Women From Germany

"Violence is the only way to answer violence."

"Ahab makes a great impression on his first appearance in Moby Dick... And if either by birth or by circumstance something pathological was at work deep in his nature, this did not detract from his dramatic character. For tragic greatness always derives from a morbid break with health, you can be sure of that."

"I just can't believe that there won't come a day when people won't be fed-up with being overfed. That they won't get fed-up with the self-deception that all this fantastic food is the whole point of life."

"Wonderful, I like cars, too, I like all the great things you can buy in a department store. But when you have to buy them in order to stay unaware, comatose, then the price you pay is too high."

"The people in our country and in America and in all West European countries, they have to gorge and guzzle so that they don't even start to think about the fact that we have something to do with Vietnam or what it might be about, OK?"

"These letters have come to be important to me because they help throw a little sand in the inevitability of the great story-telling machine in which everything is propelled towards death, murder, suicide."

"I am also overcome by fury and helplessness when I read these letters... What twisted thinking! What helplessness! What desperation and brutality against themselves, against me and others."

"I feel that by her act, she did something liberating, even for our family"

"They must have wanted to tell us — Look, this is where we are, where you have brought us. It is the position you have put us in."

"It astonished me that Gudrun, who has always thought in a very rational, intelligent way, has experienced what is almost a condition of euphoric self-realization, a really holy self-realization... To me, that is more of a shock than the fire of the arson itself—seeing a human being make her way to self-realization through such acts."

"Please never say again that I wanted to be rid of Felix, I am getting frantic here … When I get out I 'want' Felix terribly, but I don't want to take him away from you."

"If we made a mistake, then we made a mistake (I don't see it myself); after all, what's been missing in the European fight for socialism over the last 100 years, is the element of 'madness'"

"We will take them with us, because they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead... no, no I must also take the children, I must! ...they will be given a strong sleeping draught. Afterwards, I mean when they are fast asleep, they will be given an injection of Evipan or something sufficient to...to..."

"Love is meant for husbands, but my love for Hitler is stronger. I would give my life for it."

"My God, what a lot of rubbish."

"He no longer listens to voices of reason. Those who tell him what he wants to hear are the only ones he believes."

"The Führer wants it thus, and Joseph must obey."

"I would rather have my children die, than live in disgrace, jeered at. My children stand no chance in Germany after the war."

"We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge...we can't let them think we are cowards. Everybody else has the right to live. We haven't got this right—we have forfeited it. I make myself responsible. I belonged. I believed in Hitler and for long enough in Joseph Goebbels...Suppose I remain alive, I should immediately be arrested and interrogated about Joseph. If I tell the truth I must reveal what sort of man he was—must describe all that happened behind the scenes. Then any respectable person would turn from me in disgust. It would be equally impossible to do the opposite—that is to defend what he has done, to justify him to his enemies, to speak up for him out of true conviction...That would go against my conscience. So you see, Ello, it would be quite impossible for me to go on living. We will take the children with us, they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead. In the days to come Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals that Germany has ever produced. His children would hear that said daily, people would torment them, despise and humiliate them. They would have to bear the burden of his sins and vengeance would be wreaked on them... It has all happened before. You know how I told you at the time quite frankly what the Führer said in the Café Anast in Munich when he saw the little Jewish boy, you remember? That he would like to squash him flat like a bug on the wall...I couldn't believe it and thought it was just provocative talk. But he really did it later. It was all so unspeakably gruesome..."

"Harald! My beloved son! By now we have been in the Führerbunker for six days already—daddy, your six little siblings and I, for the sake of giving our national socialistic lives the only possible honourable end ... You shall know that I stayed here against daddy's will, and that even on last Sunday the Führer wanted to help me to get out. You know your mother—we have the same blood, for me there was no wavering. Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvelous that I have known in my life. The world that comes after the Führer and national socialism is not any longer worth living in and therefore I took the children with me, for they are too good for the life that would follow, and a merciful God will understand me when I will give them the salvation ... The children are wonderful ... there never is a word of complaint nor crying. The impacts are shaking the bunker. The elder kids cover the younger ones, their presence is a blessing and they are making the Führer smile once in a while. May God help that I have the strength to perform the last and hardest. We only have one goal left: loyalty to the Führer even in death. Harald, my dear son—I want to give you what I learned in life: be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country ... Be proud of us and try to keep us in dear memory ..."

"We have made a solemn vow to each other: When we have conquered the Reich, we will become man and wife. I am very happy."

"My father and step-mother were left behind in Germany but, two days before the War started, they were asked to come to Gestapo Headquarters and given an exit visa. There is a story in the family which goes back to the First World War when my step-grandparents were asked to give shelter to a young woman who'd been displaced by the war in Belgium. Although she had a Jewish step-father, she eventually married Joseph Goebbels! My stepmother believes she may have acted as a sort of protecting hand and was involved with the exit visa. Certainly, the night before Kristallnacht, they got an anonymous phone call warning my father not to go home that evening but to go somewhere safe. My step-mother swore it was Magda Goebbels."

