A bad end, a sad end, was the last end of Mieze. And why, why, why? What crime had she committed? She came from Bernau into the wh...irl of Berlin, she was not an innocent girl, certainly not, but her love for him was pure and steadfast; he was her man and she took care of him like a child. She was struck down because she happened by chance to encounter this man; such is life, it's really inconceivable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein... Berliner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by... 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Remember to take the best dancing master at Berlin, more to teach you to sit, stand, and walk gracefully, than to dance finely. Th...e Graces, the Graces; remember the Graces!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his w...ife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had been living in Berlin since 1922, thus synchronously with the young man of the book; but neither this fact, nor my sharing s...ome of his interests, such as literature and lepidoptera, should make one say "aha" and identify the designer with the design.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.... He must not be afraid to return again and... again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand--like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery--in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.... For autobiography has to do with time, with seque...nce and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form--it may be called fleeting or eternal--is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »