Quotes of Carl von Ossietzky - real journalist, writing, speaking against German militarism and the persecution of Jews

On May 4, 1938, Carl von Ossietzky, German journalist and pacifist activist who exposed the secret German rearmament (for his work he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935), died in a hospital after five years in police custody. As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, including Germany's violations of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding its air force (predecessor of the Luftwaffe) and training pilots in the Soviet Union. Details were given. Ossietzky was a vocal critic of German militarism. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison but was pardoned in December 1932.

Ossietzky remained a vocal critic of German militarism after the Nazis came to power. After the Reichstag violence of 1933, Ossietzky was arrested again and sent to the Esterwegen concentration camp concentration camp near Oldenburg. Following his arrest his brutal torture was certified by the International Red Cross, condemning the Nazi Adolf Hitler government on a global scale. In 1936 he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize but was prevented from traveling to Norway and accepting the prize. Ossietzky died of tuberculosis in a Berlin hospital in 1938 after suffering years of abuse in various Nazi concentration camps.

Ossietzki was particularly critical of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold), the paramilitary group of the Social Democrats for the Defense of Democracy. Ossietzky wrote in 1924 – Anyone who has learned from the events of the last five years knows that it is not the nationalists, the monarchists, that represent the real danger, but the absence of concrete content and ideas in the concept of the German Republic and that Not that anyone will succeed in bringing that concept to life. The defense of the republic is good. It is better to go beyond this and understand what is worth protecting in a republic and what should not be preserved. This question has escaped the Reichsbanner, more precisely it probably has not yet recognized that such a question even exists.

Here are some insightful, thoughtful quotes from Carl von Ossietzky.

There is a strong smell of blood in the air today. Literary anti-Semitism prepares the moral weapon for murder. Strong and honest guys will take care of the rest.

Antisemitism is tantamount to nationalism and its best ally. They are of a kind because a nation, wandering for two thousand years of world history, without territory or state power, is a living refutation of the entire nationalist ideology that conceptualizes a nation exclusively by the factors of power politics. Receives. Anti-Semitism never took root among the workers. This has always been a matter of the middle class and small farmers. Today, when these classes are facing their biggest crisis, it has become a kind of religion or at least an alternative to religion for them. Nationalism and anti-Semitism dominate the German domestic political picture. They are the forbidden organ of fascism, whose pseudo-revolutionary screams drown out the soft shudder of social reaction.

When our own conscience is asleep we cannot look to the conscience of the world.

As long as peace prevails, the hellish instruments of war must be abolished. The trade union movement should be forced not to let its old resolutions fade away in the files.

Intellectual anti-Semitism was the special prerogative of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who, in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, embodied the fantasies of Count Arthur de Gobineau, who had entered Bayreuth. He translated them from the language of harmless conceit into the language of modern, seductive mysticism... Contemporary anti-Semitic literature, in so far as it is not simple, is vulgar Jew-baiting, in so far as it claims intellectual thought, is satisfied with posit a dominant Teutonism which, when examined critically, evaporates into thin air like a beautiful Epicurean deity. The word blood plays a big role in its phraseology. Blood, the immutable substance, determines the fate of nations and men. Because of the secret laws of blood, Germans and Jews will never be able to reconcile, they will have to remain in conflict until the Holocaust. It's romantic, but a little dark. No real science of nationalities can be based on such weak foundations. German and Jew are not fixed categories established once and for all in some mystical prehistoric era, but rather flexible concepts that change their content with spiritual and economic changes dependent on the general dynamics of history.

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