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Quote by R.F. Kuang

“None of that mattered anymore. They weren't stupid little girls anymore. They weren't students anymore. War had transformed them both into wholly unimaginable creatures, and their relationship had transformed with them.”

Quote by R.F. Kuang

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The Dragon Republic

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R.F. Kuang

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“The Third Reich made it its mission to use the authority of the state to coordinate efforts within industry to devise standardized and simplified versions of key consumer commodities. These would then be produced at the lowest possible price, enabling the German population to achieve an immediate breakthrough to a higher standard of living. The epithet which was generally attached to these products was Volk: the Volksempfaenger (radio), Volkswohnung (apartments), Volkswagen, Volkskuehlschrank (refrigerator), Volkstraktor (tractor).34 This list contains only those products that enjoyed the official backing of one or more agencies in the Third Reich. Private producers, however, had long appreciated that the term ‘Volk’ had good marketing potential, and they, too, joined the bandwagon. Amongst the various products they touted were Volks-gramophone (people’s gramophone), Volksmotorraeder (people’s motorbikes) and Volksnaehmaschinen (people’s sewing machines). In fact, by 1933 the use of the term ‘Volk’ had become so inflationary that the newly established German advertising council was forced to ban the unlicensed use of the term.”

“There still exists - even today - a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness - or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ - had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe. Patriotism is particularism. ... However, European culture goes back much further than the nations of Europe. Greece, Rome and Israel, Christendom and Renaissance, the French Revolution and Germany’s eighteenth century, the supranational music of Austria and Slavic poetry: these are the forces that have sculpted the face of Europe. All these forces have forged European solidarity and the European cultural consciousness. None of these forces know national boundaries. All are the enemies of that barbarian power: so-called ‘national pride’.”

“In Dresden, Sylvia Morris witnessed the ransacking of the Jewish department store - Etam's [on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938]. 'Dresden had been peaceful and not pro-Nazi so this was a major event,' she recalled. 'We girls in the Töchterhaus made our terrified landlady go to the store to buy things. We opened all the windows and sang Mendelssohn songs as loudly as we could.”

“…[Samuel Beckett’s] diaries contained so little overt condemnation of the Nazis, although no one who has read them could be in any doubt about how much Beckett - who was to join the French Resistance in the war – loathed the regime. …[But] Beckett was quick to pick up on the absurd, such as the story he heard involving a servant and a milkman. In order to prevent Rassenschande [racial impurity], no Aryan servant under forty-five was allowed to work in a Jewish household. When a puzzled milkman asked a Herr Levi’s Gentile housekeeper how come she worked for him she replied that she was partly Jewish. When subsequently her even more perplexed employer asked her why she had lied to the milkman, she replied that she could not possibly admit to being forty-five.”