Post-War Germany Quotes

You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.

Germany suffered most as a consequence of this Peace Treaty and the general insecurity which was bound to arise from it. The unemployment figure rose to a third of the number usually employed in the nation, which means, however, that by counting the families of the unemployed as well there were 26 million people in Germany out of a population of 65 millions faced by an absolutely hopeless future.

When I was a young boy, during the aftermath of World War II, Germany was broken and in ruins. Many people were hungry, sick, and dying. I remember well the humanitarian shipments of food and clothing that came from the Church in Salt Lake City.

There was a time for German stars in the 1950s with Curt Jurgens, Hardy Kruger, O. W. Fischer, and Maria Schell. That was a totally different generation. It all ended in 1968 during the big students' movement in my country. It was an anti-authority movement that changed everything. All my country's hierarchies, morals and values were questioned.

Ultimately, we didn't go to Germany to create a democracy. We went to overthrow Adolf Hitler. But once a democracy was there, Germany was a much bigger supporter of and help to our national interests, both economic and security than had ever been before.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.

Angela Merkel is no Konrad Adenauer or Helmut Schmidt.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the occupation of Japan and Germany was the relatively free hand the occupation forces enjoyed in imposing policy on the conquered country. This was especially dramatic in the case of Japan. There, the occupying forces wrote a new constitution for the country and essentially handed it down to the occupied with little local consultation in ways that are quite astonishing today for their radicalness and their dictatorial quality. In Germany the occupying forces had the luxury of postponing national elections for three years giving them precious time to purge the old guard and reestablish order before putting the new political system to the test.

I grew up in the time of Germany after the war.

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean But that couldn't happen again We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen And they've hardly bothered us since then

As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.

As a consequence of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the officer corps of the old army became part of this class, as did that part of the younger generation who, in the old Germany, would have become officers or civil servants.

Historians still often see the end of the war as meaning nothing more for Germany than lost territories, lost participation in colonization, and lost assets for the state and individuals. They frequently overlook the most serious loss that Germany suffered.

That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn't know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak - and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.

I'm German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn't exist any more.

German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.

Just as the British subject loves England despite her faults, so we must insist that all Germans who were part of the old Germany and helped shape her, recognize the greatness and worthiness of present-day Germany.

The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.

If Adenauer were here with us in the sauna, we could see for ourselves that Germany is and will remain divided but also that Germany never will rise again.

The carrying out of the Potsdam Agreement has, however, been obstructed by the failure of the Allied Control Council to take the necessary steps to enable the German economy to function as an economic unit.

The conditions which now exist in Germany make it impossible for industrial production to reach the levels which the occupying powers agreed were essential for a minimum German peacetime economy.

When WWII ended, the Cold War started, and the interest of the Western world was not to completely break Germany. So all those Nazis who had been controlling the country now had the power to rebuild it. I think there were many of them who just continued their life in society; it's a very known fact.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

Not only in America but in Germany, in France since the war, in Germany after the First World War, the Germany of Adenauer, these are the creative relationships of Catholicism to a free society that the average American doesn't fully appreciate.

Germany is a country that has absolutely had to since the Second World War ask itself massive moral questions. And it's reforged its identity based on culture. I mean, the amount of artists living and working in Berlin is unparalleled. It's one of the strongest economies, not only in Europe, but globally, and it's because of its understanding of the importance of culture.