"Straight after Hitler's death, Mrs. Goebbels came down to the bunker with her children. She started preparing to kill them. She couldn't have done that above ground—there were other people there who would have stopped her. That's why she came downstairs—because no-one else was allowed in the bunker. She came down on purpose to kill them."

", Worpswede, Worpswede! [small rural village in North-Germany were a colony of German artists was working then, including Paula] My sunken Bell mood! Birches, birches, pine trees and old willows. Beautiful brown moors – exquisite brown! The canals with their black reflections, black as asphalt.."

"During her very short life-time, Paula Modersohn-Becker not only enjoyed being with children and even playing child (in a 1903 letter to her husband, she said she looked forward to playing again in the hay with him and Elsbeth), but she, also, truly desired a child of her own. In her diary notation of October 22, 1901, a few months after her marriage, she wrote that three young women in Worpswede were expecting children around Christmas, but that she was not yet ripe and would have to wait a little while. On March 10, 1903, in a letter to her husband from Paris, she wrote that as she fell asleep, she would think lovingly of small children, and that she now felt like a woman, full of expectations, which were quieter and more serious than those she had had when she was a girl. Her longing for a child was so great that in 1906, in her 'Self-Portrait on the Sixth Anniversary of her Wedding', she even portrayed herself as pregnant! Her face is tinged with sadness, she stands naked, her arms encircling her pregnant stomach."

"Modersohn-Becker's ambition might have been called masculine in earlier times. Going by the number of self-portraits she painted, she certainly had a healthy ego (which Otto complained about). The grave demeanor and large dark eyes of Coptic portraits are especially evident in her self-portraits and paintings of her sister Herma. It is thought that she is the first woman to paint a full-length nude self-portrait and also to paint herself pregnant, and nude, which she did twice - before she was actually expecting."

"'My feelings can keep developing only in an admiring contemplation of nature,' said Mackensen, the actual founder and leading mind of the [Worpswede artist]-group. In 1897 Paula Becker chose him as her mentor. From her letters and diaries, we learn how deeply she loved the Worpswede countryside, the vast sky, the dark moor, the birch trees by shiny ditches of water, the moor cabins, and the people, marked by living in this world. But few of her paintings are pure landscapes, unlike the genuine Worpsweders [artists made them]."

"For that is what you understood: ripe fruits. You set them before the canvas, in white bowls, and weighed out each one's heaviness with your colors. Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded from inside, into the shapes of their existence. And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped out of your clothes and brought your naked body before the mirror, you let yourself inside down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense, and didn't say: 'I am that; no: this is. 'So free of curiosity your gaze had become, so unpossessive, of such true poverty, it had no desire even for your yourself; it wanted nothing: holy."

"What Paula is doing with her art now does not please me nearly as it used to. She will not accept any advice – it is very foolish and a pity. A huge squandering of her powers.. .She paints life-size nudes, which she can't do, no more than she can paint life-size heads. And in this.. ..she is just as addicted as I used to be about my fairy-tale drawings.. .A great gift for color – but unpainterly and harsh, particularly in her completed figures. She admires primitive pictures, which is very bad for her – she should be looking for artistic paintings. She wants to unite color and form – out of the question, the way she does it. She doesn't like to restrain form – a great mistake.."

"[Paula saw Cezanne] as a big brother.. ..an unexpected confirmation of her own artistic quest."

"I want to give colors intoxication, fullness, excitement, power. By trying to forget Impressionism, I wanted to conquer it. In the process I was conquered. We must work with assimilated, digested Impressionism."

"We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional.. .I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside."

"Now it's almost as beautiful as Christmas [then Paula suddenly fell to the floor].. ..What a pity! [her last words]."

"I would like to go to Paris for a week. Fifty-six Cezannes are being shown there!"

"My mind has been so much occupied these days by the thought of Cézanne, of how he has been one of the three or four powerful artists who have affected me like a thunderstorm, like some great event. Do you still remember what we saw at Vollard [art-seller in Paris who showed Cézanne's works frequently in his gallery] in 1900? And then, during the final days of my last stay in Paris, those truly astonishing early paintings of his at the Galerie Pellerin. Tell your husband he should see the things there.. .If it were not absolutely necessary [Paula was pregnant] for me to be here right now [Germany], nothing could keep me away from Paris."

"What I want to produce is something compelling, something full, an excitement and intoxication of color – something powerful. The paintings I did in Paris are too cool, too solitary and empty. They are the reaction to a restless and superficial period in my life and seem to strain for a simple, grand effect. I wanted to conquer Impressionism by trying to forget it. What happened was that it conquered me. We must work with digested and assimilated Impressionism.."

"The review was more a satisfaction to me than a joy. Joy, overpoweringly beautiful moments, comes to an artist without other noticing. The same is true for moments of sadness. That's why it is true that artists live mostly in solitude.. .[[w:Otto Modersohn|Otto [Modersohn] ]] and I shall be coming home [ Worpswede ] again in the spring. That man is touching in his love. We are going to try to buy the Brünjes place in order to make our lives together freer and more open.. .If the dear Lord will allow me once again to create something beautiful, then I shall be happy and satisfied; if only I have a place where I can work in peace. I will be grateful for the portion of love I've received. If one can remain healthy and not die too young.."

