Seminar on the Geography and Literature: Berlin's views. Berlin in the eye of the beholder. Voices from seven centuries.
Berlin smelt within 9 kilometers.
Carl von Linné (1707-1778)
It speaks so much of the Berliners, and their character. That is probably nothing more than the residents of Berlin. Because the real Berlin to find economical, and this city is more partly filled with foreign nationals who pose a colorful mixture.
Anton Balthasar König (1753-1814)
Berlin is a good city - excellent music, cheap lives, very decent theater, in the Bakeries many newspapers, and I read them all in turn - in short, all good, very good. - The Germans are terrible Philistine. Would be the tenth part of their rich spiritual consciousness passed into life, it would be wonderful people, yet they are, alas! A most ridiculous people! On a [inscription] is the Prussian eagle and painted him ironing Schneider, under the Schneider: Under your wings I can iron calm.
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)
The Berlin is rough, quarrelsome, without sentimentality, vanity, exclusive. With Berlin and the way to Berlin all exhausted, and he does not have a scale as this. He not only knows everything, but he knows everything better, everything else is bad.
Heinrich Laube (1806-1884)
Berlin is a botanical garden, all minds are cultivated here in Germany, though not always naturally, without artifice, but in pots, with heating. Anything and everything is here dissected, bottled, preserved in alcohol.
Gustav Kühne (1806-1888)
The terrain's speculation began. Unquestionably, the calculated one, would urge the province to the capital and now this supposed huge growth requires thousands of new houses with ten or twenty thousand apartments. The building mania, this insane building mania was over Berlin. (...) It was straight on "established", which would keep the stuff. Banks with limbers buildings, mortgage banks and products, railroads and wallpaper, spinning mills and leather, petroleum and corrugated iron, steam brickworks and shipyards, construction companies, housing associations and real estate: everything not nailed- and was nailed down, "was founded." And all, all they flew into the light, and all danced in this Hetzgaloppade to the beloved golden calf, the shrewd capitalist and the inexperienced young people, the General and the waiter who the lady of the world, the poor piano teacher and the market woman there was speculation in the ticket windows and in the theater dressing rooms, in the artist's studio and home in the quiet of a scholar ...
Felix Philippi (1851-1921)
At Wannsee, I experienced a great surprise. (...) What a sight! (...) Splinter naked children, men, adolescent boys, the bigger only in swimming trunks or prebound handkerchief, women in corsets or corset and leg protectors Small - all hung around there, dived into the water and came dripping back out. A man in swimming trunks, a round hat on his head, smoking his pipe in the bath, another had kept his shirt and vest! (...) Of the at least two to three thousand people who come together here, hardly anybody to watch the other undress. No suspicious glance, no ambiguous smile, not a smile! I call that true shame! The honesty is already here, so to speak in view! I was just speechless! ... Here I was among hundreds of half naked ... on Berlin's such a beautiful summer days call the pines with their red shimmering slender trunks, climbing down to close to the lake, memories of Greek shore, an island of the blessed, where Daughters of the Hellenes during bathing fun. But it would be cruel to continue to paint the picture ... the anatomy of these working people of both sexes, a comparison with the beautiful Greek slave, and the lovely female swimmers of Greece would not stand up ...
Jules Huret (1863-1915)
Messrs. Berlin speculate with me as with a winning hen. But I do not know if I can still lay eggs.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
This city seems to have no soul. Maybe because I know their shape from the outside.
Halide Edip Adivar (1884-1964)
Berlin is the brain, the emotions and intuitions, desires and resentments of the German people be formulated with scientific precision and journalistic verve. The metropolis is not created: it represents. When the Berlin of the imperial period, the aggressive dynamism of the young German nationalism saber-rattling had shown to the public, so mirrored the Berlin of the early postwar years with the same scandal, the apocalyptic mood of the defeated nation.
