List of winged words / D

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Since the mouse bites from no thread

The lion and the mouse

This threatening phrase goes back to Aesop's fable The Lion and the Mouse . It tells how a little mouse accidentally runs over a sleeping lion and wakes him up. The lion attacks the mouse, but the mouse begs him:

“Forgive me for my carelessness and give me my life, I want to be eternally grateful to you. I didn't want to disturb you. "

Thereupon the lion gives her the freedom with amusement and asks how she can show him her thanks. A short time later the mouse finds the lion trapped in a net and gnaws the knots of the net.

According to other sources, the saying goes back to Gertrude's day on March 17th. On this day, according to the farmer's calendar, spring begins and it was time to end winter chores like spinning. However, if someone does not put the spindle down, a mouse will bite the thread off. In an Austrian proverb it says:

"Gertrud stops spinning, otherwise the mouse will open the thread and bite it off."

This idiom establishes something irrefutable, as for example in Karl May's novel The Oil Prince :

“We are divorced from now on; no mouse doesn't bite a thread! "

In addition, this winged word goes back to the fact that valuable foods such as B. Meat, bread, flour etc. were hung on a thread or string from the ceiling so that mice etc. could not reach them.

Not a straight face remains

These words, often used colloquially, come from the poem Paul. A hand drawing by the theologian and writer Johannes Daniel Falk . It can mean everyone laughing until they cry, or everyone is touched and crying.

The line follows the verse:

In black mourning
flores, At the ringing of the grave bells
To our churchyard, young and old billow

There he goes and no longer sings!

The quotation comes from the second edition of the song play Die Kunst zu sein, published in 1866 by the singing teacher Ferdinand Gumbert .

“There he goes and no longer sings! So it is and so it was. The old man got his hat back and the crowd trolled away! "

It is used as a joking comment when someone leaves dejected or leaves his post after failure. An article about the surprising resignation of Belgian TV manager Guillaume de Posch at ProSiebenSat.1 Media is headed with the following words:

"Guillaume de Posch - He goes there and no longer sings."

That's where everything stops!

This common phrase with the meaning “That is unheard of!” Comes from the farce of comedy poet Louis Angely's Die Reise auf common expense - comic painting in five acts , most of which was localized after French comedies in Berlin. In the first scene of the second act it says:

"That's where everything stops."

The writer Paul Heyse wrote about this play in his childhood memories:

"I received the first full impression of a real stage art from a farce in the Königstädter Theater," The journey at community expense ", in which Beckmann's comic talent enchanted me."

The coral laughs

This expression goes back to an illustrated magazine called Koralle from the 1930s from Ullstein Verlag , the funny page of which was entitled "The Coral Laughs".

“The magazine of the same name, not unlike today's BUNTEN, is no longer known to anyone after around 60 years. The title of their funny page, however - 'The coral is laughing' - is sintered into the folk estate. "

This heading was also used by the news magazine Der Spiegel in 1972 for an article about the comic strip Zack , which the Axel Springer Group published in its subsidiary, Koralle-Verlag .

That's the snag

This idiom means something like There lies the problem .

In François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel it says in the 1st volume, 19th chapter (published 1532): “Reditte quae sunt Caesaris Caesari et quae sunt Dei Deo. Ibi jacet lepus. ”-“ So give to the emperor what is to the emperor, and to God what is to God (Luke 20:25). There lies the rabbit (in the pepper). ”Already used as a catchphrase at that time, its origins go back even further.

Johann Christoph Adelung explained in his critical grammatical dictionary of High German dialect (1793–1801): “In Upper German, a broth strongly spiced with pepper, a pepper broth, is called pepper. Put a hare in pepper and dress it with a pepper broth. Hence the figurative idiom there is a rabbit in the pepper, that is the real cause of the evil, that is what it is, that is what it is missing. "

An alternative explanation sees the origin in the hunter language. “Pepper” is the name given to the hare's spherical droppings, which reveals its hiding place.

In Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe it is said: "There is a lot in the way of things".

In ETA Hoffmann's Der Sandmann , the phrase is used as follows:

“The professor of poetry and eloquence took a pinch, closed the can, cleared his throat and said solemnly: 'Honorable gentlemen and ladies! don't you notice where the bunny is? The whole thing is an allegory - a continued metaphor! - You understand me! - Sapienti sat ! '"

The phrase “There is a bunny in the pepper” is used on the one hand to point out that due to a particular difficulty that is easy to overlook, the task at hand cannot or must not be completed as usual: “… there is a staircase , but it's rotten; and that's exactly where the rabbit is in the pepper! We have to get to the attic differently. ”On the other hand, the saying is used when one has discovered the previously overlooked but probably decisive detail:“… well, the rabbit is in the pepper! The translator confused land miles with nautical miles! ”(See similar ETA Hoffmann quote). The idiom does not indicate anything simple, general or obvious (contradiction of pepper as ubiquitous rabbit droppings). A usage in the sense of “the bunny ends up on the table” is also absurd.

Explanation: If a rabbit lies in a pile of pepper and behaves quietly, it cannot be found by smelling by the best hunting dogs, even if they follow its trail closely. The pepper is over. A particularly attentive and experienced hunter is required to be able to sense this hare even from the failing dogs, to find it and to kill it in other ways without the usual help of the dogs. If "experts and specialists" come to a quick judgment ("Impossible! Not possible!") Through routine inspection, there may still be "a rabbit in the pepper".
In this sense, pepper is also a synonym for a facade that obscures meaning and behind which the unidentifiable is hidden (see Hasenpfeffer , which, without spiced pepper , consists of inferior scraps). This is indicated in the historical explanation with the Upper German pepper broth, but does not explain the saying. In the times of Johann Christoph Adelungs or Friedrich Schiller, pepper could hardly be used as a food ingredient in middle-class cuisine due to its lack of general availability. Its extreme smell and taste were certainly well known from reports (at least since Marco Polo) as well as its effect on dog noses. It would be just as easy to derive actual or hypothetical defense strategies against dog tracking from this as it would be to blame these behaviors on a clever rabbit. Why, however, a hare preserved in (spicy) pepper broth is the “real cause of the evil” cannot be understood without further explanation.

Other interpretations and explanations can be proven in literature, but are not conclusive.

The phrase is to be used in a similar way to the "(hidden / discovered) hook on the matter" and must be clearly distinguished from "the core of the matter". The latter, loosely translated as "content / purpose of the charade / camouflage / envelope", served Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a variant of a "Trojan horse", with the help of which Mephisto 's attention Faust I procured. The "crux of the matter" suggests another importance in assessing known circumstances. A recognized "rabbit in the pepper" can become a "crucial point" but not the other way around.

the dog is buried there

Memorial of the dog Stutzel

This phrase goes back to a memorial stone inscription from the 17th century in the Thuringian town of Winterstein (Waltershausen) :

Anno 1660 Jar ... a dog was greeted here that the ravens
don't eat ...

The loyal dog Stutzel went all alone to Friedenstein , with letters on his collar, to the sovereign's castle, and through his loyalty did many services. When he died, his mistress had him put in a coffin, and she and her servants solemnly buried him. She is said to have even forced the dog to be buried in the cemetery, but the pastor and the parish had him dug up again and buried at the current location. From this the following proverb was formed in the village:

"The dog is buried in Winterstein."

Where the dog is buried is the heart of the matter. It is possible that this idiom has nothing to do with the pet, but with the Middle High German word hunde , which means something like prey, treasure. It then says: The treasure is buried there.

Robert Burns ' song Whistle O'er The Lave O't (whistle over / on the rest of it) with the beginning "First when Maggy was my care" was translated by Adolf von Winterfeld to Da lies the dog buried :

When I was still after Meg I sighed heavily,
she was an angel, lovely and dear,
since we married - don't ask any more -
there the dog is buried. -
Meg was as soft as the spring wind ,
so natural, dear child -
But cleverer are already cheated -
The dog is buried there.

The phrase “the dead dog is buried here” also denotes a desolate, inhospitable area.

The singer's politeness is silent

There are several sources for this saying. The refrain of a song by an unknown author published in Berlin around 1800 has the following form:

That hides the singer's courtesy.

A poem written by August Friedrich Langbein in 1812 with the title The Prophecy begins with the lines:

In a little town whose name
the poet withholds courtesy.

The idiom is used to indicate that one does not want to comment on a particular sensitive or embarrassing matter. However, it can also be the mildly reproachful comment on someone's silence on a particular question.

Here I stand, poor fool! And am as smart as before

Faust in his study

At the beginning of Goethe's Faust I , Faust speaks these words after referring to all of his previous studies that he regarded as useless:

I have now, ah! Philosophy,
Juristerey and Medicine,
and unfortunately theology too!
Thoroughly studied, with great effort.
There I stand now, I poor Thor!
And am as smart as before;
Hot masters, hot doctors even,
And already pulling for
ten years, up, down and across and crooked,
my pupils by the nose -

The quote is used again and again when someone feels overwhelmed, for example in this article about the variety of cellular technologies :

Here I am, poor fool, and I'm as smart as before
... you want to complain when you get hit with all the new cellular technologies in the news and in advertising every day.

But it's terrible down there

This quote comes from Friedrich Schiller's ballad Der Taucher , in which the diver speaks these words after successfully diving into the depths for the king's cup:

Long live the king!
I am glad, whoever breathes in the rosy light.
But down there it is terrible,
And man does not try the gods,
And never, ever desire to see
what they graciously cover with night and horror.

The quote is mostly used jokingly, for example when expressing disgust for a dark basement or a deep cave.

In 1841 Friedrich Engels wrote in his travelogue Eine Reise nach Bremerhaven from a visit to an emigrant ship:

"'But it's terrible down there," all my companions quoted as we climbed up again. Down there was the canaille, which does not have enough money to spend ninety thalers on a crossing in the cabin, the people to whom one does not take one's hat off, whose customs are described here as common, there as uneducated, the plebs, which has nothing, but which is the best that a king can have in his kingdom, and which, especially in America, alone upholds the German principle. "

You know what you've got ... Good evening!

This advertising slogan , formulated by Werner Butter , was used by Volkswagen from 1969 , initially for the VW Beetle and still in the 1990s as a claim for the company.

From 1973 the Henkel Group also used it for its detergent brand Persil .

The so-called Persil man who, as serious as a Tagesschau spokesperson, presented his advertising message on television in the manner of a news program, was supposed to convey reliability. That was necessary because Persil's market share had declined as many housewives preferred to use cheaper detergents.

The wholesale company Engelkemper takes up this slogan on the subject of trademark protection and explains:

“This well-known advertising slogan of a detergent brand makes it clear what brands and brand protection are all about. Because wherever Persil is on it, Persil should also be inside, that's what the buyer of branded products wants. Brand protection is therefore an important issue for all brand providers in order to be able to offer the consumer the security that he is getting what he expects. "

You will be helped!

In 1997, the entertainer Verona Pooth (then Verona Feldbusch) advertised the Telegate directory assistance service in a series of satirical TV commercials . All spots ended with the number 11-88-0 and Pooth's comment:

"There you will be helped!"

The slogan, in which Pooth flirted with her lack of grammar certainty in German, achieved cult status and was often modified. It also helped the newcomer Telegate to get an effective first listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange .

Women become hyenas

This line of poetry comes from Friedrich Schiller's Lied von der Glocke . At this point Schiller refers to the French Revolution:

“Freedom and equality!” Can be heard resounding;
The quiet bourgeois defends
himself, the streets are filling up, the halls,
and bands of stranglers are wandering around. "

The unleashed masses rage in the streets:

"Women become hyenas
and joke with horror."

Being there is everything

" To be there is everything" or "To be there is more than winning" is repeatedly referred to as an Olympic thought, but it is usually the common consolation for losers, because the official Olympic motto is Citius, altius, fortius - "Faster, higher, Stronger " .

That's how I recognize my Pappenheimer

“This is how I recognize my Pappenheimers” goes back to Gottfried Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim , whose troops were significantly involved in the storming and looting of Magdeburg in 1631. The Counts of Pappenheim from the Altmühltal were hereditary marshals in the old empire and responsible for the imperial coronation ceremony.

This sentence is often quoted as “I know my Pappenheimers” and comes from Schiller's drama Wallenstein's Death . There it is not meant ironically at all. When, in the third act of the drama, ten cuirassiers from Pappenheim wanted to find out whether Wallenstein wanted to defer to the Swedes, a private said to him:

But we do not believe that you are an enemy
and that you are a traitor, we just think it is
lies and deceit and a Spanish invention.
(Faithful.)
You yourself should tell us what you intend to do,
because you have always been true with us, we have the
highest confidence in you,
no strange mouth should push between us,
the good general and the good troops.

