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Claudio Magris

Claudio Magris Biography

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“The honeyed sweetness of Mengele, of his words and of his smile, which he hoped would endow him with some resemblance to the Angel of Death, is the genuine, imbecile expression of every kind of fascination with evil; it is the expression featured in every demi-culture that expects the shoddy junk of the shadows to make amends for its own paltriness. The prohibited act, often as trite as throwing rubbish out of the window, is no less obtuse just because it torments or tortures. The Gorgon, said Joseph Roth about Nazism, is banal. Mengele's victims are characters in a tragedy, but Mengele himself is a figure in a farrago of gibberish.”

EvilViolenceNazismLosers
Book:Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
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“It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes -- for that is a sedentary task -- than like one who destroys them. . . . But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order.”

ShouldArtDifferentFormCertainOrderCreatingStonesTasksDestructionShould HaveArchitectureLandscapeConstructsComfortingCalculationsTravellerDeconstructionSedentary
Book:Danube
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