A Quiet Flame

All men come to resemble their fathers. That isn’t a tragedy, but you need a hell of a sense of humour to handle it.

His face was all sharp angles, thin and pointed, like something Pythagoras had doodled on the corner of his scroll before getting on with his theorem.

truth is rarely the truth and the things you thought weren’t true often turn out not to be false.

I know, I know. Urgently. Germans. Every time you people open your mouths, I hear a clock ticking.

Saying one thing and thinking another was second nature to me.

Germany is for the Germans now,” said Wowereit. “Not a bunch of immigrants who are only here for what they can get.

You talk like the Nazis were going to win the election, Bernie.” “I keep hoping they won’t. And I keep worrying that they might.

The smart money in Berlin said that if they ever got into power, the Nazis were planning to put Daluege in charge of the Berlin police force. It wasn’t that he had any experience of policing. He wasn’t even a lawyer. What he did have experience of was doing exactly what Hitler and Goebbels told him to do.

If the Nazis do get in, we shall have to have faith that, eventually, the parliamentary process will restore Germany to its senses.

We have a saying here in Argentina. We say, ‘I can’t trust you until I tell you a secret.

I watched her go. I was glad to see the back of her. More important

In this job you meet the lazy, the stupid, the cruel, and the indifferent. Unfortunately, that’s what’s called an electorate.

All newspapers are fundamentally fascist

Sometimes the worst has to happen before you can hope for the best? That’s the only reason anyone is going to vote for the Nazis.

How did it ever get to be that bad? I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering.

the things you thought weren’t true often turn out not to be false.

All Germans carry an image of Adolph Hitler inside them....Even ones like me, who hated Hitler and everything he stood for. This face with its tousled hair and postage-stamp mustache haunts us all now and forevermore and, like a quiet flame that can never be extinguished, burns itself into our souls. The Nazis used to talk of a thousand -year empire. But sometimes I think that because of what we did, the name of Germany and the Germans will live in infamy for a thousand years. That it will take the rest of the world a thousand years to forget. Certainly if I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never forget some of the things I saw. And some of the things I did.

The colonel stood up. “I hope you enjoy your trip to Uruguay. Its government is stable, democratic, and politically mature. There’s even a welfare state. Of course, the people are entirely European in origin. I believe they exterminated all the Indians. As a German, you should feel very much at home there.

She ordered a coffee, and I ordered something I had no interest in drinking, so long as she was around.

She walked toward me, her high heels perforating the polished wooden air of the Richmond’s quiet basement like the slow beat of a tall clock.

Uki Goni’s excellent book The Real Odessa for much of my information about Nazis in Argentina.