Germany Quotes

I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again.
I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.
If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.
In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.
In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.
It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding.
It would be presumptuous to say writing a book would be a sufficient gesture, but if people were more preoccupied with the past, maybe the events that overwhelm us would be fewer.
Mine is a European imagination, shaped largely by my very promiscuous reading in German, French, English and, with greater difficulty, Italian.
My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army.
My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.
My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.
Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.
The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get.
The writing I do makes great demands on translators.
There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie.
To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.
Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.
Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.
Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent.
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Ada Louise Huxtable
Profession
Critic
BirthDate
14 March, 1921
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