Which German do you most admire?

Post Reply New Topic

I went through a Nietzsche phase a few years ago so I'll add him to the thread

And I suppose Karl Marx because his philosophy is what got me interested in sociology and politics and all of that kind of stuff, although I wouldn't say I'm a Marxist at all

Ya I studied Marx as a sociology major. I studied Max Weber too.

Willy Brandt would have been my choice for politicians.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius are my favorite artists (both were architects).

I have not read Karl Marx but he wrote about the ways in which workers are systematically separated from the products of their labour, no?

Jonathan Littell picked that up in Les Bienveillantes / The Kindly Ones, which is a book I found really fascinating. But it's something I think about a lot just in terms of the loss of moral agency that seems so pervasive these days.

I don't know if he is post- or pre-Bismarck and I've got in trouble for this before but I like Goethe

...which was set to music by Schubert I believe!

Carlyle's translation:

Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping and watching for the morrow,
He knows ye not, ye gloomy Powers.

...himmlischen Mächte is heavenly powers but I guess it is a bit of a gloomy mood


And Baring's translation:

We mortals are most wonderfully tried,
Nor could we bear it, were we not vouchsafed
By Nature a divine frivolity.

^Well because the German verses rhyme, the English translation must also.

I only have to step out my own front door to experience the "iron cage of bureaucracy" (Max Weber)

I kind of got over the whole communist (Karl Marx) thing a long time ago when I understood the reality of it

Franz Kafka is a hero of mine.

Not German! But spoke and wrote in German.

Extent of overlap between language and culture?

Again I have to point (with sincere apologies) to my ignorance of things German and especially German history.

The Holy Roman Empire was basically the predecessor to the German Empire. That plus the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant that German was the language all educated people learned in school. When I visited Budapest in the early 1970s, It seemed all older people there could communicate in German, even a woman dishing out food at a self-service restaurant as I recall.

In particular, Jewish people in Prague only spoke German amongst themselves (although they weren't the only people in Prague who did so). Any Jewish literary figure (and I suppose a great many non-Jewish although I'm not sure how quickly I could get numbers on that) would have written in German. It was the only language they would have studied to that extent. The best parallel I can think of would be upper middle class people in the West End of Montreal e.g. Westmount who know enough French to communicate with servants lol.

So Kafka's work is part of German literature although I don't think anyone would describe him as German. I recommend not obsessing over that.

I admire Peter Max. He was born into a Jewish German family that came to America when he was 3. He's famous for his psychedelic art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Max

I have a BFA, and I did not know that about Peter Max. Wow. I am familiar with Peter Max.
(Please note, when one gets a BFA, it does not give them divine knowledge about all things that were and will be concerning art. This is especially true for me.)

I hope this is ok but I admire my great grandfather for emigrating over from Germany to the US around 1926. I admire the courage he had in what was a scary and uncertain time and the risks he took. In terms of a famous German I admire Albert Einstein.

I like Sophie Scholl; she stood up against nazis and was killed for it...but she will always be remembered for her bravery.