Socialists From Germany

"I am freer than anybody else. I am free to choose the parents I want, the country I want, the age I want."

"[In response to the question "Who the hell are you?"] If I knew, I think I would not be able to continue writing, or wouldn't have written the books I have written."

"My personal history would not be disappointing to readers, but it is my own affair which I want to keep to myself. I am in fact in no way more important than is the typesetter for my books, the man who works the mill; ... no more important than the man who binds my books and the woman who wraps them and the scrubwoman who cleans up the office."

"Ich warte nicht auf die Einigkeit; denn ich bin die Einigkeit. / Ich warte nicht auf die Masse; denn ich bin die Masse. / Ich warte nicht auf die Revolution; denn ich bin die Revolution. / Ehe die Revolution ist, muß der Revolutionär sein! / Ehe die Masse ist, muß der Einzelne sein! / Ehe die Einigkeit ist, muß der Eine sein, der Selbe! / Das Wort muß sein, bevor das Feldgeschrei und die Parole sein können."

"If the company wants to beat competition, the drag and the fireman have to pay for it. Some way or other. Both the company and the crew cannot win. One has to be the loser in this battle, as in all other battles."

"No use to preach to the working-man courtesy and politeness when at the same time the working-man is not given working conditions under which he can always stay polite and soft-mannered. One must not expect clean speech from a man compelled to live in filth and always overtired and usually hungry."

"Imperator Caesar Augustus: don't you ever worry! You will always have gladiators. And you will have more than you will ever need. The strongest, the finest, the bravest men will be your gladiators; they will fight for you, and dying they will hail you: Morituri te salutamus! Hail, Cæsar Augustus! The moribund are greeting you. Happy? I am the happiest man on earth to have the honor to fight and to die for you, you god Imperator."

"The worker who has a job feels superior to a worker who is without one. Workers are not at all as chummy toward each other as some people think when they see them marching with red flags to Union Square and getting noisy about a paradise in Russia. Workers might have a big word in all affairs were it not for the middle-class ideas they can't shake off. The one who makes the delicate parts of an engine feels superior to the man who stands before a lathe making bolts by the ten thousand. And the man at the lathe feels superior to the poor Czech who gathers up the scraps from the floor and carries them in a wheelbarrow to the back-yard."

"There is no reason why I should run after a job. I'd have to stand up before the manager like a beggar, cap in hand, as sheepishly as if I were asking him to let me shine his shoes with my spit. In fact, usually it is less humiliating to beg for a meal than to ask for work. Can the skipper sail his bucket without sailors? Or can the engineer, no matter how clever he is, build a locomotive without workers? Nevertheless, the worker has to stand with his cap in hand and beg for a job. He has to stand there like a dog about to be beaten."

"The class I belong to always has to wait and wait, stand long nights and days in long files to get a cup of coffee and a slice of bread. Everybody in the world, official or boss, takes it for granted that our sort of people have ages, of time to waste. It is different with those who have money. They can arrange everything with money. Therefore they never have to wait. We who cannot pay with cold cash have to pay with our time instead. Suppose you get sore at the official who lets you wait and wait, and you say something about the citizen’s right it won’t help you a bit. He then lets you wait ten times longer, and you never do it again. He is the king. Do not forget that. Don’t ever believe that kings were done with when the fathers of the country made a revolution."

"The death ship is it I am in, All I have lost, nothing to win"

"Life is worth more than any book one can write."

"The biography of a creative man is completely unimportant."

"An author should have no other biography than his books."

"Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1956)"

"Die Macht einer Weltanschauung bewährt sich ja nicht durch die Antworten, die sie zu geben weiß, sondern durch die Fragen, die sie abzudrosseln versteht."

"Human beings are ashamed to have been born rather than made. They are ashamed of the fact that, unlike flawless and wholly calculated products, they owe their existence to the blind, incalculable and decidedly archaic process of procreation and birth."

"Wurm, der ich bin, von Leidenschaften zerfressen, der Selbstsucht zum Köder hingeworfen, soll ich dennoch den Menschen lieben. Wenn ich dies kann, und sofern ich dies kann, kann ich auch Gott lieben."

"Unter dieser Beleuchtung entsteht mir der Gott, der der Beistand des Armen ist und sein Rächer in der Weltgeschichte. Diesen Rächer der Armen liebe ich."

