{"id":41399,"date":"2022-12-13T01:00:20","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T06:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41399"},"modified":"2022-12-12T09:33:07","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T14:33:07","slug":"qotd-postwar-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/12\/13\/qotd-postwar-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Postwar Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy&#8217;s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. Well-stocked shops do not supply meaning or purpose. Beauty, at least in its man-made form, has left the land for good; and such remnants of past glories as remain serve only as a constant, nagging reminder of what has been lost, destroyed, utterly and irretrievably smashed up.<\/p>\n<p>Theodore Dalrymple, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/html\/15_1_urbanities-dresden.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">&#8220;The Specters Haunting Dresden&#8221;, <em>City Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2005-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[356,1118,7,41,230],"tags":[457,1289],"class_list":["post-41399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-germany","category-history","category-quotations","category-ww2","tag-fascism","tag-theodoredalrymple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aLJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41399"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78596,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41399\/revisions\/78596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}