Klaus Mann (1906-1949)
On the way to Antwerp, I passed through Hitler's Germany, where I spent a few months. I had come on foot from Breslau to Berlin. I would like to steal. A remarkable spell of me would stop. Germany inspired a Europe whole horror, it was mainly in my view, is the embodiment of cruelty. Already it was launched. Even the Linden I had the feeling to walk through a scale of bandit camp. I believed that the brain of the most conscientious citizen Berlin hide pounds of hypocrisy, hatred, malice, cruelty, greed. It dug me to be free in the middle of an outlawed people. Sure, I also stole there, as elsewhere, but I felt it a kind of embarrassment - because the attitude that dominated this action was brought here to civic virtue - an entire nation was familiar with it and pointed it towards the others. "This is a nation of thieves", I felt. If I stole this, I do nothing special, so I could distinguish myself: I obey only the general order. I destroy they do not. I do not disturb. The scandal is impossible. I fly into space. It seemed that the gods who watch over the laws, not outraged, just surprised were. I was ashamed. More importantly, I wanted to return to a country where the laws of common morality, founded on the life, are the subject of a cult. In Berlin, I chose to live, prostitution. It satisfied me a few days, then bored me.
Jean Genet (1910-1986)
past model camp for Northern Europe, now a model of Rubble, destroyed Carthage and the dwindling giant cities in the jungles of Saigon. Geology of the people, history, powers! Of hanging gardens and lions gates of gray border town, attracted by the Eastern and the Western Caravan. Dust storms in summer, head-high nettles on the sidewalks, and where once drove the sleek Transportation mowing, at night she secretly hidden in the grass for the animals kept rooms. One million man-like creatures still in the wreckage, but all without work, behind boarded windows, rats in the arcades. A community! Now in the winter evenings sometimes I walked through the snow carefully in the middle of the roads from frost and winds most of the ruins. (...) It is still winter and all hopeless. The magistrates hide themselves behind the allied dese, behind the elements, these behind the highlands of Tibet, the Dalai Lama after the uswu we go to the dogs.
Gottfried Benn (1886-1956)
The consideration of the Berlin Wall, from another point of view, which alone takes into account the proportion of this building would be surely welcome. Immediately defused the wall. By inner laughter. Destroy the wall. It is not depend more on the physical wall. It is executed attention to the mental wall, and overcome, that's what matters most. (...) Spontaneously emerging question: What being member in me or other people create this thing? How much each of us has contributed to the potency of this wall and contributes further. Every man is interested enough in the disappearance of this wall? What antiegoistische, anti-materialist, what reality according to mental training, a young man to overcome this ever? Bottom line: the wall is not important as such. Do not talk so much of the wall! Explain disappear through self-education better morale in the human race and all the walls.
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)
I've written songs in all Western capitals and every time I reached the point where it was between me and the city no more friction. The case was nostalgic, vaguely decadent and collapsed on to the next town. Right now I am unable, in Los Angeles, New York or London or Paris to compose. Something is missing. Berlin has the strange ability to bring a to write only the important things - everything else mentioned it does not, it still remains, writes nothing.
Integrated David Bowie (1947)
in Berlin has none. Berlin is and never was a melting pot for anything. Who lives in Berlin, meets just that there are the others. (...) His return to earth one is surprised once again that will be in Berlin still each an expert in everything. But in Berlin the other, are also statements as meaningless as nowhere else suffocate the Berlin universities in their self-administration and bring forth yet modern academic models, in Berlin there is crippling subsidy mentality and yet it attracts those who are innovative . Berlin makes verbal opposition to his wall and at the same time criticized those who were doing something about it or do, it makes its pubs open throughout the night and complains about the noise. It is complaining about the noise of the aircraft and criticized, however, that gave Tempelhof to Tegel. On Berlin's lakes yachts bob up and down that are good for the oceans, its ice sailors race across the frozen Havel, as would be Mazury, and the Husky Club confuse the location of the city with the other side of the Arctic Circle. The Berlin crowd is elitist, even though it does not exist.
Reinhard Furrer (1940-1995)
Paris is always Paris and Berlin is never Berlin!
Jack Lang (1939)
Berlin is an island without gull.
Gültekin Emre (1951)
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