Andre Gide Quotes
Since Germany seems bent upon getting rid of her brains, could not France offer to take in that “gray matter” that our neighbours seem to scorn? Could not the French government, above and beyond politics, offer Einstein, forced into exile by Germany, a chair in the College de France …
Andre Gide, 1869-1951, French Writer, Diary, April 7, 1933
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Laval was not quite correct. He was shot as a traitor when de Gaulle returned. See {587231} and {587230}.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
France, which in the 18th and 19th centuries was the center of science and technology for the world, has become more culturally conservative and has developed a maturity towards money and materialism which admires science and innovation but is reluctant to make the sacrifices in living and social style that is often required. Corporate regulations and banking and investment standards made it hard to form a Silicon Valley type organization in France. Many young people had gone to other countries to develop their skills and gain experience, but few return to France while many will start companies, they do it elsewhere.
The Germans had just passed a law making it illegal for a Jew to work as a teacher, professor, government official, scientist, or researcher. Szilard, a Jewish Hungarian politically astute physicist who was working in Germany was trying to organize a plan for the rescue of the Jewish German scientists—to place them in scientific or teaching positions in other countries. Kuhnwald, himself a Jew, was not only a very experienced politician, but one who had been following the Nazi Germany political scene “next door” to predict the future effect on Austria.
See {642231} for has additional views on German leadership. Many serious Germans agreed, but the culture, concept of patriotism, and the laws did not encourage open discussion of negative things about the nation so the problem remained.
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1947). Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars. The author of more than fifty books, at the time of his death his obituary in The New York Times described him as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti."