Wallenstein replies gratefully: "That's how I recognize my Pappenheimer."

Today the term “Pappenheimer” is more associated with the winking insight into inadequacies. The Süddeutsche Zeitung explains under the heading On these phrases you can build this change in meaning:

“It was not only the ironic school councils of the 19th century that made the term 'Pappenheimer' a pejorative one; Since the Pappenheim marshals were also responsible for cleaning the streets of the city of Nuremberg from excrement, the infamous name was in the air long before Schiller. "The dirt ran up / downright cheeky / according to Pappenhaimer's rule," the 'Grimm' quotes an anonymous poet from the 16th century. "

So that was the crux of the matter

Margret Hofheinz-Döring : The core of the matter

The saying comes from Goethe's drama Faust I (study room scene). During the Easter walk, Faust and Wagner are joined by a black poodle whose strange demeanor Faust notices:

Do you notice how in a wide circle of snails
He chases around us and closer and closer?
And if I am not mistaken, a whirlpool of fire pulls behind it
on its paths.

The poodle accompanies Faust into his study and changes before his eyes:

That is not the shape of a dog!
What a ghost I brought into the house!
He already looks like a hippopotamus ...

Finally the animal takes on human form, Mephisto emerges in the costume of a traveling scholar . This is followed by Faust's surprised exclamation:

So that was the crux of the matter.

The opposite sex

The opposite sex (French: Le deuxieme sexe ; literally: the second sex ) is the title of a famous book by Simone de Beauvoir in which she deals with the demands and problems of women's emancipation . The title became at times the catchphrase of women's emancipation and is also used as a term for “women” in general.

The basis of the script is the thesis:

"You are not born a woman, you become one."

The Munich philosophy professor Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann published a book on the 50th anniversary, which he named Simone de Beauvoir and the opposite sex , and in it raises the provocative question: "Does emancipation fail?"

Combine the pleasant with the useful

This phrase goes back to the poetry of the Roman poet Horace :

"Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci."

"Everyone who mixed the useful with the pleasant received everyone's applause."

Horace speaks of poets and their works:

“Horace says he is the perfect artist who mixes the useful with the pleasant; but it is more in accordance with the highest purpose of the arts to reverse this sentence and to take him to be the true artist who mixes the pleasant with the useful. "

Today the phrase is used quite generally in relation to pleasant things that also have a usefulness aspect:

  • "According to the motto 'to combine the pleasant with the useful'"
  • "Combine the pleasant with the useful!"
  • "After retirement you can combine the pleasant with the useful."

Someone else understands that than I do

This quote comes from the opera Zar und Zimmermann by Albert Lortzing . The self-important mayor of Saardam van Bett has to learn that he has also suspected the Russian ambassador as a "traitor":

van bed
(to Lefort)
“Answer me, who are you? Speak! "
Lefort


I am called the envoy of the Emperor of all Reussen, Admiral Lefort.

van bed

O thunder! What is that supposed to be?
Someone else understands that than I do.

The better is the enemy of the good

Also: “The better is the enemy of the good.” The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) made this Italian proverb popular. The proverb is used with two opposing meanings:

  1. Something is only good until it is surpassed by something better, one should always strive for better.
  2. One should be satisfied with what is good and not always strive for better; the relentless striving for better makes one blind to the good.

That little household

The little household is a hit that the actress Johanna von Koczian sang in 1977 and which began with the following verses:

The little housekeeping takes care of itself, says my husband.
That little housekeeping can't be that bad, says my husband.
How a woman can complain at all
is incomprehensible, says my husband.

The song was very successful and ironically picked up on common clichés. Dieter Thomas Heck , the presenter of the ZDF hit parade , allowed himself the joke and swept the studio stairs during the song.

The song title is quoted again and again when it comes to the topic of household:

  • "The little household" (exhibition in the City Museum Wels)
  • "Eichels number games: That little bit of budget." (Federal budget of the German Finance Minister Hans Eichel )

The bread of the early years

The bread of the early years is the title of a story by Heinrich Böll published in 1955 . In the story, bread has become a symbol for the hero, who spent his youth in deprivation in the post-war period, and he judges his fellow men according to whether they are able to share their bread with others.

Böll himself summarized the story in the following words:

“It is the story of a young man who is now 24, was 13 or 14 at the end of the war, who comes to the city, initially starves, but then 'gets involved', sets on a career, even makes it - and then through love for one young girl is pulled in a different direction. "

The story was filmed in 1961 by the director Herbert Vesely based on a script by Böll and Leo Ti.

An article about the young Jürgen Klinsmann , the son of a baker, in the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel is headlined with the words Das Brot der early Years .

The critical breadth of the early years is the title of an article on the life of the art historian Carl Einstein .

That is the curse of evil deed

The quote

That is the curse of the evil deed
that if it continues, it must always give birth to evil.

comes from Friedrich Schiller's tragedy Die Piccolomini (V, 1).

Here Schiller paraphrases a quote from Aeschylus' tragedy Agamemnon (V 757-758):

Τὸ δυσσεβὲς γὰρ ἔργον
μετὰ μὲν πλείονα τίκτει, σφετέρα δ 'εἰκότα γέννᾳ.
To dyssebes gar ergon
meta men pleiona tiktei, sphetera d 'eikota genna.
Because the evil deed grows rampantly
And creates a sex more evil, deeds equal to the father.

The past

The quote is in Friedrich Schiller's tragedy, Wallenstein's death . In his monologue, Wallenstein hesitates to defeat the emperor because he realizes:

It is an invisible enemy whom I fear,
Who opposes me in the heart of man,
Through cowardly fear alone terrible to me.
What is vividly and powerfully proclaimed is not what
is dangerously terrible. It's the very
common thing, the eternal yesterday,
whatever was and always comes back
and tomorrow counts because it counts today!

With the ever Yesterday 's habits were then meant where people hold. If today someone as living in the past referred to, so that his stubborn adherence to Überlebtem is criticized.

The Eternal Feminine

This expression comes from Goethe's drama Faust II , and with it the chorus mysticus concludes Faust's redemption with the words:

Everything that is transitory
is only a parable;
The inadequate,
here is the event;
The indescribable,
here it is done;
The eternally feminine draws
us to it.

The term "the Eternal Feminine" ties in with the immediately preceding invocation of the "Virgin, Mother, Queen and Goddess", which should not mean the Virgin Mary ("Goddess"!), But the virginal mother of all nature and goddess with the Wall crown, the childbearing, nourishing and murdering Diana (Magna mater) of Ephesus, to whom Goethe felt particularly connected.

Ringelnatz parodies this line in his poem "Klimmzug".

The parody “The Eternal Feminine Pulls Us Down” is also common.

It should be all of Germany

What is the German Fatherland? The text was written by Ernst Moritz Arndt before the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 . In view of the French occupation of many German territories at the time, it has a strongly anti-French tongue, which can be explained from the time of its formation during the Wars of Liberation.

"1. What is the German Fatherland?
Is it Prussia? Is it Swabia?
Is it where the vine blooms on the Rhine?
Is it where on the Belt the seagull pulls?
Oh no, no, no!
|: His fatherland must be bigger!: |
"

On the occasion of the victory over Napoleon and the invasion of Blücher's troops in Paris, the song was performed for the first time in Berlin in 1814. Since the melody was not well received by the audience, the song missed its effect. Gustav Reichardt composed the new melody in 1825. After that, the song was used by parts of the German population alongside the Deutschlandlied as a national song of the unification movement.

After the failed German Revolution in 1849 , August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote a snappy parody with the title " Where is Vetter Michel's fatherland ?"

The dangerous age

This expression became popular through a 1910 novel by the Danish author Karin Michaëlis entitled Den farlige alder , which, however, refers to a woman with menopause and describes her problems.

Melitta Walter writes about the author and her book:

“With the 182-page book The Dangerous Age, she managed to grapple with the menopause of women, which was so emotional and honest for her time that a storm of indignation broke out, especially among bourgeois women and frightened men. Then this Michaelis woman dared to write about the female longing for sexual satisfaction, about the self-determined separation from her husband and the eternal struggle for personal freedom. "

Today, the dangerous age is jokingly used to refer to the mean age of men when they are more inclined to have romantic adventures. Men in Dangerous Age is a German rogue comedy from 2004. The Hamburger Abendblatt titled an article about Ildikó from Kürthy's novel Blaue Wunder with the following words:

"The dangerous age: Either I'm worried - or something to eat!"

That goes his' socialist course

This saying was common in the GDR to express that something is going according to plan and tends to take a long time.

It is also the title of a song with which Wolf Biermann appeared at his legendary Cologne concert on November 13, 1976. Three days after the concert, the East Berlin news agency General German News Service reported that Biermann's citizenship had been revoked.

In his eulogy for Biermann on the occasion of the award of the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on his 70th birthday, the German President Horst Köhler said on November 15, 2006:

“It's not all 'his' socialist course' when people take history into their own hands. And that you are never immune to surprises, you have seen it often enough. Today you celebrate your birthday - and at the same time the date of your expatriation from the GDR will be celebrated. "

The expression "socialist gait" is used when talking about encrusted structures in socialist states, such as:

  • “Cuba in transition. Everything is taking its socialist course ”(Fidel Castro's time seems to be over - there is much to be said for his brother Raúl as successor)

It only happens once, it will never come back

This is the refrain of a hit from the film The Congress Dances , which was filmed in 1931. The best known are the first two and the last two lines of the refrain:

It only happens once, it never comes back, it
is too good to be true!
Life can only give it once,
because every spring has only one May!

The song was sung by Lilian Harvey in the role of the young glove maker Christel Weinzinger, who had a romance with the Russian Tsar Alexander I during the Congress of Vienna . Weinzinger advertises her business by throwing a bouquet of flowers with her business card in every carriage that goes by. She hits the Russian Tsar Alexander in the head. At first she is accused of an attempted assassination. The Tsar falls in love with Christel and uses the business card to visit her in her shop. A romance ensues, and the tsar has her picked up in a splendid carriage.

In 2000, these lines became very popular again as Expo 2000 used a rock version of the song in their commercials.

Happiness is an easy whore

This quote is the first verse of the motto that precedes the second book of Heinrich Heine's cycle of poems Romanzero :

Happiness is an easy whore
And doesn't like to stay in the same place;
She brushes your hair from your forehead
and kisses you quickly and flutters away.

On the contrary, Frau Unglück
pressed you dearly to her heart;
She says she is in no hurry,
sits down next to you on the bed and knits.

The topos of the impermanence of happiness appears here in the image of a prostitute; the topos of persistence of unhappiness, however, in the image of the housewife or wife.

Hear the grass grow

This idiom describes a superhuman sensitivity but also being able to perceive and know something better or earlier than others. The phrase supposedly goes back to an Old Norse teaching essay from the 13th century. The Younger Edda tells of the wise Heimdall who was so astute that he could even hear the wool of the sheep and the grass growing. In addition, he could see 100 stops by day and night.

Heimdall was the guardian of the Bifröst Bridge at Asgard . In case of danger, he warned with the Gjallarhorn. He is also considered the ancestor of man.

The quote collector Georg Büchmann quotes in his winged words from the younger Edda:

“It needs less sleep than a bird and can see a hundred restings by night and by day; he also hears the grass in the earth and the wool growing on the sheep, and therefore also everything that makes a stronger sound. "

The big eat

The big food is the German title of the French feature film La Grande Bouffe from 1973, which caused a sensation because of its shocking portrayal of a food orgy. Four friends get together to commit collective suicide by overeating over a weekend.

The film title soon became popular as a term for events where food is the focus, but also for economic matters:

  • "The big meal - minutes of a meal event"
  • "Obesity in the UK - The Big Bone."
  • "Big eat at the banks"

The largest insect is the elephant

This absurd statement is one of the famous flowers of the pedagogue Johann Georg August Galletti .

Galletti was a grammar school professor in Gotha from 1783 to 1819 . Friedrich Schiller is said to have declared him “the most boring and most mindless historian who ever lived”. He became famous for his slip of the tongue, which was supposedly collected by his students. In the Encyclopedia by Erf-Gruber it says about Galletti:

"With some other learned men he had the weakness in common that he became distracted during the lesson ... These small defects were covered by the nobility of his mind and heart."

Fritz Eckhardt changed the quote as follows:

"The largest insect is the elephant, which is made from a mosquito."