"I cannot come back to you. Not yet.. .I do not yet want to have a child by you. I must wait, if it comes again, or if something else comes out of it.."

"This past summer I realized that I am not the sort of woman to stand alone in life. Apart from the eternal worries about money, it is precisely the freedom I have had which was able to lure me away from myself. I would so much like to get to the point where I can create something that is me. It is up to the future to determine for us whether I'm acting bravely or not. The main thing now is peace and quiet for my work, and I have that most of all when I am at Otto Modersohn's side."

"The time is getting closer for you to be coming [to Paula, in Paris]. Now I must ask you for your sake and mine, please spare both of us this time of trial. Let me go, Otto Otto Modersohn. I do not want you as my husband.. ..accept this fact; don't torture yourself any longer."

"Night and day I've been most intensely thinking about my painting, and I have been more or less satisfied with everything I've done. I'm slacking a little now, not working as much, and no longer so satisfied. But all in all, I still have a loftier and happier perspective on my art than I did in Worpswede. But it does demand a very, very great deal of me – working and sleeping in the same room with my paintings is a delight.. .When I wake up in the middle of the night, I jump out of bed and look at my work. And in the morning it's the first thing I see.."

"..you [Otto] know me well enough to know that I am not bad and heartless. It just happen to be a 'Sturm und Drang' period which I have to get through, and there is no way to avoid hurting the people closest to me. It hurts me to cause you all this pain and suffering. Believe me when I say it is not easy for me either. But I must fight it through, to one exit or another – It has begun to be really beautiful here.. .I've seen wonderful Courbet's. I am sorry that he is now the latest mode. I think he is greater than either Manet or Monet. There was a colossal still life [of Courbet] with hollyhocks, in every conceivable colour, with a female figure in it. It was magnificently painted.. .Stay close to Elsbeth and to your art.."

"Dear Rainer Maria Rilke I thank you for saying that you rather like my painting of 'the little child'.. .You have brought me the first touch of Paris with this phrase of yours about 'liking and approving', and that alone is a great deal.. .Will I be seeing you here [in Worpswede] before I leave? I really hope not. The ground is burning a little beneath my feet.. . And now, I don't even know how I should sign my name. I'm not Modersohn, but I'm no longer Paula Becker anymore either [because she was married with Otto Modersohn, but is now leaving him]. I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more. That is surely the goal of all our struggles.. .I am now leaving Friday night and shal arrive in Paris on Saturday. Write a line to 29 Rue Cassette, where I plan to stay.."

"Mornings I am painting Clara Rilke in a white dress. It's to be her head and part of a hand holding a red rose. She looks very beautiful that way, and I hope that I am getting a little of her into my portrait. Her little girl, Ruth is playing next to us. She is a cuddly little creature. I'm happy that I can get together frequently with Clara Rilke this way. In spite of everything she is still, of all my friends, the one I care about the most. She was living very close to Rodin for about a month.. .As Rodin's secretary Rilke [Clara's husband] is gradually meeting the intelligentsia of Europe. Otto paints and paints and paints.."

"There are great many Rembrandts here [in Paris]. Even if they are yellow with varnish, I can still learn so much from them, the wrinkled intricacy of things, life itself. There is a little thing here by him.. ..It is of a women in bed, nude. But the way it's painted, the way the cushions are painted, their shapes, with all those details of lacework, the whole thing is bewitching."

"Today I was on the Rue Laffette where the art dealers are. There is so much of interest to see here. You know the things that you call 'the artistic' in art. The French possess to a high degree this sense of not having to bring everything to a pitch of perfection. The mobility in their nature really comes to their aid there. We Germans always obediently paint our pictures from top till bottom, and are much to ponderous to do the little oil-sketches and improvisations which so often say more than a finished painting."

"I feel a burning desire to become grand in simplicity."

"I believe that one should not think so much about nature when painting, at least not during the conception of the picture. Make the color sketch exactly as one has felt something in nature. But my personal feeling is the main thing. Once I have established it, lucid in tone and color, I must bring in from nature the things that make my painting seem natural, so that a layman will only think that 1 have painted it from nature."

"..Mother, the dawn has broken in me and I can feel the day approaching. I'm going to become somebody. If only I had been able to show Father that my life has not been fishing in troubled waters, pointless; if only I had been able to repay him for the part of himself that he planted in me! I feel that the time is soon coming when I no longer have to be ashamed and remain silent, but when I feel with pride that I am a painter.."

"In my first year of marriage I have often wept and the tears fall often as they did in my childhood - in large drops. They occur when I hear music and when I see beautiful things which move me. In the last analysis, I live alone just as much as I did in my childhood. This aloneness makes me sometimes sad and sometimes happy. I believe it deepens one's life. One lives less according to outward appearances.. .One lives inwardly."