” People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. “
” You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn’t exist. “
” 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 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. “
All 4 W. G. Sebald Quotes about People in picture
Topics: People quotes