The good - this sentence is clear - is always the bad, what one leaves

This statement comes from the closing words to the picture story Die pious Helene by Wilhelm Busch . With these words, Busch restores order. On the website of Bayerischer Rundfunk it says:

“Max and Moritz end up as chicken feed, which pious Helene burns and finds himself in the throat of hell. Good wins, but you shared the excitement with the bad guys. "

The shirt is closer to me than the skirt

This saying goes back to a comedy by the Roman poet Plautus , in whose play Trinummus (The Three Drachmas Play) it is called in Latin:

"Tunica propior pallio est."

In German, the Roman undergarment, the tunic , is rendered as “shirt”, while the Greek upper garment pallium , which corresponds to the Roman toga, was translated as “skirt”.

With this expression one wants to express that one's own advantage is more important to one than the interests of others. It corresponds to the saying:

"Every man for himself."

The German Federal Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in his Bundestag speech in the debate on the government declaration 2005:

“Environmental protection is justice and fairness practiced. The motto “the shirt is closer to me than the skirt” is far too much used in politics around the world. In our modern language, the skirt would probably be the coat. The earth's atmosphere, fresh water supplies, soil, forests and seas are to be understood as mantle. The shirt is the way we heat, what kind of mobility we maintain and what products we buy. "

Gabriel continues the picture:

“The people of Dresden on the Elbe, the Münsterlanders these days and the residents of Harbin, China know that the shirt is only a thin rag as soon as the skirt gets a small tear. We have to maintain and repair the skirt that belongs to everyone. "

The heart has reasons that the mind does not know

This aphorism comes from the philosopher Blaise Pascal , who wrote in French:

“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas. »

The highest of feelings

Max Slevogt : Papageno

These words come from the second act of Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte , in which Papageno and Papagena express their anticipation of rich children's blessings:

What joy it will be,
When the gods consider us,
give our love children give
our love children
so dear little children, little children,
little children, little children,
so dear little children.
First a little Papageno,
then a little Papagena,
then another Papageno,
then another Papagena,
Papageno, Papagena, Papageno, etc.
It is the highest of feelings,
When many, many, the pa-pa-pageno (a)
The parents' blessing will be.
When many, many, the pa-pa-pageno (a) of
the parents will be blessings. Etc.

The greatest happiness on earth

The alleged "Arabic proverb" often quoted by riders comes from the German poet Friedrich von Bodenstedt , who wrote the following in his "Lieder des Mirza-Schaffy" in 1851:

The paradise of the earth
lies on the back of a horse,
In the health of the body
and in the heart of the woman.

Opponents of equestrian sport have turned the slogan in the interests of horses to:

The horse's greatest happiness
is the rider on earth.

The Song of Songs

Illustration from the 12th century

The Song of Solomon is a collection of popular love songs in the Old Testament. The German name goes back to Martin Luther . The Hebrew name Shir ha Shirim literally means "song of songs" . The title corresponds to this in other languages:

  • Ἄσμα Ἀσμάτων (asma asmatôn) in the Greek Septuagint
  • Canticum Canticorum in the Latin Vulgate
  • Song of Songs (English)
  • Cantique des cantiques (French)

Today this title is used to denote something that symbolically represents a song of praise to something:

  • "Steve Ballmer sings the great song of safety."
  • "The Song of Songs of Democracy"
  • "The high song of hospitality"

Michael Preiner uses the phrase the song of politics in his commentary on the election campaign for the US presidency:

“Oh blessed Obama, why aren't you German and you are available as the next candidate for Chancellor. We would cheer you, we would choose you with fervent conviction and would sing the high song of politics for you, at least until 4 weeks after the election, because then you too would have to make decisions and make politics. "

The Empire Strikes Back

The Empire Strikes Back is the German title of the American science fiction film The Empire strikes back , the fifth part of the Star Wars series , from 1980. After the destruction of the Death Star, the rebels of Yavin IV had to flee and find a new one Look for a base.

The film title is also related to economic empires if they take countermeasures on any point.

It is the misfortune of kings that they do not hear the truth

These words said the politician Johann Jacoby in 1848 as part of a delegation of the Prussian National Assembly to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The same idea is already found in the paraphrase of the Spanish epic El Cid by Johann Gottfried Herder :

"Oh, the harsh fate of kings,
that when you no longer fear them,
then only tell them the truth!" -
"At other, other times too,
they are told the truth,
but they, they do not hear."

This is the beginning of a wonderful friendship

In the 1942 American film Casablanca, bar owner Rick says to French officer Louis Renault:

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a wonderful friendship."

Shortly before, Rick shot and killed Major Strasser at the airport who wanted to call the control tower . Renault (although a witness to the crime) instructs the approaching police officers to arrest “the usual suspects” and takes Rick's side.

This last sentence from the film is usually quoted in a joke or ironic way, for example when a relationship emerges that one would not exactly want to call friendly.

That is the curse of our noble house: To strive hesitantly halfway and halfway with half means

This is the curse of our noble house:
Half way and half way.
To strive hesitantly with half means.
Yes or no, there is no middle ground here.

Franz Grillparzer , A Brotherly Dispute in Habsburg , Act 2

Most of the time this quote is shortened to Halfway and Halfway .

This is the plague of our time: madmen lead the blind.

"This is the plague of our time: madmen lead the blind."

is a saying from William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear (IV, 1); in the English original it says

'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.

That is the sun from Austerlitz!

Louis-François, Baron Lejeune: The Battle of Austerlitz

When the sun rose on the Moskva on September 7, 1812 , Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte called out to his officers in French:

«Voilà le soleil d'Austerlitz! »

He recalled the victorious Battle of Three Emperors between Brno and Austerlitz on 2 December 1805 in which he described the Austrian and Russian troops under Emperor Franz II. And the Russian Tsar Alexander I had defeated. On the evening of December 1st, the cloudy weather turned into a cloudless night. On December 2nd there was dense ground fog, which only gave way to the legendary sun of Austerlitz. The sun breaking through the clouds provided an overview of the fighting that made a decisive contribution to Napoléon's victory.

The Russians under Kutuzov stood for battle in front of Moscow. The Battle of Borodino was Napoleon not win, but she became one of the costliest battles of the Napoleonic wars at all.

Later this exclamation was occasionally quoted with similar encouragement in the face of a difficult situation.

That is Lützow's wild, daring hunt

Theodor Körner recites his sword song to his comrades .

These words come from the song Lützow's wilde Jagd , which Theodor Körner wrote in 1813 during the wars of liberation and whose six stanzas all end with this line. In the setting by Carl Maria von Weber , the song is still part of the repertoire of male choirs today. It starts with the following stanza:

What shines there from the forest in the sunshine?
Hear it roar closer and closer.
It pulls itself down in gloomy ranks,
And piercing horns ring in it,
Filling the soul with horror.
And if you ask the black fellows:
This is
|: This is Lützow's wild, daring hunt.: |

The Freikorps of Baron Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow did particularly well in the Wars of Liberation. Lützow's Black Hunters owed their fame above all to their prominent members, such as the poet Theodor Körner, who fell in 1813 . Other famous members were: the gymnast Karl Friedrich Friesen , the "gymnastics father" Friedrich Ludwig Jahn , Joseph von Eichendorff , the most important poet of German Romanticism, and the later founder of the kindergartens Friedrich Froebel .

This is more than a crime, this is a mistake

The execution of the Duke of Enghien

When Napoleon Bonaparte executed the Duc d'Enghien , who had fought against the republic, Talleyrand (or the Minister of Police Joseph Fouché ) said:

"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute."

Napoléon had Duke Enghien shot after a sham trial as an "emigrant who is paid by foreigners to facilitate an invasion of France". The kidnapping and execution caused outrage across Europe, but it was also a chilling signal to Napoléon's opponents. This approach damaged Napoleon in foreign policy. Napoléon had previously rejected a petition for clemency brought by Joséphine de Beauharnais .

Domestically, however, Napoléon had stifled all royalist conspiracies with this "terrorist execution" (Louis Bergeron) and the approval of the population at large. Significantly, Napoléon himself said only briefly in response to the indignation abroad:

"I am the French Revolution."

Talleyrand's words are used to express that one considers an action to be rash.

That can't shake a sailor

These words are the refrain from a hit song that was sung in the 1939 film Paradies der Junggesellen with Heinz Rühmann . The text is by Bruno Balz , the setting is by Michael Jary :

That can't shake a sailor, do
n't worry, don't worry, Rosmarie!
We will not let life embitter us,
no fear, no fear, Rosmarie!
And when the whole earth trembles,
And the world is unhinged ...
It can't shake a sailor, do
n't worry, don't worry, Rosmarie!

The film is about three hard-drinking men who live in a shared apartment. The refrain is cited as an expression of unshakable optimism.

No pig can read that

Marcus Swyn († 1585) was the ducal governor of the northern third part of Dithmarschen . After the end of the peasant republic in Dithmarschen, all property documents were to be certified by the governor. If the papers had become illegible, it was stated: "Even a Swyn can no longer read that. Dat can not read Swyn."

There is, however, another interpretation. It says on the Deutschlandradios website :

“Already in the early modern times there were many funny depictions of animals in schools, where donkeys and pigs were popular. The pig in particular could theoretically hold a pen and write with its claw. The way to the expression 'pig claw' was not far. "

Call the child by the right name

This phrase has been around since the 17th century and by Goethe's drama Faust I become known. Faust advises his Famulus Wagner that it can be dangerous to openly communicate your findings:

Yes, what one means to recognize!
Who can call the child by its right name?
The few who recognized something of it, who
foolishly did not keep their full heart,
The mob revealed their feeling, their vision,
Has always been crucified and burned.

The child in the man

This phrase goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche's work Also Spoke Zarathustra . In the chapter of old and young women there is the following statement:

“A child is hidden in the real man: it wants to play. Up, women, discover the child in my man! "

Men often justify their play instinct with the child within the man , while women use it to comment on masculine behavior that appears childish to them.

The lesser evil

The expression goes back to the philosopher Plato , who in his dialogue Protagoras had Socrates say:

"Of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he can choose the lesser."

The artificial silk girl

The artificial silk girl is the good-natured, always in love and easily rotten stenographer Doris in the novel The artificial silk girl by the writer Irmgard Keun , published in 1932 . Doris is a bit reminiscent of artificial silk , of which she says:

"You should never wear artificial silk with a man who then crumples so quickly, and what do you look like after seven real kisses and counter-kisses?"

Seeking the land of the Greeks with the soul

These words come from the opening monologue of Goethe's play Iphigenie auf Tauris . Iphigenia laments her fate, far from her home:

For alas, the sea separates me from the beloved,
And on the shore I stand long days,
searching the land of the Greeks with my soul.

This catchphrase was often quoted, especially in the 18th century, when interest shifted from Roman to Greek antiquity .

The land where milk and honey flow

This picture comes from the Old Testament, where God says to Moses with reference to the Israelites , e.g. B .:

"... and came down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them out of this land to a good and wide land, to a land where milk and honey flow."

(In total this phrase is used 21 times in the Old Testament.)

This term is usually used jokingly to refer to a place where everything is in abundance. It also serves as an Antonomasie for the land of milk and honey . However, one would expect the plural : "... where milk and honey flow".

Life is not a pony farm

The phrase, which has appeared in everyday German language since the 2000s and refers to the harsh reality of life and warns of naive illusions, appeared among other things as the title of an album by the German punk band Die Schröders from 2001. A webcomic series by the author Sarah Burrini , which has been published since 2009, also bears this title . The phrase also appeared repeatedly in the TV series Stromberg . A Facebook page with the phrase had around one million likes in January 2016.

Instead of “pony farm”, the quote was used earlier with terms such as “girls' boarding school”, “request concert”, “sugar lick” or “picnic”. In 2009 the short story volume Das Leben ist keine Waldorfschule by the German author Misha Verollet was published .

A slightly more optimistic variation reads: "Life is a pony farm and the stable has to be cleared out."

Life is short, art is long

"Life is short, art (lasts) long." Is the beginning of the aphorisms that were published under the name of the Greek doctor Hippocrates of Kos . In Latin, this sentence lives on under Vita brevis, ars longa and was handed down by the Roman poet Seneca in his writing “De brevitate vitae” - “About the brevity of life” . There it says in 1.1:

“The greater part of mortal people, Paulinus, complains about nature's disapproval that we are only born for a short period of life, and that the period of life that has been given to us is running out so rapidly and stormily that, with the exception of a few, life abandons the rest in the preparation of life. And about this general evil, it is believed, not only the great mass and the ignorant mob sigh. "

It is not just the medical art that takes a long time to complete.

