Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts

Thursday, January 5, 2012


Wittenberg All Saints' Church. The "These...
Wittenburg All Saints Church doors
"To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had commited and impossible sin and violated the Mother of God - this is madness." Martin Luther, 95 Theses
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The picture shows the doors where Luther is supposed to have nailed his 95 Theses

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Did The Enlightenment Fail ?

Jurgen HabermasImage via Wikipedia
Jurgen Habermas
"Enlightenment thinkers still had the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces, but would also further understanding of the world and of the self, would promote moral progress, the justice of institutions, and even the happiness of human beings. The 20th Century has shattered this optimism...Should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity as a lost cause ?" - Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity" in New Left Critique, 22 (Winter 1981)
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Monday, April 25, 2011

Hymn Of Hate

French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot,
We fight the battle with bronze and steel,
And the time that is coming Peace will seal.
You we will hate with a lasting hate,
We will never forego our hate,
Hate by water and hate by land,
Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,
Hate of seventy millions choking down.
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone
– ENGLAND!
 
- Ernst Lissauer (1914)
 
"The hymn was distributed in the German army, taught to German school children, set to music and sung in concerts. Lissauer was decorated for it by the Kaiser. It was also quickly used as counter-propaganda: translated into English and published in Britain and the U.S.A. to show how hateful those beastly Huns were and also to turn it round, by training English readers to hate the Germans back." - Friendship and Emnity in the First World War, Max Saunders, Literature & History Third Series Spring 2008 (Manchester University Press), 17 1, p62-77.