Quotes About Weimar

From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimer for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as "Sie," and must use the more intimate "du." This brought about a sea change. As one critic put it, Goethe's letters now became "prose poems of happy love with few parallels in any literature.

Berlín. Yo adoraba esta vieja ciudad. Pero eso fue antes de que se mirara en su propio reflejo y le diera por llevar unos corsés tan ajustados que apenas podía respirar. Yo adoraba las filosofías fáciles y despreocupadas, el jazz barato, los cabarés vulgares y todos los demás excesos culturales que caracterizaron los años del Weimar y que hicieron de Berlín una de las ciudades más apasionantes del mundo.

Look at the Weimar Republic and their hyperinflation in the early '20s. It didn't happen overnight. I've used the analogy, it's a lot like soybeans: you plant 'em, you wait. Conditions take some time. You need some sun; you need some water, but ultimately things start to grow, and are we in that phase or not?

Table 9.1 shows the soaring number of Reichsmarks needed to buy one US dollar, which indicates the trend in consumer inflation in Weimar Germany preceding and during its hyperinflation. Note

The creation of a free and comprehensive welfare system as the entitlement of all its citizens was one of the major achievements of the Weimar Republic, perhaps in retrospect its most important.

Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now.

Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar's failures.

Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany's largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler's staunchest followers.

In later years, the creators of "Weimar culture," the ones who survived, cursed the German people for not having listened to them. The tragedy is that the people had listened.

During the twenties, Germany's youngsters (both rightist and leftist) were in the vanguard of the growing rebellion against the Weimar Republic. The youngsters were rebelling against the establishment in the name of every fundamental idea which they had been taught by every influential spokesman of that establishment

My time in Weimar Berlin was the most elegant in my life. I would have parties for a hundred people - writers, scientists, artists.

And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable.

Weimar Germany conjures up fears of what can happen when there is simply no societal consensus on how to move forward and every minor difference becomes a cause of existential political battles,

The Weimar system appeared to me like a father who locks his little boys in a room and stirs them up against one another and says: 'Beat each other up as much as you want.'

The fall of the short-lived Weimar Republic, and the subsequent rise of Nazi power, tells us that there is a danger to whittling down the power of our institutions when we cannot yet foresee what will replace them.

Indeed, the ancestral proof that Nazis began to require of German citizens would not have been possible without the formalization of genealogy that began in imperial Germany and continued through the Weimar era. Even

The new government decided the best way to rectify this was to outlaw abortion and prohibit the sale or display of contraceptives in the Weimar constitution of 1919. During a time of unimaginable scarcity and fear, women were forced into motherhood. They were forced to make do, and the pressure to repopulate the nation, to birth and raise a new generation of mothers and soldiers, was enormous. It was the most important thing a woman could possibly do: Be the Good Mother.

he saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse.

We worked and governed with incredible elan. We really ruled. For the bureaucrats of the Ministry the contrast to the Weimar Republic was stark. Party chatter in the Reichstag was no longer heard. The language of the bureaucracy was rid of the paralyzing formula: technically right but politically impossible.

Rather than creating a pure Reich out of a Weimar Germany almost glorifying in its hedonistic allure, the Nazi hierarchy would exhibit every symptom of decadence. When the drug-addicted Goering was arrested in 1945, his fingernails were varnished red; on being strip-searched, it was discovered his toenails were painted, too.

Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.

There are times – they mark the danger point for a political system – when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing. The politicians of Weimar's parties were well on the way to reaching that point in 1930.

The austere empiricism and scholarly imagination of the Warburg style were the very antithesis of the brutal anti-intellectualism and vulgar mysticism threatening to barbarize German culture in the 1920s; this was Weimar at its best.