That's the Berlin air

These words come from the operetta Frau Luna from Paul Lincke , landed in from on the moon and is told by Moon protection men arrested Berliners. They remember their native Berlin air:

That is the Berlin air, air, air,
So with its lovely scent, scent, scent.

The Berlin air is synonymous with the social and cultural climate in the city of Berlin .

The next game is always the hardest game!

Sepp Herberger on a postage stamp

This well-known statement comes from a circular from the German national soccer coach Sepp Herberger to the national team on August 20, 1954. This sentence is often quoted in a slightly different form:

"The next game is always the most important."

In this context one can also see another sentence from Herberger:

"After the game is before the game."

The soccer player and coach Matthias Sammer varied Herberger's sentence to:

"The next game is always the next."

After the World Cup triumph at the Football World Cup in 1954 , the heroes of Bern were celebrated at home for weeks. Herberger worried about the fitness of his actors at all the honors and receptions. At the World Cup victory celebration in Munich, he said to striker Hans Schäfer :

"Hans, don't drink so much, in eight weeks we'll have a tough game against Belgium in Brussels."

Herberger wanted to bring his players back to the ground and make it clear to them that you shouldn't rest on your laurels. The title holder then lost 2-0 to Belgium in front of 70,000 spectators in Brussels.

The journalist Christoph Biermann later called Herberger's wisdoms Herbergerisms .

The horse does not eat cucumber salad

Replica of
Philipp Reis' telephone

In order to test the transmission quality of the first telephone set he had developed, Philipp Reis contacted a friend. The words should be indistinguishable in case they arrive imperfectly. The story goes back to a teacher colleague, who in his memories describes a demonstration in the Reis house: Reis' brother-in-law read a book on the phone in the garden, Reis repeated the text to the audience that he had eavesdropped on the recipient. The colleague countered that he might know the book by heart:

"That's why I went into the room where the phone was and said a few sentences like 'The sun is made of copper' or 'The horse doesn't eat cucumber salad'."

Reis did not understand exactly what the horse was eating and thought that the sun was made of sugar, but his colleague was nevertheless convinced.

The principle of hope

The Hope Principle is a three-volume work by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch , who wrote it between 1938 and 1947 while in exile in the United States. Originally, his main work should be called “The dreams of a better life” (Eng .: The dreams of a better life ).

  1. The first volume includes “Small Day Dreams” (report) , the philosophical centerpiece “The anticipating consciousness” (foundation) and “Ideal images in the mirror” (transition) .
  2. The second volume analyzes the “outline of a better world” (construction) .
  3. The third volume "Ideal images of the fulfilled moment" (identity) .

The cunning beast did it for the sake of rhyme

This is the last line of the nonsense poem Das Aesthetic Wiesel by Christian Morgenstern :

A weasel
sat on a pebble in the
middle of the stream trickle.

Do you know
why?

The moon calf
told me
in silence:

the cunning
animal
did it for the sake of rhyme.

The quotation is mostly used to comment on actions that cannot be understood.

The round must go into the square

This quote should also come from the soccer coach Sepp Herberger, who wanted to laconically express that the aim of a soccer game is to get the round ball into the square goal. But the originator was the former Bundesliga coach Helmut Schulte , who said in a very simplified language:

"Round ball must be square in goal."

The author Helmut Schümann called his book about the history of the Bundesliga, Das Runde muss ins Eckige, and thus picked up on this much-cited phrase from sports journalism.

A study by Controlling Professor Jörn Littkemann at the FernUniversität Hagen is entitled “The round has to go into the square - FernUniversität: Football as an economic factor” . It says:

"But whether Bundesliga, Uefa Cup or EM: For the round to fly into the corner, some conditions have to be met, even some that initially have little to do with sport."

The fate of man is man

These words are spoken in Bertolt Brecht's play The Mother, the mother of a young communist who was killed. One wants to explain to her that, especially in suffering, man cannot do without God:

“Ms. Vlasova, man needs God. He is powerless against fate. "

To which she replies:

"We say: The fate of man is man."

Brecht is rephrasing a thought of Karl Marx who wrote in the introduction to his criticism of Hegel's philosophy of law that man is the highest being for man.

Fate sets the plane

In Ferdinand Raimund 's magical fairy tale with song Der Verschwender , the master carpenter Valentin sings the famous planing song . With regard to the difference between rich and poor, it says at the end of the first stanza:

People
often argue about the value of happiness,
one calls the other stupid, in the
end nobody knows nothing.
The poorest man is
far too rich for the other:
Fate sets the plane
and planes everything the same!

Being determines consciousness

This is the common abbreviation of a quote from Karl Marx , who writes in the foreword of his treatise On the Critique of Political Economy that the conditions of production lead to a certain consciousness :

"It is not people's consciousness that determines their being, but, conversely, their social being that determines their consciousness."

That looks very clear

With these words, the main character in Loriot's film Oedipussi describes the poor but noble food in a fine French restaurant and diplomatically expresses his disappointment with the modest portion sizes in the gourmet restaurant.

The sentence has now become a phrase that is used in comparable situations.

These are the practitioners of the world ...

"Those who changed over overnight / Those who are committed to every state / These are the practitioners of the world / You could also call them rags."

These verses of Bogislav von Selchow's ridicule against the supporters of the Weimar Republic were - with the softening "different" instead of "rags" - in the session of the Prussian state parliament on December 16, 1931 by the German national delegates Hansjoachim von Rohr and Joseph Kaufhold to the finance minister Otto Opposed to Klepper . The Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan reported in his memoirs in the witness stand of history - answers on the subject of Hitler , “as early as 1933, [in order] not to offer the approaching guard hunters an overly friendly welcome, [...] at the entrance of the Gauleitung in Halle the many after the victory To have greeted the hurrying, now finally wanting to be there, with the motto of Bogislaw von Selchow “. The fact that seventy years after the overthrow of National Socialism in Germany this should still be a catchphrase is something to think about.

The game is over

The game is out is the German title of the French feature film Les jeux sont faits from 1947, based on a script by Jean-Paul Sartre . The title quotes the croupier's announcement at roulette :

«Les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus. »

"The game is over, nothing works."

A return to life is not possible for the two main characters from the realm of the dead because they do not manage to realize their love in one day.

Hiking is the miller's delight

The question of why the Müller of all people should have a particular penchant for hiking answers itself when you know that the text for this folk song was written by the poet Wilhelm Müller .

The song begins with the following verses:

Hiking is the miller's delight ...
That must be a bad miller
who never thought of hiking ...

The word for Sunday

The word for Sunday is one of the oldest television programs on the ARD . On Saturday evening it brings short ecclesiastical reflections by a representative of the two major Christian denominations.

The title is quoted as a serious admonition.

The miracle is the dearest child of faith

This skeptical sentence is a quote from Goethe's Faust I and immediately follows the words with which Faust declares his loss of faith:

"I hear the message, but I lack faith."

In a sermon on Mark 8, 22-26 in August 2007, Wilfried Härle takes up this quote from Goethe:

“'The miracle is the dearest child of faith', Goethe lets his Faust say. That may have been true 200 years ago when these words were written, although by the end of the Enlightenment the belief in miracles had already become quite questionable and problematic for many people. In the meantime, many people - outside and inside the churches, under and in the pulpit - have more difficulties with the miracle stories, including those that are copiously handed down in the New Testament. From the dearest child, miracles in our Central, Western and Northern European culture have developed into a stepchild, or more precisely (since stepchildren can also be very beloved children) to the unloved of faith. "

The goal is nothing, the movement is everything

This maxim of the workers' movement, which wanted to achieve socialism not through revolution, but exclusively through a policy of social reform, was first formulated in 1897 by the social democratic theorist Eduard Bernstein in the journal Die Neue Zeit .

How controversial this sentence was is shown by Franz Walter under the heading How Bernstein caused the SPD to quake :

“The storm of indignation only broke out in 1898, when Bernstein wrote a sentence that is still famous on the left and infamous for many:“ I admit it frankly, I have what is commonly referred to as the 'ultimate goal of socialism 'understands extremely little point. This goal, whatever it is, is nothing to me, movement is everything. ""

Half a decade of bitter struggle followed, which is historically called the revisionism dispute.

Today, Bernstein's words are used as a censure when the dispute over the direction of a political group has become more important than the common goal.

That the soft water in motion conquers the mighty stone in time

These verses come from Bertolt Brecht's poem The Legend of the Origin of the Book Taoteking on Laotse's Path into Emigration . It tells that the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi met a customs officer on his way to emigration who wanted to know what knowledge his reflection on the world had led to. To his question "Did he get something out?" He gets the answer:

That the soft water in motion
conquers the mighty stone in time.
You understand that the hard is subject to.

The source should be the Latin proverb Gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed saepe cadendo . In 1986 the futurologist Robert Jungk published a volume of essays with the title And water breaks out of the stone .

Stand there like Buridan's donkey

This formulation means that someone cannot decide between two things of equal value and refers to a parable attributed to the medieval French philosopher Johannes Buridan , according to which a hungry donkey would starve to death from indecision in front of two equal bundles of hay. The basic idea comes from the text About the Sky by the Greek philosopher Aristotle and is taken up in Buridan's commentary using the example of a dog. The term Buridan's ass possibly invented opponents Buridans.

The world will not end because of this

With these words begins a hit that Zarah Leander sang in the 1941/1942 film Die große Liebe . The film tells the love story between an Air Force officer and a famous vaudeville singer and was one of the "hold-out films" that were intended to distract people from the events of the war. The chorus of the song begins with the following verses:

The world does not end from that
, sometimes you see it gray.
Once it becomes more colorful again,
once it becomes sky blue again.

The song wrote Bruno Balz along with "I know it'll be a miracle gescheh'n" in the summer of 1941 at the Gestapo headquarters in the Prince Albert Road or Christmas 1941 in the 24 hours after his intervention on its author Partners Michael Jary made Release from prison. The text could be interpreted as you wanted: The world is either not going to end from the hail of bombs or from the "evil of the Nazis".

De gustibus non est disputandum

The Latin motto “ De gustibus non est disputandum ” means “One shouldn't argue about taste.” However, the sentence does not come from ancient times. The French gastrosoph Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin derived this sentence from Spanish, which says:

"Sobre los gustos no hay disputo."

In scholastic philosophy it says:

“De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.”

"You can't argue about tastes and colors."

Just as there are an infinite number of colors, there are also an infinite number of flavors.

De mortuis nil (= nihil) nisi bene

This Latin saying goes back to the Greek sage Chilon of Sparta , who, according to Diogenes Laertius , is said to have said in Greek:

Τὸν τεθνηκότα μὴ κακολογεῖν, γῆρας τιμᾶν.

"Ton tethnēkota mē kakologein, gēras tīmān."

"Don't speak badly about the dead, honor old age."

This means that if you have nothing good to say about a dead person, then you shouldn't say anything about him.

The Latin saying is still used today, for example in the following examples:

  • “De mortuis nil nisi bene? - About Karl May's alleged mental disorder "
  • "Edward Teller has died: De mortuis nihil nisi bene"
  • “De mortuis nil nisi bene: That applies to the dead. But there is no need to spread half-truths about the living, especially not at funeral services "

Your wish was the father of the thought

In the English original of William Shakespeare's drama Henry IV , the king says to the Prince of Wales:

"Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought."

Prince Harry had thought his father, who was sleeping on the sickbed, dead and had taken his crown to wear as his legitimate successor.

The saying is quoted today in the modified form "The wish was the father of the thought" when one wants to suggest that something is based on wishful thinking.

Déjà-vu

As a déjà-vu experience [deʒaˈvy] (French: “already seen”; also memory deception or déjà-vu for short), also as a déjà-entendu phenomenon [deʒaɑ̃tɑ̃ˈdy] (French: “already heard”) or a déjà-vécu experience [deʒaveˈky] (French: “already lived”) is a psychological phenomenon that expresses itself in the feeling of having already experienced, seen or dreamed a completely new situation. This is not a wrong perception, but a paradoxical emotional experience.

The term itself was coined by the French psychologist Émile Boirac in his book L'Avenir des sciences psychiques (The future of psychic sciences) .

The opposite of the déjà vu experience, namely the feeling of foreignness in a familiar environment , is called the jamais vu experience [ ʒamɛˈvy ] (French: “never seen”) and can occur under similar circumstances.

Well known to the office

This ancient formula was spread through Heinrich von Kleist's comedy Der zerbrochne Krug , where the judge Walter abbreviates the cumbersome insistence of judge Adam on formalities with the following words:

Questions like this are superfluous.
Put her name in the record
and write: Well known to the office.

