Thomas Piketty:
"My book recounts the history of income and wealth,
including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany
is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history,
has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second
World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from
France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under
this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our
ideas of order and justice."
Michael Bloch:
“...‘The God of the Germans’, wrote Jung in a notorious essay
of 1936 which was said to lend support to Nazi anti-Semitism, ‘is not the
Christian God but Wotan.’ Leo Abse agrees. The leitmotiv of his profoundly
disturbing and compulsively readable book is that a destructive aggressiveness,
a Wagnerian megalomania, lurks at the root of the German psyche. Since 1945,
the Germans have been struggling to repress these elements, but (as every
psychologist knows) whatever is repressed tends to resurface sooner or later
with a vengeance....”
