Modris Eksteins · 396 pages
Rating: (2K votes)
“Early on, to arouse a sense of belonging, of “community,” the party began to emphasize the importance, above everything else, of ritual and propaganda—the flags, the insignia, the uniforms, the pageantry, the standard greetings, the declarations of loyalty, and the endless repetition of slogans. Nazism was a cult. The appeal was strictly to emotion.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“Myth took the place of objectively conceived history. Myth, Michel Tournier has said, is “history everyone already knows.”2 As such, history becomes nothing but a tool of the present, with no integrity whatsoever of its own.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“It was Hitler’s style, his oratorical talents and his remarkable ability to transmit emotions and feelings in his speeches, that took him to the leadership of the ragtag party of misfits and adventurers that he joined in Munich in 1919 and that called itself the German Workers’ Party. The ideas he and the party spouted were all tattered; they were nothing but jargon inherited from the paranoid Austro-German border politics of the pre-1914 era, which saw “Germanness” threatened with inundation by “subject nationalities.” Even the combination “national socialist,” which Hitler added to the party’s name when he became leader in 1920, was borrowed from the same era and same sources. It was not the substance—there was no substance to the frantic neurotic tirades—that allowed the party to survive and later to grow. It was the style and the mood. It was above all the theater, the vulgar “art,” the grand guignol productions of the beer halls and the street.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“Nazi kitsch may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns.”
― Modris Eksteins, quote from Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
“People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires.”
― Robert Greene, quote from Mastery
“This was the other thing Grace had noticed about grown-ups. In addition to being afraid of each other, it was hard to wring any information out of them. At least, if it was information about them. If it was about what kids ought to do, then they were nothing but words.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Don't Let Me Go
“We were never perfect. There's no such thing as perfect. But it's not to late for us. We can still be good.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Last Days of Lorien
“Love be damned; I never wanted to feel that vulnerable and broken again.”
― Angela Graham, quote from Inevitable
“I don't know why women are so mad about flowers. Personally, they leave me cold. I prefer trees.”
― Sue Townsend, quote from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole
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