It is a subtlety that God learned Greek when he wanted to become a writer, and also that he did not learn it well.
Es ist eine Feinheit, daß Gott griechisch lernte, als er Schriftsteller werden wollte, und ebenso dies, daß er es nicht besser lernte!
--Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in Nietzche Werke, book VII (posthumous fragments, 1882-1884), no. 445.
Compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.
...In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million....
But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead....France lost 270,000 civilians....Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 milllion, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million....In China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown now....The complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand-- in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies-- seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.
--British historian Tony Judt (1948- )in the New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008
The Dutch understand cleanliness better than anyone in the world. Things are very different in France. There is one dirty thing at Court that I shall never get used to: the people stationed in the galleries in front of our rooms piss into all the corners. It is impossible to leave one's apartments without seeing somebody pissing.
--Letter from Liselotte von der Pfalz, German sister-in-law of Louis XIV, Versailles, 23 July 1702. From Letters From Liselotte, translated by Maria Kroll
The Axis allies were not... the best of bedfellows. Nevertheless, in summing up the Italians to [his son] Manfred, Rommel made a not ungenerous and refreshingly un-German remark. "Certainly they are no good at war," he said. "But one must not judge everyone in the world only by his qualities as a soldier: otherwise we should have no civilisation."
--German General Erwin Rommel, quoted in Rommel, the Desert Fox (1950), by Desmond Young
Yes, if you meet Englishmen in a foreign country, you see their defects quite glaringly through the contrast. They are the gods of boredom, who hunt through all countries post-haste in shiny black carriages, and leave a gray dustcloud of gloom behind them everywhere they go. And then you have their disinterested curiosity, their well-washed dowdiness, their impertinent stupidity, their awkward selfishness, and their dreary joy in all melancholy subjects. 
For the past three weeks, you can see an Englishman every day here in the Pizza di Gran Duca [in Florence, Italy]. For hours at a time he watches a charlatan there who sits on a horse and pulls out people's teeth. Perhaps the noble son of Albion takes advantage of this show because he misses the executions in his dear homeland....For, next to boxing and cockfighting, there is for a Briton no finer view than the agony of some poor devil who has stolen a sheep or counterfeited a signature and is shown to the public for an hour in front of the façade of Old Bailey, with a rope around his neck, before they spin him off into eternity. It is no exaggeration when I say that stealing a sheep and counterfeiting are punished the same as the most abhorrent crimes, like parricide or incest, in that savage land. I myself, passing by through a sad coincidence, saw a man hanged because he stole a sheep, and since then I have lost all my pleasure in roast mutton; the fat always reminds me now of the white cap of the poor sinner. Next to him they executed an Irishman who had imitated the handwriting of a rich banker; I still see the naive fear of death of the poor Paddy, who at his trial could not grasp that he would be punished so harshly for an imitated handwriting-- he, who would let anyone who wanted imitate his own! And this people constantly talks of Christianity, and misses no Sunday in church, and floods the whole world with Bibles.
--Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Florentine Nights
Ja, wenn man den Engländern in einem fremden Lande begegnet, kann man, durch den Kontrast, ihre Mängel erst recht grell hervortreten sehen. Es sind die Götter der Langeweile, die, in
blanklackierten Wagen, mit Extrapost durch alle Länder jagen und
überall eine graue Staubwolke von Traurigkeit hinter sich lassen. Dazu
kommt ihre Neugier ohne Interesse, ihre geputzte Plumpheit, ihre freche
Blödigkeit, ihr eckiger Egoismus und ihre öde Freude an allen
melancholischen Gegenständen. Schon seit drei Wochen sieht man hier auf
der Piazza di Gran Duca alle Tage einen Engländer, welcher stundenlang
mit offenem Maule jenem Scharlatane zuschaut, der dort, zu Pferde
sitzend, den Leuten die Zähne ausreißt. Dieses Schauspiel soll den
edlen Sohn Albions vielleicht schadlos halten für die Exekutionen, die
er in seinem teuern Vaterlande versäumt... Denn nächst Boxen und
Hahnenkampf gibt es für einen Briten keinen köstlicheren Anblick als
die Agonie eines armen Teufels, der ein Schaf gestohlen oder eine
Handschrift nachgeahmt hat und vor der Fassade von Old Bailey eine
Stunde lang, mit einem Strick um den Hals, ausgestellt wird, ehe man
ihn in die Ewigkeit schleudert. Es ist keine Übertreibung, wenn ich
sage, daß Schafdiebstahl und Fälschung in jenem häßlich grausamen Lande
gleich den abscheulichsten Verbrechen, gleich Vatermord und
Blutschande, bestraft werden. Ich selber, den ein trister Zufall
vorbeiführte, ich sah in London einen Menschen hängen, weil er ein
Schaf gestohlen, und seitdem verlor ich alle Freude an Hammelbraten;
das Fett erinnert mich immer an die weiße Mütze des armen Sünders.