These words are used jokingly today when you want to express that you know someone very well because they have already attracted attention.

Far from the eye, close to the heart

This farewell formula, often used in connection with deaths, can be found in the poem of the same name by Ludwig Jacobowski:

Far from the eye, close to the heart!
When I saw the old grave inscription
In the sunken marble stone
Then my dead love occurred to me.
Oh God, I've written a thousand times
The same song of the same agony
And yet there was none like this:
Far from the eye, close to the heart!

The origin, however, is probably much older and not known, so it can be attributed to the vernacular.

Nothing is to be sworn to the engineer

This much-quoted sentence from the translator Erika Fuchs of Disney -Figur Daniel jet placed in the mouth (or beak). Daniel Düsentrieb is a brilliant inventor in the comic series, who probably reminded Ms. Fuchs of her husband Günter Fuchs, a manufacturer and inventor. Günter Fuchs built everything in the house, including the furniture. When it came to technical things in the comic stories, Erika Fuchs asked her husband:

"What he makes real and reasonable, I muddle up again so that it gets a little crazy."

Her husband was not only knowledgeable about technical things, he was also a specialist in quotes from classic books. In contrast to the English models, their translations contained countless hidden quotations and literary allusions.

The saying, almost always referred to as their creation: "Nothing is too swear for the engineer" is a modification of the first line of the engineer song by Heinrich Seidel from 1871:

"Nothing is too difficult for the engineer ..."

Giving the emperor what is the emperor's

This phrase goes back to a quote from the Gospel according to Matthew , where Jesus, when asked by the Pharisees about the interest penny, pointed to the coin with the image of the emperor:

"So give the emperor what is the emperor's, and God what is God's!"

The phrase is used today in the sense of “ fulfilling one's duty to the authorities” .

The living spirit

The living spirit . Seated Minerva by Karl Albiker

The New University of Heidelberg University , built from American donations, received this dedication formulated by the literary scholar Friedrich Gundolf . In the Third Reich, Heidelberg was notorious as a brown university due to some distinguished regime supporters. Over two thirds of the teaching staff were members of the NSDAP . The dedication of the portal figure on the New University building has been changed to "The German Spirit". After the Second World War, the original inscription was restored and, under the leadership of the philosopher Karl Jaspers, new statutes were drawn up in which the university committed itself to "serving the living spirit of truth, justice and humanity".

In 1968, the poet Hans Arnfrid Astel published a poem in his volume of poems Notstand that referred directly to this inscription:

Looking for old grave inscriptions
in Heidelberg
, I found this inscription
above the portal of
our new university.

The man can be helped

This sentence from Friedrich Schiller's drama Die Räuber is often quoted in the form “The man can be helped”.

With this statement Karl Moor, who became a murderer and rebel against the social order, admits at the end of the play "that two people like me would destroy the whole structure of the moral world" and wants to face himself. Since a thousand Louis d'or are exposed to his capture , he wants to give a poor day laborer with his eleven children the opportunity to earn the bounty:

“One could admire me for it.” (After some reflection.) “I remember speaking to a poor rascal when I came over who works on a daily wage and has eleven living children - a thousand Louis d'or have been offered, who delivers the great robber alive. The man can be helped. " (He goes off.)

Thank you, lady, I don't want it

In Friedrich Schiller's ballad The glove is about a questionable proof of love. A lady-in-waiting deliberately drops her glove into the arena with wild animals and then asks a knight who woos her to fetch the glove. The knight actually climbs into the arena and fetches the glove. But then he behaves differently than everyone expected:

And calmly he brings the glove back.
Then his praise echoes from every mouth,
But with a tender love look -
He promises him his near happiness -
Fraulein Kunigunde receives him.
And he throws the glove in her face:
"Thank you, lady, I don't want it,"
and leaves her at the same hour.

We leave heaven to the angels and the sparrows

This verse comes from Heinrich Heine's cycle of poems Germany. A winter fairy tale . In it, Heine criticizes the spirit that prevailed in Germany during the Restoration. In the first poem he turns against the consolation of people in a better hereafter:

“A new song, a better song,
O friends, I will write for you!
We want to establish the
kingdom of heaven here on earth .

Yes, sweet peas for everyone, as
soon as the pods burst!
We leave heaven to
the angels and the sparrows. "

The youth is adorned with modesty

This quote is a rearrangement of the words with which in Franz Grillparzer's drama Die Ahnfrau the youthful hero Jaromir is admonished by the old Count Zdenko von Borotin not to exaggerate his modesty:

Modesty
adorns the young man, Do not he misjudge his worth!

It is questionable whether the joking adage “Modesty is an ornament, but you can get further without it” has its origin in this.

All day long

This expression can be found at the beginning of Philipp Jacob Düringer's poem Des Mädchen Klage :

All day long
I have only pain and plague.

In the poem, the girl describes her grief for her deceased lover.

Everything is pure to the pure

“Everything is pure to the pure” is a biblical quote from the letter to Titus . There the apostle Paul writes in Greek:

Πάντα μὲν καθαρὰ τοῖς καθαροῖς ·

"Panta men kathara tois katharois;"

It is an exhortation to correct legal false teachers . Paul states that to the clean everything is pure; but nothing is pure for the unbelievers, for their disposition is also unclean. That is why Christians do not need any food, washing or clothing regulations.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche reverses this sentence as follows:

“'Everything is pure to the pure' - so says the people. But I tell you: everything will be a pig for the pigs! "

The Lord gives his own in their sleep

"The Lord gives his people in their sleep" is a quote from the 127th Psalm , a song of trust, and today it literally stands for children of fortune:

“1 A Song of Solomon in the Higher Choir. Where the Lord does not build the house, those who build it work in vain. Where the LORD does not keep the city, the watchman watches in vain. 2 It is in vain that you get up early and then sit late and eat your bread with worries; because he gives it to his friends asleep. "

A sermon about these lucky children says:

“'The Lord gives his people in their sleep' - that is a proverbial phrase for the lucky children on the sunny side of life. It just flies to them like this: the ones at school, the sympathies of fellow students at the university, the hearts of women at the festivals, the recognition of the lecturers in the seminars and later the successes in the community. Such sun children usually do not need to do much. Sometimes they do nothing - and yet they succeed. "

Neither ox nor donkey stop socialism in its course

This slogan is often ascribed to the co-founder of the SPD, August Bebel , but has not been proven for him. It can be verified for the first time in the summer of 1886 as an anonymous entry in the guest book on the Spindler Tower, which later became the Müggelturm in the Berlin area.

In 1989 the chairman of the GDR State Council , Erich Honecker , took up this sentence when the VEB Kombinat Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" in Erfurt succeeded in producing a 32-bit microprocessor . Honecker's statement of August 14, 1989 was on the front page of the SED newspaper Neues Deutschland on August 15, 1989 and received attention because it was the only public appearance of the seriously ill Honecker between July and September. At the same time there were 200,000 GDR tourists in Hungary, many of whom no longer wanted to return to the GDR.

Honecker, however, praised socialism and said that "the triumphant shouting of the Western media over the failure of the socialist conception of society is not worth the money that is being spent on it."

Honecker repeated the slogan again on October 6, 1989 in his speech on the 40th anniversary of the GDR in the Palace of the Republic in the presence of the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev . In public the sentence was now perceived as a stubborn slogan to persevere. Gorbachev's reaction is often referred to as “ If you come late, life punishes you. “Quoted. There is a cartoon by the Austrian cartoonist Horst Haitzinger .

Ox and donkey are assigned to the representations of the Christmas story in the Gospel according to Luke . But the guest book entry of the Spindlerower contains a reference to the Prussian Interior Minister Robert Viktor von Puttkamer , who was in charge of the persecution of the Socialists .

Close the curtain and open all questions

In the literary program The Literary Quartet of ZDF , the literary critic adopted Marcel Reich-Ranicki with the standardized Brecht QUOTE from the audience:

"And again we see, affected, the curtain closed and all questions open."

The slightly modified quote comes from Brecht's drama The Good Man of Sezuan and is in the original as follows:

We stand disappointed ourselves and see
the curtain closed and all questions open.

With this appeal, an actor takes the stage and justifies the open conclusion by saying that the audience should think about the consequences for themselves.

Can't see the forest for the trees

This phrase comes from Christoph Martin Wieland's poem Musarion, or the Philosophy of the Graces , published in 1768 :

“It's as if the foolish people couldn't see the forest for the trees; they are looking for what lies in front of their noses and what they simply cannot find because they are moving further and further away from it in a kind of snail-like line. "

The point of this phrase is that too many details can obscure the whole.

I think of Germany at night ...

Heinrich Heine's mother Betty Heine

"If I think of Germany at night / Then I am brought to sleep." Is the beginning of the poem Nachtgedanken by Heinrich Heine , which he wrote in 1843:

I think of Germany at night,
then I am brought to sleep,
I can no longer close
my eyes, And my hot tears flow.

Today the beginning of the poem is often used to criticize conditions in Germany. Such a thing can only be read in the background in Heine's poem. In fact, the Night Thoughts are very specifically about the fact that - who lives in Paris - Heine hadn't seen his elderly mother, Betty Heine , for twelve years:

Germany will
last forever , It is a perfectly healthy country,
With its oaks and linden trees,
I will find it again and again.

I don't long for Germany so much
if my mother weren't there;
The fatherland will never perish, but
the old woman can die.

The poem ends with the following verse:

Thank God!
French bright daylight breaks through my windows ;
My wife comes, beautiful as morning,
And smiles away the German worries.

Because all guilt takes revenge on earth

In Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship , the title figure listens to the song of a harp player laden with mysterious guilt, who blames the “heavenly powers” ​​for his fate. The second stanza of the song goes like this:

You lead us into life,
you let the poor feel guilty,
then you leave them to torment;
Because all guilt takes revenge on earth.

Because Brutus is an honorable man

Denarius with the image of Brutus and the inscription "Ides of March"

The Roman politician and general Mark Antony says in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar in his famous funeral address of Gaius Iulius Caesar :

For Brutus is an honorable man,
So are they all, all honorable men.

Because Brutus is an honorable man.
They are all, all honorable.

At Caesar's corpse, Antony first shakes hands with the conspirators. But then he asks Caesar's ghost to forgive him for making peace with the conspirators. Marcus Junius Brutus wants to speak to the people himself and justify the killing of Caesar, but allows Antonius, at his request, to bring the body to the forum and speak there in front of the assembled crowd.

After Brutus' speech, the people initially consider Caesar to be a tyrant and the deed to be justified. But then Mark Antony begins his incendiary speech against Brutus:

Fellow citizens! Friends! Romans! listen to me:
I want to bury Caesar, not praise him.
What people do bad, they survive,
The good is often buried with them.
So be it with Caesar! The noble Brutus
said to you that he was full of domination;
And if he was, it was a grave offense,
and Caesar paid hard for it too.
Here, with the will of Brutus and the others.
Because Brutus is an honorable man,
they are all, all honorable.

With rhetorical skill he finally succeeds in turning prevailing opinion and inciting the people to revolt against the conspirators.

Because one thing is certain: the pension

The German labor minister Norbert Blüm posted this slogan on election posters in 1986. Since this statement is no longer believed, this claim has often been parodied and quoted since then. Twenty years later Hanno Beck wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung under the heading "Because one thing is certain - the pension cut":

"One should remind politicians of their promises much more often: 'Because one thing is certain: the pension', posted Norbert Blüm on Bonn's market square. Later, the then Federal Minister for Labor and Social Affairs apparently had to answer the 'What am I?' earn a little on top of his own retirement income, and he probably doesn't like to be reminded of his promise from back then. "

However, one must add that this statement does not mention either the retirement age or the pension amount. In September 2008, Blüm wrote under the heading "The pension was safe" in the Süddeutsche Zeitung :

“'The pension is safe,' I said twenty years ago. Now one can ask: Which one? Definitely not the stock market oriented one! Of 112,000 United States pension funds, 32,000 survived. Such a disaster has never happened to the pay-as-you-go pension scheme. "

... because they don't know what they're doing

" ... because they don't know what they're doing " is the German title of the US film Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean , which is about rebellious but also misunderstood youngsters .

The English original title could be translated as "rebel without reason". Instead, the German version refers to the depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus and the first of his seven last words :

“But others were also led, two evildoers, that they would be executed with him. And when they came to the place called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the evildoers with him, one on the right and one on the left. But Jesus said: ' Father, forgive them; because they don't know what they are doing! '“

The plot of the film gave little cause for such reference. However, the German rental wanted to but repeated use Dean Films James to the success of the previous one Bible quote in the film title seen East of Eden tie, the title of Cain and Abel in Genesis 1 (4.16 LUT alluded): "So went Cain left the face of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod , beyond Eden, to the east. "

Because what you have in black and white can confidently be carried home

This has become a proverb quote comes from Johann Wolfgang Goethe's drama Faust .

