, in spite of one's agony, one felt one's spirits rise. Comfort and misery are relative things.

During his first stay in the infirmary he had immediately smelled out the fact that not less than eight of the thirty inmates were Nazis.

He would point to some spot or other near the latrines. "There," he would say, pushing a bit of bread about inside his mouth, "on the sixth of February at five o'clock in the afternoon I began my memorable discussion with Professor K. on the ramifications of Leibniz's doctrine of monads in the thought of our day.

The city of Nîmes itself was short of everything; it was swamped with refugees from Holland, Belgium, and northern France. It had tripled in population.