"As faith in mankind, Israel's faith is hope. And it is this epitome of Israel's prophetism, this hope in mankind's future, that comprises the substance of the messianic idea."

"Man's hope is transformed into faith when he no longer thinks of himself alone, that is, of his salvation here and now, or of his eternal salvation (the latter, if I may say so, with calculating sanctimoniousness). Hope is transformed into faith when man associates the future with the emergence of a community whose concerns will reach beyond its everyday concrete reality. Such a community will not be composed merely of man's immediate circle of friends or family nor will it include only those who share his own cherished beliefs; indeed, it will even cut across the borders of his own country because it will represent the community of mankind."

"Ethics must not remain a lovely abstraction; it must be concretized into valid truth. At this point ethics joins forces with religion because ethics too has ultimately no other recourse but to hypothesize the idea of God: not for the personal redemption of the moral individual but as a guarantee for the eventual realization of morality in this world."

"Wherever rights are denied the poor, the prophetic anger is turned not merely against the incumbent rulers but equally against the means society employs to gloss over its own mendacity. And foremost among these means is art. Catering to luxury and emphasizing only the beautiful, art denies the fact that wretchedness and destitution have a tight grip on the poor. This is the reason why the prophetic zeal turned against art, and not merely against the luxury of women and the pretentiousness of the rich."

"Love of God implies love of religion. And religion exemplifies that creative spirit of God which is at work in history as well as in the mind of man. Thus, one ought to love any religion, that is, religion as such, and in any form—as a manifestation of the moral spirit, the divine spirit of mankind."

"Only the idea of God gives me the confidence that morality will become reality on earth. And because I cannot live without this confidence, I cannot live without God."

"An dem Armen geht mir der Mensch auf. Daher kann ich den Menschen nicht denken ohne das Mitleid mit ihm, ohne die Liebe zu ihm. Nicht das Universum, aber das sittliche Universum, das soziale Dasein der Menschen muß ich denken und lieben, wenn mein Denken Gottes: Liebe heißen darf."

"Wenn ich Gott liebe, so liebe ich nicht pantheistisch das Universum, nicht die Tiere, die Bäume und die Kräuter, als meine Mitgeschöpfe, sondern aber ich liebe in Gott einseitig den Vater der Menschen, und diese höhere Bedeutung und diese soziale Prägnanz hat nunmehr der religiöse Terminus von Gott alsVater: er ist nicht sowohl der Schöpfer und Urheber, sondern vielmehr der Schutz und Beistand der Armen."

"Brandt’s first Government Declaration promised a social programme appropriate for what he termed a new participatory democracy. But, though innovative in many respects, his strategy was to expand and consolidate rather than to introduce radical reforms of basic institutional arrangements. In any case, there was no political incentive to do so, since the existing welfare system was popular and had contributed to the economic prosperity that was so evident to the electorate. Social expenditure in the Brandt years broke loose from economic growth rates, rising from one quarter to a third of GDP, the Federal Republic becoming one of the top social spenders in the OECD. This hyperactivity, after the years of careful planning and management during the Grand Coalition, may be explained as a response of the SPD to their long absence from being senior partners in the government. For the first time in the history of the republic they were now in that position and wished to legitimise themselves in the eyes of the electorate as a sound and progressive alternative to the Union parties."

"In our modern world, mass hunger, economic stagnation, environmental catastrophe, political instability, and terrorism cannot be quarantined within national borders."

"What belongs together, is growing together again."

"At the beginning of the 1980s the world community faces much greater dangers than at any time since the Second World War. It is clear that the world economy is now functioning so badly that it damages both the immediate and longer-run interests of all nations...The problems of poverty and hunger are becoming more serious; there are already 800 million absolute poor and their numbers are rising; shortages of grain and other foods are increasing the prospect of hunger and starvation...Between 20 and 25 million children below the age of five die every year in developing countries...A number of poor countries are threatened with the irreversible destruction of their ecological systems while many more face growing food deficits and possibly mass starvation. In the international economy there is the possibility of... a collapse of credit with defaults by major debtors, or bank failures... [and] an intensified struggle for influence or control over resources leading to military conflicts."

"It gives me great pleasure to congratulate you on your elevation to the high office of Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. You have already done much for your people, as governing Mayor of Berlin and as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor. The admiration and respect you have won throughout the world in these earlier capacities promises much for the discharge of the even greater and more challenging duties you have now assumed. I think you are aware of the confidence you have won throughout the world in years."