There Mephistopheles says to the pupil:

So that you can see better afterwards
that he says nothing but what is in the book;
But try hard to write,
As if the Holy Spirit dictates you!

The pupil, who previously said to Mephistopheles "I get so stupid from all of this, as if a mill wheel was going around in my head", now says:

You shouldn't tell me that twice!
I guess how much use it is;
Because what you have in black and white,
you can confidently carry home.

The background to this is the idea that black ink or printer's ink, written or printed on white paper, is more permanent than the fleeting word that can be forgotten or forged.

The Eagle has landed.

Apollo 11 mission logo

The words with which Neil Armstrong, as commander of the lunar module, announced the landing on the moon were:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. "

“Houston, this is Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed."

The first words after the moon landing were different, however, with some technical information from Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong shortly beforehand.

Tranquility Base was the landing site in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of ​​Tranquility). Adler was the name of the lunar module (English: Eagle).

The Eagle Has Landed is a war film directed by John Sturges in 1976 and based on the bestselling novel by Jack Higgins of the same name .

The appetite comes while eating

This saying comes from the French quote L'appétit vient en mangeant , which can be found in François Rabelais ' adventure novel about the two giants Gargantua and Pantagruel from 1535:

«L'appétit vient en mangeant; la soif s'en va en buvant. »

"The appetite comes while eating; the thirst disappears while drinking. "

("The appetite comes with eating, says Angeston, but the thirst is lost with drinking." Angeston is the surgeon Hieronymus von Hangest.)

Pantagruel, the son of Gargantua, is characterized here by particular voracity.

This phrase is also used in a figurative sense, with “appetite” often referring to greed.

Totò , Neapolitan comedian and actor, had a different opinion: Si dice che l'appetito vien mangiando, ma in realtà viene a star digiuni , "They say that the appetite comes with eating, but in reality it comes with fasting."

The doctor helps, nature heals

“The doctor helps, nature heals.” Or in Latin Medicus curat, natura sanat . is an aphorism that is probably based on the teachings of the Corpus Hippocraticum .

The sentence should make it clear

  1. that the actual healing happens in the patient,
  2. that there is a natural course of disease
  3. and that a good doctor considers natural processes.

The ball is round

Conventional football with a honeycomb structure

This much-cited banal statement comes from the former German national soccer coach Sepp Herberger and is mostly quoted in connection with other soccer wisdom, such as "A game lasts 90 minutes" and "The ball is always in the best condition". The latter statement is intended to underline that it is better to let the ball "run" than to run after the ball yourself ("we let the ball run, it doesn't sweat").

Herberger did not want to express that a soccer ball is a spherical structure, but that nothing is decided as long as the ball is rolling.

Thorsten Langenbahn writes in his book The Most Popular Football Mistakes :

“For football ignoramuses, those who don't know and lumberjack, the following applies, despite all the physical differentiations: 'The round is the ball!' If necessary, this reference should also be articulated as reproachfully and with the necessary emphasis as possible in the future by the expert audience. "

An exhibition by the German Football Association in the Gasometer in the CentrO Oberhausen had a century of its history historically and critically honored, had the motto The ball is round .

The ball is round is also the title of a Herberger biography by Karl-Heinz Schwarz-Pich, while Lothar Mikos and Harry Nutt named their Herberger biography When the ball was still round .

The Bundesliga coach Gyula Lóránt says about the above quote:

"The ball is round. If it were square, it would be a cube. "

The trainer Rudi Gutendorf says with regard to the strange behavior of the play equipment:

"The ball is a bastard."

The account of my death has been greatly exaggerated

Mark Twain at the age of 72

When the American writer Mark Twain was on a lecture tour through Europe, a rumor spread throughout the United States that he had suddenly died. Mark Twain then wired the following correction to America:

"The report of my death was an exaggeration."

Mostly cited as:

"The report of my death has been greatly exaggerated."

The responsible newspaper man at the New York Journal countered calmly:

“What is printed is printed. We never take anything back. All we can do is put in a new birth announcement from you. Price: $ 1. "

He needs a long spoon to eat with the devil

In William Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (1592-94) says in the fourth record, third scene, Dromio von Syracuse to Antipholus von Syracuse:

"Well, my dear, he needs a long spoon that eats with the devil."

Also in the variants Who eats with the devil needs a long spoon , He must have a long spoon who should be able to eat porridge with the devil or Who needs a long spoon who eats with the devil was the Shakespeare quote (He has need of a long spoon that eats with the devil) to a catchphrase, often related to the meaning that one got involved with the wrong people, for example in the case of the Brandenburg Consistorial President and later Prime Minister Manfred Stolpe , who was accused of having got too involved with the state security service during the GDR era .

The bureaucrat is doing his duty

This statement comes from Carl Zeller's operetta Der Obersteiger from 1894. The play is set in southern Germany and begins at the princely Marienzeche mine. In the second act there is the following lyrics:

The bureaucrat does his duty
from nine to one.
He doesn't do more.

Zeller was a full-time ministerial advisor and head of the art department in the Ministry of Education. With this text he expresses his view on the subject of civil servants .

The only crap that nothing grows on is the pessimist

This statement about pessimism comes from the former German Federal President Theodor Heuss and plays on the meaning of the Mists as fertilizer in agriculture.

The banker Carl Fürstenberg said on the same subject:

"The optimist and the pessimist have a common denominator: the crap."

... women's tongues never rest.

Second line of the penultimate stanza from the ballad Die Sonne brings it to the day of Adelbert von Chamisso . In it, Adelbert von Chamisso describes the story of Master Nikolas, who killed a person out of need and anger on his wanderings. With his last strength he rattles “The sun brings it out.” Whenever the sun shines, Master Nikolas mumbles to himself: “You don't bring it out.” When his wife hears this, she presses him so long before he tells her about his homicide. Although he asks her to shut up, she tells the story of the "godfather". This is how the manslaughter is known. Master Nikolas is braided onto the bike.

An alley for freedom!

Konrad Grob: Winkelried's death near Sempach

It is said that Arnold Winkelried grabbed a bundle of Habsburg knights' lances in the battle of Sempach in 1386 and opened a breach for the confederates by impaling himself . According to legend, he should have called before:

"Take care of my wife and child!"

The better known variant of his last words is "An alley for freedom!" ...

... which became popular in the German national movement of the 19th century, such as B. in the refrain of Georg Herwegh's "Freiheitslied" :

In front of the enemy stood
the army with its flags in a row and
called Mr. Struthan Winkelried
I want to clear the way for you
God I command the woman and child
that I leave on earth
and so he blows up
an alley at the speed of an arrow of freedom

That was a knight right with justification
who proudly
struck down the enemy like a thunderstorm . Oh
, if I were such a knight
on a proud horse with a fast hoof
in a shimmering cuirass
to die with the thunderous cry of
freedom an alley!

When all the world has lost the courage
to begin the feud
, you, my people, come before the peoples,
let your heart run and
give us the man who will
grasp the banner of the new time
and through Europe we will break
an alley for freedom!

You Germans pave mountains and valleys
for your fire wagons,
You can be seen
chasing through the countries on roads without numbers ,
even this steam is sacrificial steam
don't believe that I hate it
but only pave the way in a fight and fight
for freedom

When all the world lost courage
to begin the feud
you, my people, come before the peoples,
let your heart and soul flow,
give us the man who will
grasp the banner of the new times
and through Europe we will break
an alley for freedom

Text published in: Georg Herwegh : Gedichte eines Lebendigen , Volume I (1841), which first had to appear anonymously in Switzerland.

This call is a quote from Theodor Körner's poem Calling , published in 1813 :

Fresh up, my people! The signs of flame smoke,
light from the north breaks the light of freedom.
Thou shalt plunge the steel into the heart of the enemy;
Fresh up, my people! - The signs of flame smoke,
The seed is ripe; you reapers, do not hesitate!
The highest salvation, the last, lies in the sword!
Press the spear into your loyal heart:
'An alley for freedom!' - Wash the earth,
your German country, with your blood clean!

In Max von Schenkendorf's poem Schill's Geisterstimme from 1809 it said:

And it rang in the heart, the right lives in the heart!
Steel, waved by a man's fist, only saves this generation. So hold fast to hatred, fight honestly, German blood!
'An alley for freedom!' thought a hero in the heart of death.

Franz von Papen's autobiography The Truth in One Alley quotes Körner.

The god who made iron grow

These are the opening words of the patriotic poem Vaterlandslied by Ernst Moritz Arndt , the first stanza of which reads as follows:

The God who made up the iron,
who wanted no servants,
therefore he gave saber, sword and spear
the man in his rights,
therefore he gave him the bold courage,
the wrath of free speech,
that he stocks to the death,
until death the feud.

Arndt wrote these verses just before the coalition wars of 1813–1815, which liberated Germany from Napoleon's rule. The composer Albert Methfessel was inspired by this text to a martial melody.

Although Arndt's verses were inspired by hatred of Napoleon Bonaparte , no current political events are mentioned in the lyrics. The song was later changed to Otto von Bismarck :

The God who made Bismarck to be
has been kind to us;
when he blew his breath into him, he
wanted us to be united.

The great Zampano

The great Zampano (Italian: Zampanò ) is one of the three main characters from the 1954 film La Strada - The Song of the Street by Italian director Federico Fellini .

This film character has negative connotations for the term Zampano . Anthony Quinn plays a boastful man who loudly puts himself in the limelight and tries to convince his astonished fellow man that he can even make the impossible possible. Zampanò, a coarse showman, displays his strength on marketplaces, the highlight of his appearances is when he bends a hook with the strength of his chest muscles.

Today the term Zampano is often used as a synonym for someone who has all the strings in hand. The phrase playing like the great Zampano means something like embodying the star in a certain scene. For example, it says about Joschka Fischer :

"The fact that the butcher's son from the Württemberg province never made it morally easy on his winding march through the institutions from the great Zampano of the left-wing radical Frankfurt spontaneous scene to the serious vice-chancellor and foreign policy model boy is proven by journalists Matthias Geis (Die Zeit) and Bernd Ulrich (Tagesspiegel ). "

The Lord gave it, the Lord took it

This resigned statement comes from the Old Testament book of Job , where the righteous sufferer Job (Job) says:

“The Lord gave it, the Lord took it; the name of the Lord be praised! "

Job is struck with terrible sufferings by Satan. He is portrayed as a pious man whose loyalty to God is tested, because one day Satan comes before God and claims that Job's piety only comes because God protects him and his property. Then God allows Satan to test Job.

The biblical book deals with the question of how it can be that the righteous God tolerates bad things happen to good people.

The listener on the wall hears his own shame

Anyone who tries to actively hear what is being said behind a door or wall must expect to hear unflattering things about themselves. This experience is also recorded in Wanders Deutsches Sprichormen-Lexikon .

See also: The eavesdropper on the wall hears his own shame .

Jürgen Klinsmann and I are a good trio

The Mannheim football professional Fritz Walter said in an interview:

"Jürgen Klinsmann and I, we are a good trio."

A little later he then corrects himself:

"I meant: a quartet."

Born in Heidelberg, Fritz Walter played together with Jürgen Klinsmann at VfB Stuttgart and was discovered and promoted in Mannheim by his namesake Fritz Walter , the 1954 world champion .

Walter allowed himself a similar blunder when he said to the press after a game:

"The paramedics immediately invaded me."

The captain is the last to disembark

The captain is the last to disembark ” or “the captain goes down with his ship” is a maritime rule and tradition according to which a captain has the ultimate responsibility for his ship, his crew and his passengers and must rescue them.

The little difference

When one jokes about the small difference, one usually means the male member as a symbol of the difference between man and woman.

The expression comes from Erich Kästner's novel Fabian , published in 1931 , where the exclamation "Long live the little difference!" Alludes to the difference between men and women:

"She dragged Labude off his stool, kissed him, slapped his hat on his head and, as soon as he could take his coat with him, pulled the young man to the door. 'Long live the little difference!' she screamed. Then the two were gone. "

The expression was best known as the book title of the feminist Alice Schwarzer , who in 1975 brought out a book entitled The Little Difference and Its Big Consequences . She represents the so-called equality feminism , which was also represented by Simone de Beauvoir . The book was translated into eleven languages ​​and made Schwarzer the most famous personality of the German women's movement.

