Really from the Nazi dramatist Hanns Johst's play Schlageter (1933?). The literal translation is: "When I hear 'culture' I release the safety on my Browning!" Goering like to quote the line, though.
Johst was the inspiration for the main character in Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto, also a movie from about 25 years ago. I liked the movie, but it's been decades since I saw it. I tried the novel in German, it was too hard for me. I don't know if it has been translated.
or "It's I
> who decides who's a Jew" -
As I've said here before, this is from the antiSemitic Mayor of Vienna around the fin de siecle: Auf Deutsch: "Wer ein Jude ist, ich bestimme."
both attributed to
> Hermann Goering even though
> they were actually said by someone else.
>
> Does the fact that that a saying was or was not
> uttered by a reprehensible
> monster make any difference?
It could, in the same that that if Shakespeare's works were written by Bacon it would put a whole differenbt light on them from a certain perspective.
What does the Stalin's
> persona add to the
> realization that, after all, for some people four
> walls are indeed a waste
> of valuable real estate space. Or that what passes
> for "Kultur" is often a
> bunch of hogwash? Or that identity politics is but
> a shell game?
Well, true propositions are true regardless of who says them. On the other hand they may have different conntations and even different meanings insofar as speaker's meaning (see H.R. Grice) is relevant, what is intended to be communicated matters. Also different tools can be used or not to interpret the statement depending on who said what. If Shakespeare's works were written by a Catholic, as a book referenced by some one here recently states, that gives one a battery of references that one otherwise wouldn'y have.
Also, your one interpretation of Lueger's remark as being anti identity-politics (it took me a minute to figure what you meant) is a case in point. Knowing Lueger and his context, it becomes clear that identity politics is not the subject of his copmment at all. The cultivated Jews of fin de siecle Vienna (like Freud) were desperately assimilationist, anti-identity politics, as we'd say today. They wanted to be accepted as Austrian. They did not particularly identify as Jewish even if they were somewhat observent; that was just their religion.
But in anti-semitic Vienna, this acceptance and assimilation was not possible. However, Lueger, whom I believe was an opportunist populist and not a principled bigot, was happy in some cases to ignore the identity _imposed on Vienna's Jews by the anti-Semites_ for a number of reasons. (Sartre talks about this imposed identity in Anti-semite and Jew, one of his bests book, in my view.)
If Goering quoted the statement, he was (a) wrong, as unlike in fin de siecle Vienna there were elaborate Nazi laws (part of the Nuremberg Laws) and administrative regulations determining who in Nazi Germany was a Jew -- and for Germans that's a very serious matter; and (b) it meant something very different; in Vienna, the difference was -- if I recall correctly -- between social acceptance and avoidance of certain humiliating but not terribly onerous restrictions, whereas in Nazi Germany, being classified as Jewish or not was initially a matter of being denied citizenship, property rights, etc., and ultimately life and death.
So yes, it matters who says it.
__________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com