"In the face of this fact, is there not some justification for the opinion that the United States owe their very existence to the Jews? And if this be so, how much more can it be asserted that Jewish influence made the United States just what they are—that is, American? For what we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish spirit distilled."

"The rejection of concern for practical goals expressed in the German Society for Sociology's founding charter represented the culmination of a debate in the Social Policy Association, the so-called Werturteilsstreit, in which a group of young political economists, including , Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, attacked the older generation of political economists for mixing facts and values, science and politics."

"The name of Rothschild means more than the firm. It means ALL JEWDOM SO FAR AS THE STOCK EXCHANGE is concerned; for only with the help of compatriots could the Rothschilds have reached their position of power — which dominates all others and obtain ENTIRE MASTERY OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE. In order to obtain command of the stock exchange and the money market all possible means were utilized. The Rothschilds practiced stock jobbing in the narrower sense which the French attach to the word. They employed the expedient of artificially influencing the market by creating a favorable atmosphere. The capitalist movement reached its highest point in the speculation banks. By means of loaning speculative securities, banks are placed in a position, by acquiring other securities at a cheap price, to create the impression that money is plentiful and is accompanied by a desire to buy. Thus power of creating an upward movement in prices is easily acquired — and this power can be reversed just as easily to depress prices by depreciating the store of available securities. The great banks, accordingly, hold the handle which controls the machine called the stock exchange. And the heads of the banks tend more and more TO BECOME ENTIRE MASTERS OF ECONOMIC LIFE."

"Capitalism was born from the money loan. Money lending contains the root idea of capitalism. Turn to the pages of the Talmud and you will find that the Jews made an art of lending money. They were taught early to look for their chief happiness in the possession of money. They fathomed all the secrets that lay hid in money. They became Lords of Money and Lords of the World."

"Humanity without Nationality is empty, nationality without humanity is blind."

"Der Mensch gönnt seiner Gattung nichts, daher hat er die Gesetze erfunden. Er darf nicht, also sollen die andern auch nicht."

"Darauf sagt ein Diplomat vom Quai d’Orsay: «Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!»"

"It is not true, however, that the solutions proposed by the Zionists, of whatever shade, represented historical realism as against the inconsistent utopianism of the Bund. Certainly the prophets were not numerous, but they have to be given their due: Kurt Tucholsky, for example, who already in the mid-1920s sounded the alarm, in a Weimar Republic prey to the demons of order, nationalism, xenophobia and dreams of revanchism; Leon Trotsky, who in the late 1920s warned that the fate of Europe was being played out in Germany, and understood that the bankruptcy of German communism in the face of Hitler bore within it the inexorable unfurling of horror. At this time they were preaching in the desert, including the desert of Judaea. The rabbis who called for obedience to the temporal power in all circumstances, and the inspirers of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon who at the time paraded in black shirts, are not best placed to cast the first stone at these Jewish visionaries and militants who were struggling at this time for a better world."

"As a youth I enjoyed — indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered — the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system — which is to say by the accrual of wealth — house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America."

"I love Brecht and Fassbinder, of course."

"this sequence has that title coming from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright and poet, a revolutionary playwright and poet, I should add, who wrote a poem in which he said, “What kind of times are these, when it seems almost a crime to talk about trees, because it means keeping silent about so many evil deeds.” And so, I called the whole sequence “What Kind of Times Are These.” And in it, I was just playing with the sense of what it was like—what it is like to be alive in this country in the 1990s—the encroaching power of the capitalist economy, the denial of any kind of counterbalancing past, the wiping out of history, and also the need to find happiness and pleasure in the midst of such dark times, and how that can carry you through to be aware, as open-eyed as you can of what is going on in your time, and at the same time, as Rosa Luxemburg advised, to seize every beautiful cloud and every joyful moment. And so, this little sequence of poems came out of that kind of musing."

"A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls."

"The main objective is to learn to think crudely. Crude thinking is the great one's thinking."

"Do not treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have I not Always spoken the truth in my books? And now You treat me like a liar! I order you: Burn me!"

"The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I've felt that way, too. That's the way I am. That's life. That's the way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That's great art — Everything is self-evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art — nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh."

"Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable!"

"Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of."

"Those who lead the country into the abyss Call ruling too difficult For ordinary men."