In 2002 she brought out a book called The Big Difference: Against the Splitting of People into Men and Women , in which - 25 years after her world bestseller - she asks what has happened on the frontline of women's emancipation in the meantime.

The congress is dancing

The quote was created in 1814 during the Congress of Vienna , when Vienna was the most important metropolis in Europe. The hosts of the congress tried to make the stay of the high-ranking personalities as pleasant as possible. The sequence of social events, balls and other amusements let Charles Joseph Fürst von Ligne coined the term “dancing congress”. In a letter to Talleyrand dated November 1, 1814, Ligne wrote:

"I am credited with the word: 'Congress is dancing, but it is not moving forward.' Nothing seeps through but the sweat of these dancing gentlemen. I also think I said: 'This is a war congress, not a peace congress.' "

The quote is also used in the 1931 film of the same name, The Congress Dances .

The war feeds the war

War feeds war is a quote from Friedrich Schiller's Die Piccolomini , the second part of the Wallenstein trilogy in the Thirty Years' War . There Schiller has Isolani , the general of the Croats (who are particularly notorious as looters), say in Act One:

The war feeds the war. If farmers lose it,
the emperor wins more soldiers.

War is the father of all things

This statement comes from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus , according to which the principle of the world consists in that there is something constant, which changes continuously by turning from one pole to the other:

"Controversy is the father of all things, the king of all things, some he proves to be gods, others as human beings, some he makes slaves, others free."

The much-quoted sentence in ancient Greek goes like this:

Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι.

"Polemos pantōn men patēr esti."

The publicist Udo Marquardt wrote about this dictum :

“'Strife is the father of all things.' The sentence comes from Heraclitus. He wrote it down over two and a half millennia ago. And Heraclitus knew what he was talking about. He was convinced that most people are no good. "

Marquardt further explains:

“Heraclitus is not entirely wrong. Quarrel is the father of all things - at least that applies to philosophy. Having different opinions and arguing about them is the real business of philosophers. The philosophical dispute is never one among like-minded people, as the poet Eugen Roth knows:

A person defends with a lot of cunning:
The world seems different than it is!
But his opponent strictly denies:
The world is different from what it seems.

And so there is a dispute when philosophers meet. "

The poet Erich Fried published the following, very well-known play on words in his novel A Soldier and a Girl under the title "Spruch", which takes up the statement of Heraclitus:

I am the victory
my father was the war
peace is my dear son
who is already like my father

War is the continuation of politics by other means

The best-known quote from the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz is correct:

"The war is a mere continuation of politics by other means."

What is meant by this is that the military is always subordinate to politics. Politics determines the use of military force, that is, of war, as a means of resolving a conflict. Every war therefore has a purpose which is essentially to "impose our will on the enemy". But this purpose is determined by politics.

Clausewitz defined the aim, means and end of war as an instrument of politics as follows:

"Political intention is the end, war is the means, and the means can never be thought of without an end."

It is important to "throw the enemy down and thereby render them incapable of any further resistance."

The eavesdropper on the wall hears his own shame

This means that we sometimes overhear or actively overhear conversations that are not intended for us, and thereby also learn unpleasant truths or opinions about ourselves. Similarly: the eavesdropper behind the wall hears his own shame. Also: Whoever listens behind the wall hears his own shame.

See also: The listener on the wall hears his own shame '.

The last of the Mohicans

Mohicans Chingachgook at the leather stocking fountain in Edenkoben

The Last of the Mohicans is a historical novel by the American writer James Fenimore Cooper from 1826, the plot of which is set at the time of the French and Indian War. It is the second novel in the leather stocking series about the trapper Natty Bumppo. The novel deals with the fall of North American Indian tribes through the advancing European settlers.

During the so-called French and Indian War between the French and British and the Indian tribes allied with them, there were disputes over the British Fort William Henry. While the Hurons are allied with the French, the Mohicans are on the side of the British. When the fort is captured by the French, there is a massacre.

The tribal name Mohicans is a word created by Cooper. The name of this fictional tribe came about by contracting the names of the two New England tribes Mahican and Mohegan .

As early as the 19th century, the phrase "the last of the Mohicans" became proverbial for many of the last contemporary witnesses or supporters of an idea:

  • The last of the Mohicans on the CB radio
  • The last of the Mohicans of church youth work
  • The last of the Mohicans in the state economy of the GDR

The pilot disembarks

The Punch cartoon Dropping the Pilot

Even if Otto von Bismarck did everything to eliminate potential successors, the call for a risk-taking foreign policy was loud in the 1880s. After the short reign of Friedrich III. faced with the new Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bismarck two different personalities.

On March 15, 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm finally withdrew support from the Chancellor because of his conflict course. Two days later Bismarck presented Wilhelm his resignation. The public reacted with relief to the resignation. Theodor Fontane wrote:

“It is lucky that we are rid of him. He was actually just a habitual ruler (sic!), Did what he wanted, and demanded more and more devotion. His size was behind him. "

The English magazine Punch then published a cartoon by Sir John Tenniel on Bismarck's dismissal with the title Dropping the Pilot , which in German is usually translated as The pilot goes off board .

“The pilot disembarks” read the cover of the news magazine Der Spiegel on September 20, 1982, on which the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was depicted as the departing pilot.

The pilots in shipping take on the function of a skipper for a limited time and distance on a certain waterway and act as an advisor to the captain of a ship.

The man without qualities

The novel The Man Without Qualities is the main work of the Austrian writer Robert Musil . Through this novel, Musil also coined the word Kakanien (from “ kk ” for “imperial-royal”) as an ironic term for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy .

The main character of the novel is Ulrich, who fulfills various professional roles, e.g. B. as a mathematician, engineer or political advisor. However, he experiences all these roles as constrictions and therefore offers his much-called utopian “sense of possibility” in a one-year “vacation from life” in order to become a better person. He is the symbol of modern man, no longer has an all-encompassing spiritual home and is separated from all other people in his specialized knowledge. He recognizes the arbitrariness of world views and yet constantly attaches new, more absurd theories.

The book title - also in a modified form - is often used in a different context. An article titled Man without Qualities: Living and Working in the 21st Century about employees and civil servants states :

“If you take business surveys seriously, these men and women without qualities are on the rise. Like the proverbial maggot in bacon, they do the job in companies or authorities. You avoid attracting attention unpleasantly through thoughtless statements, statements or comments. "

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains

The French-Swiss writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his social contract :

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in bonds. Some consider themselves to be the master of their fellow human beings and are still more of a slave than they are. "

The short version of this claim is:

«L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. »

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

You are what you eat

Ludwig Feuerbach's review of Jakob Moleschott's doctrine of food for the people was made famous by the casual play on words:

"You are what you eat."

Man is neither angel nor animal, and misfortune wants it that whoever wants to make an angel of him, makes an animal of him

This pessimistic realization comes from the thoughts of the philosopher Blaise Pascal and reads in the French original:

«L'homme n'est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête. »

According to Pascal's core anthropological thesis, the human being is a “being in the middle”, neither angel nor demon , but half angel and half demon, because there are both possibilities in him. Pascal also notes:

«L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; corn c'est un roseau pensant. »

“Man is just a reed, nature's weakest; but he is a thinking reed. "

The philosopher Karl Popper summarizes Pascal's thoughts with regard to Marxism-Leninism on the one hand and National Socialism on the other hand in the following sentence:

"The attempt to realize heaven on earth always produces hell."

Man does not live on bread alone

is a word from the Bible (( 5 Mos 8,3  EU , Mt 4,4  EU )). It became the title of a book by Vladimir Dudintsev (see here ). This book was published during the thaw after Khrushchev's secret speech in February 1956 in Moscow, with which the de-Stalinization entered a new phase. A translation into German appeared in 1958.

Human needs and motivations are named among other things by the Maslow hierarchy of needs of the psychologist Abraham Maslow .

The Moor has done his duty

“The Moor has done his duty; / the Mohr can go. ”is a quote from Friedrich Schiller's drama The Fiesco Conspiracy to Genoa . In the original, however, it does not say “duty” , but “work” .

In the third act of the drama it says:

Fiesco . I hear footsteps. It's you Guy, you deserve your own gallows where no son of Adam has fidgeted. Go into the anteroom until I ring the bell.
MOOR (leaving). The Moor has done his job, the Moor can go. (From.)

Gianettino Doria sees a danger in Fiesco and wants the Moor Muley Hassan to remove him. However, the murder is betrayed by the Moor, and Fiesco gets the man at hand with whose help he can set off his intrigue.

The killer is always the gardener

The killer is always the gardener is both the title of a song by Reinhard Mey and a line of his refrain :

The killer was the gardener again,
and he's already planning the next coup.
The killer is always the gardener
and he strikes mercilessly!

The formulation is generally used to refer to stereotypes in thought and action patterns, in the field of crime fiction it is also often used as self- deprecating reverence for stereotypes in one's own genre. This ironic reverence can often be found in reviews and content information on works of crime fiction.

  • “Reinhard Mey sang: 'The murderer is always the gardener'. And whenever parties stumble upon illegal financial transactions, the treasurers are the scapegoats. " (Article in Zürcher Tages-Anzeiger)
  • “The killer is always the gardener! Or the butler? ... " (beginning of the table of contents of a crime novel published by Rowohlt Verlag )
  • The murderer is always the gardener - a criminal music revue (title of a play The murderer is always the gardener - a criminal music revue by Wolfgang Rumpf & Wolfgang Seppel (Berliner Bühnen spring 2009))

The next winter will come

With this slogan, Rheinische Braunkohlenbrikett -verkauf GmbH began advertising in 1960 that its customers would already be supplied with heating material for the winter in the summer by adding slogans such as the following:

  • "Now put the briquettes in the cellar."
  • "If you take briquettes in summer, you take care."

Although the saying is protected by law, it is used by different companies today.

The east is red

The East is Red (Chinese: 东方 红; Dōngfāng Hóng) is a song of praise to the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong , who almost assumed the status of a national anthem during the Cultural Revolution . The text is from a farmer in Shaanxi Province .

东方 红 , 太阳 升,
中国 出 了 个 毛泽东.
他 为 人民 谋 幸福,
呼 尔 嗨哟 , 他 是 人民 大 救星!

Dōngfāng hóng, tàiyáng shēng,
Zhōngguó chū liǎo ge Máo Zédōng,
Tā wèi rénmín móu xìngfú,
Hū ěr hei yo, tā shì rénmín dà jiù xīng!

The east is red, the sun rises on
China produced Mao Zedong.
He plans happiness for the people,
hurray, he is the great Savior of the people!

Dong Fang Hong and Dong Fang Hong I are the names of Chinese satellites that were launched in the 1970s. Upon arrival at the moon, the Chang'e-1 probe, launched in 2007, is said to spark the song The East is Red and other patriotic songs back to Earth.

The title of the song is used in German in a completely different context. An article about voting behavior in the 2002 Bundestag election from an east-west perspective is headed as follows:

"Is the east really red?"

The East is Red is also the title of an album by Holger Czukay from 1984. On the cover of the record is a message circulating in 1983 about a book in which the Beijing leadership warns against decadent rock music and instead recommends exemplary songs, such as: B. "The sewage collectors descend from the mountain".

The East Was Red is a book by Hans-Peter Bärtschi about the failed do-gooder in the formerly socialist states

The rest is silence

"The rest is silence." Are Hamlet's last words in William Shakespeare 's drama of the same name:

Oh, I'm dying, Horatio!
The strong poison overcomes my mind;
I can't hear the papers from England.
But I prophesy: ​​The election falls
on Fortinbras: he has my dying word:
That tells him, including the coincidences of chance
that brought it there. -
The rest is silence.

(He dies.)

Today one expresses perplexity with this quote or expresses one's inability to say something about a difficult matter.

The rest is silence is also the title of a film by Helmut Käutner from 1959.

The womb is still fertile from which it crawled

This quote, with reference to National Socialism, comes from the epilogue of Bertolt Brecht's play The Resistant Rise of Arturo Ui , which transfers Hitler's seizure and expansion of power into the world of gangsters. There it says:

But you learn how to see instead of staring
and act instead of talking still and still.
Something like that almost ruled the world once!
The peoples became its master, but
that none of us triumphed too soon -
the womb is still fertile from which it crept!

The shot that was heard around the world

The stanza is engraved at the base of The Minute Man statue .

The gunshot that was heard around the world is a popular phrase in the United States that refers to the beginning of the American Revolutionary War . The phrase comes from the first stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn from 1837 and describes the effect of the Battle of Lexington and Concord on the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts in 1775.

The stanza reads:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard 'round the world.

At the simple bridge that spanned the tide,
its flag unfolded in the April breeze.
Here the farmers once stood lined up
and fired the shot that was heard around the world.

I am the state

Louis XIV in coronation regalia

The arrogant maxim of absolutism , L'État, c'est moi , is attributed to the French Sun King Louis XIV , who is said to have said this sentence on April 13, 1655 in front of parliament. The parliament and the king met together as a court of justice ( lit de justice ).

The historian Adolphe Chéruel writes in his historical work Histoire de l'Administration monarchique en France , published in 1855 :

"This is where, according to a suspicious tradition, the story of the apparition of Louis XIV in Parliament is moved, in a hunting coat, a whip in hand, and this is where the infamous response to the remark of the first President, who emphasized the interest of the state, is moved: 'I am the state'. Instead of this dramatic scene, the most reliable documents show us the king, as he admittedly commands Parliament to remain silent, but without displaying any outrageous arrogance. "

Dulaure ( Histoire de Paris , 1853, p. 387) claims of course:

"He interrupted a judge who was using the words 'the king and the state' in a speech by exclaiming with highness: 'L'État c'est moi'."

Ludwig consolidated the power of the crown by expanding the administration, by combating the opposition of the nobility and by promoting the economy. The court culture was tailored entirely to the person of the ruler. His pompous appearance became a symbol of his outstanding position.

His last words, however, were: “I am dying, but the state will always remain.” ( Je meurs, mais l'État demeurera toujours. )

The ballot is stronger than the bullet

This is what the American politician Abraham Lincoln said during a speech in Bloomington, Illinois in 1856 :

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet."

The stuff dreams are made of

The stuff dreams are made of is a novel by Johannes Mario Simmel , the title of which is based on a quote from William Shakespeare's drama The Tempest :

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

"We are made of the same stuff as dreams are, and our little lives are surrounded by sleep."

In this drama, the magician Prospero says to Ferdinand, the bridegroom of his daughter Miranda, looking back on his magic game that the whole earth will dissolve and disappear without a trace.

In Simmel's novel, a gigantic industrial apparatus is depicted in which the fabric for the dreams of millions is woven and the dream world of a person who sacrifices himself for the powerless.

The book title is often used in a different context. This is the title of an article on the sleep hormone melatonin or an article on the methodology of Freud's interpretation of literary works.

The Devil is a squirrel

This winged word can be understood ambiguously.

  1. It denotes an absurd assertion that can be maintained from an illogical conclusion or only with rhetorical gimmicks .
  2. Because of its red fur and dexterity, the squirrel is , in superstition , a manifestation of the devil. The saying "the devil is a squirrel" wants to express that evil or misfortune can be seen in the most unsuspicious forms, e.g. B. that of a squirrel can lurk.

See also: the devil is a squirrel (Wiktionary)

Death is a master from Germany

This line from the death fugue of the poet Paul Celan is often quoted, especially in anti-fascist language, and can be found on posters and in wall paintings.

Black milk of the morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you in the evening and in the morning we drink and drink
death is a master from Germany his eye is blue

The tourist destroys what he is looking for by finding it

This quote from the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger is mostly used in discussions on the subject of soft or rough tourism.

The Austrian folklorist Hans Haid speaks of a " Goa in the Alps" and means:

“Around 13 million people live in an area of ​​around 180,000 square kilometers. They are haunted, nourished and eaten bald by 120 million guests with 500 million overnight stays in five million guest beds. The people of the Alps should serve, mow meadows, conserve suntanned wooden houses, yodel in traditional costumes, sell building sites, wait for guests, serve schnapps, open the porn bar, wait safe and sound at the hunter's fence, patiently endure everything. "

The American humorist Sam Ewing said on the same subject:

"The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists."

"The average tourist wants to go where there are no tourists."

The madness, when it becomes epidemic, is called reason

This quote is currently attributed exclusively to Oskar Panizza , the author of The Love Council . But Panizza had only adopted it and gave its source in a distorted manner. In the essay Christ in Psicho-Patological Illumination in the Zurich Discussions , he wrote: "As M. Jacobi rightly said: 'Madness, when it becomes epidemic, is called reason.'"

Panizza's biographer Michael Bauer inferred from the unprinted notebooks that he was a “psychiatrist Jacobi” without giving his first name. Meanwhile, Maximilian Jacobi was meant . In fact, however, the quote is in a letter from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to Jakob Friedrich Fries of July 29, 1808: " When madness becomes epidemic, says Hamann in a text, it applies to common sense." The philosopher Jacobi therefore had the quote excerpted from a work by Johann Georg Hamann , also called “the Magus in the North”.

The list of those who gave the quote under educated wings long before Panizza and interpreted it differently is long and includes theologians (J. Scheinert), lawyers ( Jodocus Temme ), physicists ( Karl Friedrich Zöllner ) as well as doctors and psychologists such as Theodor Puschmann or Rudolf Leubuscher . They all correctly traced the quote back to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Only the Berlin court newspaper of May 4, 1867 wrote, "There are times - says a German psychologist, Jacobi - when madness becomes epidemic." Overall, in addition to the well-known citation, there is also often the variant: "The madness, if it becomes epidemic, gets the name of reason. "

The real Jacob

Reliquary shrine in Santiago de Compostela

“That is the real Jacob” should mean, that is the right man or the right, long sought agent. The expression is also used in the form “That is also not the real Jacob” and then means something like “That is also not exactly the right thing”.

The expression is traced back to the apostle James the Elder , whose grave is said to be in the Spanish pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela , but whose bones were often suspected to be in other graves.

Other attempts at explanation lead the expression back to the biblical progenitor Jacob , who cheated his brother Esau of the birthright and the blessing of the father.

Der Wahre Jacob was a German satirical magazine that was founded in 1879 and appeared intermittently until 1933.

The physicist Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to Max Born about quantum mechanics :

“Quantum mechanics is very important. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the real Jacob yet. The theory delivers a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secret of the old. In any case, I am convinced that the old man does not roll the dice. "

The way to the hell is paved with good intentions

This proverbial saying is ascribed to the English lexicographer Samuel Johnson and passed down by his biographer James Boswell :

"Hell is paved with good intentions."

"Hell is paved with good intentions."

The phrase can also be found in a similar form in the Scottish poet Walter Scott , who traces it back to an English theologian of the 17th century. Chesterton specifically contradicted: “Only Calvinists can believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is precisely what it cannot be paved with. "

The American humorist Sam Ewing modifies the saying slightly by saying on the subject of the Internet :

"The information highway is paved with good inventions."

"The information superhighway is paved with good inventions."

The last word of wisdom

At the end of his life, the blind Faust in Goethe's drama Faust II has the vision of a paradisiacal land that has been wrested from the sea and has to be constantly defended against the tide. He comes to the following conclusion:

The tide rushes to the edge outside,
And as she nibbles, piercing in by force, the
community rushes to close the gap.
Yes! I am completely devoted to this sense.
That is the last word of wisdom:
Only he deserves freedom like life,
who has to conquer it every day.

With the words of not the ultimate wisdom one now thinks that something is not the perfect solution . An article in the daily newspaper Die Welt about Spinner GmbH is headed with the words “Cutting jobs is not the ultimate wisdom”.

The wind told me a song

These words come from a song by the hit poet Bruno Balz , whose refrain begins as follows:

The wind told me a song
About happiness unspeakably beautiful;
He knows what is lacking in my heart,
For whom it beats and glows.

In the film La Habanera from 1937, Zarah Leander sings this hit, which expresses the longing for a distant, past happiness. The film tells the story of a Swede who married a wealthy Puerto Rican but does not get happy in Puerto Rico . She patiently bears her grief for ten years, until suddenly a childhood friend turns up and her fate turns again.

The song became one of the most successful songs by the Swedish Ufa star.

The words have changed enough, let me finally see deeds

This request comes from the prelude to Goethe's drama Faust I at the theater . In a conversation between the director, the playwright and the funny person, the director takes the view that what matters most in theater is the effectiveness of the audience. He does not accept the poet's objections and ends the dispute with these words.

The Dice has dropped

Location of the Rubicon River in Northern Italy

The expression “crossing the Rubicon” is the name given to a momentous decision, such as Caesar's passage over the Rubicon , because it unleashed the civil war. When Caesar, after hesitating for a long time, made the decision to cross the Rubicon, he is said to have said alea iacta est .

On January 10, 49 BC Julius Caesar marched on the Rubicon, the border river to the demilitarized zone around Rome, which no Roman general with his troops was allowed to approach, and initially said:

“We can still go back; if we cross this little bridge, everything will have to be carried out with weapons. "

While he was still there, a shepherd came, snatched a soldier's trumpet, crossed the river, and sounded the alarm. Caesar then said:

“That is where the path leads, where the signs of the gods and the atrocities of the enemy call. The die is thrown. "

According to Athenaeus of Naukratis, this sentence was originally written by Menander. In the life of Pompey, Plutarch reports that the saying was in Greek:

«Ἑλληνιστὶ πρὸς τοὺς παρόντας ἐκβοήσας, Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος, διεβίβαζε τὸν στρατόν."

"He spoke in a loud voice in Greek to those present, 'Throw up the dice' and led the army across."

Suetonius is a not quite literal translation Iacta alea est! Mostly one quotes Alea iacta est ! (“The die has been cast !”) Or Aleae iactae sunt ! ("The die is cast!").

The end justifies the means

This sentence became known as the supposed motto of the Jesuit order and was particularly evident in interventions in politics. The principle can be found as "... if the end is allowed, the means are also allowed" in the "moral theology" (Medulla IV, cap. 3, dub. 7, art. 2) of the Jesuit father Hermann Busenbaum 1652, albeit with provided certain restrictions. In its unrestricted form, it is likely to be an old principle of power politics, which is often ascribed to Niccolò Machiavelli , but to whom it was not formulated. Machiavelli had allegedly considered every means permitted to achieve political ends. Even Napoleon Bonaparte is awarded this sentence, because it was important only to achieve its objectives, and he took no consideration in his choice of means.

The one who

This slang expression has the meaning of "the one we are talking about". It comes from the short Berlin posse Das Fest der Handwerker by Louis Angely . In this piece itself, however, it says “always the one who”.

The Emperor's New Clothes

The Emperor's New Clothes (Danish: Kejserens Nye Klæder ) is a fairy tale by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen . It tells of a vain emperor who is duped by two cunning swindlers. They promise him to make the most beautiful clothes that should be invisible to anyone who is not fit for his office:

“The chamberlains, who had the right to carry the train, put their hands on the floor as if they were picking up the train; they walked and pretended to be holding something in the air; they dared not let it be seen that they could see nothing.
So the emperor walked under the magnificent canopy of the throne, and all the people in the street and in the windows said: 'How incomparable are the emperor's new clothes! What train he has on his dress! How beautiful it is! ' Nobody wanted to let it be noticed that he saw nothing; because then he would not have been fit for his office or would have been very stupid. No clothes of the emperor had made such luck as this. "

The dizziness is only revealed when a child exclaims that the emperor has no clothes on:

“'Hear the voice of innocence!' said the father; and the one hissed at the other what the child had said.
'But he's not wearing anything!' at last called the whole people. "

The singer Reinhard Mey celebrates this topic in his song Des Kaisers neue Kleid ( The Emperor's New Clothes) , in which he questions the modern art world:

As for me, I'm sick of faxing.
Doesn't anyone here see that the Kaiser is not wearing any clothes?
This is neither new nor original, it's just stupid.
Take a good look, the poor guy is stark naked.

Life's toil

In the play Torquato Tasso by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, State Secretary Antonio Montecatino says in the fifth act:

"Life's toil alone teaches us to value life's goods."

Despotism tempered by sloppiness

“The Austrian government is as incapable of being consistent in an act of justice as it is in an act of oppression ; it fluctuates constantly back and forth - we have softened despotism through sloppiness . "

With these words in his report “on the situation of the socialist movement in Austria”, Victor Adler , co-founder of the Social Democratic Labor Party , evoked “great amusement” at the 1889 International Workers' Congress in Paris .

There are similar statements about other countries:

In his work Caractères et Anecdotes, the French writer Nicolas Chamfort mentions a witty man as the inventor of the following quote:

«… Le gouvernement de France était une monarchie absolue, tempérée par des chansons. »

"France is an absolute monarchy, tempered by lively songs."

(Another translation: "... absolute monarchy, moderate by witty words.")

After the assassination of the Russian Tsar Paul in 1801, a Russian prince said to the Hanoverian ambassador, