Egon Bahr Quotes

“International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It's about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what you are told in history lessons.”

“Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.”

“It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.”

“As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind.”

“Anna thought about the men outside on the gallery. She was glad they were there; finding them smoking and talking quietly had been comforting, it was what men did in the evenings when the work was done. Of course, the work was not done, and she doubted that it ever would be. It would go on and on, even after the house was emptied of strangers, long after the wildflowers had blossomed a hundred times on their graves.”

“Then as Anna listened another sound began to rise within the first. It began as a low keening, like the wind in a bottle tree, almost indiscernible amid the guns. Yet it was there, and it grew and grew, gaining strength and timbre until suddenly a new note broke away and was taken up: a high weird quavering like nothing that Anna had ever heard, that peopled the smoke with an army of mourning phantoms. Anna had heard the men talk of this, too—the uncanny demon cry of the Rebel army going into the attack—and now here it was for real, echoing across violence and death for the last time in a wild crescendo that seemed to peak and yet peak again: descanting blood, crying lost youth and the loss of all dreams. One last time it shrilled out of the rolling smoke, then collapsed all at once into a maelstrom of voices—the deep snarling utterance of thousands of men in hell.”

“They had three cadences, these spectral drummers, which they called First Kings, Second Kings, and Revelations. Going into a fight, they went from one cadence to another with no apparent signal until the officers began to shout commands and men began to fall. Then the drummers began a solemn drill beat that Bushrod believed would be the muttering undertone of every nightmare he would ever have.”

“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.”

“What is it that Australians celebrate on 26 January? Significantly, many of them are not quite sure what event they are commemorating. Their state of mind fascinated Egon Kisch, an inquisitive Czech who was in Sydney at the end of January 1935. Kisch has a place in our history as the victim, or hero, of a ludicrous chapter in the history of our immigration laws. He had been invited to Melbourne for a Congress against War and Fascism, and was forbidden to land by order of the attorney-general, R. G. Menzies. He had jumped overboard, broken his leg, gone to hospital, failed a dictation test in Gaelic and been sentenced to imprisonment and deportation. When the High Court declared Gaelic not a language, Kisch was free to hobble on our soil...”

“Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.”