Neben ihm ward ein Irländer gehenkt, der die Handschrift eines reichen
Bankiers nachgeahmt; noch immer sehe ich die naive Todesangst des armen
Paddy, welcher vor den Assisen nicht begreifen konnte, daß man ihn
einer nachgeahmten Handschrift wegen so hart bestrafe, ihn, der doch
jedem Menschenkind erlaube, seine eigne Handschrift nachzuahmen! Und
dieses Volk spricht beständig von Christentum und versäumt des Sonntags
keine Kirche und überschwemmt die ganze Welt mit Bibeln.
Where can you and Luise have been hiding, to know so little of the ways of the world? I should have thought it was quite impossible to spend any time at all at any court without getting quite a good idea of it. If one were to detest every man who is fond of young fellows, it would be impossible to find even six people to like, or at least not to dislike. Some of them hate women and only love me, others like both men and women, some only like children of ten or eleven, others young men between seventeen and twenty-five. Most are in this category. Other debauchees, who love neither men nor women, amuse themselves all alone, but there are only a few of those. And then there are those who don't mind what they have, human or animal; they take whatever comes along. I know someone here who brags that he has had relations with everything under the sun except toads.
--Letter from Liselotte von der Pfalz, German sister-in-law of Louis XIV, Versailles, 3 December 1705. From , translated by Maria Kroll
A female black swan in the German city of Münster, who became famous for her "well-known tragic liaison" with a swan-boat for the past two years, has now fallen in love with a white mute swan.
"'And of course the swan-boat is the last to find out,' stated zoo boss Adler soberly, adding, 'It's almost painful.'"
A dinner at Harvard. I was the only foreigner at an evening dinner with six or seven men, including two Nobel Prize winners. The only thing they talked about was the best way to invest their money. It was appalling, I'll never forget it.
--Helmut Schmidt (1918- ), Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, remembering his worst dinner ever
Ein Essen in Harvard. Ich sass als einziger Auslaender an einem Abendbrottisch mit sechs oder sieben Maennern, darunter zwei Nobelpreistraeger. Die haben sich nur darueber unterhalten, wie sie am besten ihr Geld anlegen. Es war schrecklich, ich werde das nicht vergessen.
[The author meets Dr. Alfonso Smith of the University of Virginia.]
Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Institutions. While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.
"I talked with him twice," he said, "and upon the second occasion under very delightful circumstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess Victoria Luise being present....
"He speaks English without an accent, though we might say that he spoke it with an English accent. He told me that he had learned English before he learned German, and had also caused his children to learn it first. He reads Mark Twain, or had read him, and he enjoyed him, but he said that when he met Mark Twain the latter had little or nothing to say, and that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he got him to talk at all. He subscribed, he told me, to 'Harper's Magazine,' and he was in the habit of reading short stories aloud to his family, in English."
--From American Adventures: A Second Trip "Abroad at Home" (1917), ch. 15, by Julian Street (1879-1947)
Kaiser Wilhelm's mother was a British princess, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. She did not want him to rule Germany, and sent her own papers away for safekeeping when he came to the throne.
On April 30, 1945, as units of the 7th American army prepared to take Munich, the "Hauptstadt der Bewegung" ["capital of the movement" of Naziism, and Hitler's favorite city], a ghostly land of ruins awaited them, in which almost all human life seemed to have died out. Already since the day before traffic had fallen silent in the rubble-filled streets of the outer areas, which in the center of Munich had been worn into narrow paths through mountains of looming building façades; a tense, paralyzing silence, interrupted only through the thunder of guns, told of the arrival of the victors....
The Munich population still bore the burden of the years of bombing, but the marching in of the enemy was still an occasion for joy: for the city, the Second World War was over.
--From Ruinen-Jahren: Bilder aus dem zerstörten München 1945-1949 [Pictures of Munich destroyed] (1983), by Richard Bauer.
