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Quotes About Berlin

I'm a Berliner - fast, loud, obnoxious, industrious, brutally open.
~ Hasso Plattner
The family is a police state, the Visitor said, describing how minuscule stages lit up inside her, repeating key scenes from her life. Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them? After a long silence, A. said: Childhood is a city you never leave. In Berlin's past, we seek our own.
~ Cristina García
In der Morgensonne schlenderte er über den Kurfürstendamm, kaufte sich an einem Kiosk einen Baedeker und nahm ein Taxi zum verwüsteten Reichstag, wo man emsig an der Restaurierung arbeite. Das Gebäude war barhäuptig: die große Mittelkuppel – Bismarcks Helm – war verschwunden, und als er sich umdrehte, sah er am anderen Ende der großen Wiese im Tiergarten das neue Kongreßzentrum, das exakt die Form von Hitlers Mütze hatte.
~ Harry Mulisch
Berlin. 25 June 1940. I have the impression that we are rushing for a common currency for the whole of Europe. That would be progress, of course, and, one would hope, of lasting significance. Letter from Helmuth von Moltke (military intelligence)1
~ Len Deighton
Ich bin ein Berliner,' I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.
~ Len Deighton
Berlin is a sort of history book of twentieth-century violence, and every street corner brought a recollection of something I'd heard, seen, or read. We followed the road alongside the Landwehr Canal, which twists and turns through the heart of the city. Its oily water holds many dark secrets.
~ Len Deighton
At a mass meeting in Berlin, Adolf Hitler, in thrall to a most appalling aynredenish, shrieked, "And who is responsible for all our troubles?" Ben Cohen shouted, "The bicycle riders and the Jews!" Hitler looked up, astonished. "Why the bicycle riders?" "Why the Jews?" replied Cohen.
~ Leo Rosten
Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.
~ Janet Fitch
In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.
~ Janet Fitch
Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia
~ Janet Fitch
It is Leistikow's lasting achievement - and will always remain so - that he found a style that can express the melancholy charm of the surroundings of Berlin. We see the Grunewald lakes and those on the upper Spree through his eyes; he has taught us to see their beauty.
~ Max Liebermann
I knew Berlin would have to become a kind of character in my new book, 'In the Garden of Beasts'. I had felt likewise about Chicago when I wrote 'The Devil in the White City' and Galveston with 'Isaac's Storm'.
~ Erik Larson
I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.
~ George J. Mitchell
'Hum Dono' was accepted in a very big way. It was the official entry at the 1962 Berlin Film Festival.
~ Dev Anand
In 2013, we opened our first international office in London and established a European hub in Berlin.
~ Jon Oringer
The Oberst chuckled. "The Führer was a cheap poseur," he said. "On April twenty-second…I remember it was two days after his birthday…the Führer decided to leave for the south to take command of Schoerner and Kesselring's army groups before Berlin fell. I persuaded him to stay. The next day I flew out of the city in a light plane, using as a runway an avenue that ran through the shattered Tiergarten. Move, Herr Barent.
~ Dan Simmons
Berlin was charismatic in the roguish way of a love... It was a lover who was a little dangerous in ways that didn't always show, keeping you a bit on edge, a bit in love and endlessly forgiving because he made her feel that she was exactly where she was meant to be... Berlin made you like who you were when you were there, as if everything worth being a part of in the world - all those modern ideas about sex and art and women; all that possibility - was right there, in its dark, beating heart.
~ Whitney Otto
Noble in form and in intent as all these neutral appeals were, there is something unreal and pathetic about them when reread today. It was as if the President of the United States, the Pope and the rulers of the small Northern European democracies lived on a different planet from that of the Third Reich and had no more understanding of what was going on in Berlin than of what might be transpiring on Mars.
~ William L. Shirer
To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared that a charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of Germans Hitler had—or would shortly assume—the aura of a truly charismatic leader. They were to follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine judgment, for the next twelve tempestuous years. THE ADVENT OF ADOLF HITLER Considering
~ William L. Shirer
Early in January 1919 he struck. Between January 10 and 17—"Bloody Week," as it was called in Berlin for a time—regular and free-corps troops under the direction of Noske and the command of General von Luettwitz* crushed the Spartacists. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured and murdered by officers of the Guard Cavalry Division.
~ William L. Shirer
As the strife-ridden year of 1932 approached its end, Berlin was full of cabals, and of cabals within cabals.
~ William L. Shirer
The Olympic games held in Berlin in August 1936 afforded the Nazis a golden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they made the most of it.
~ William L. Shirer
On Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lustgarten in the center of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler Chancellor.
~ William L. Shirer
BERLIN, June 18 It's in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain's. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.
~ William L. Shirer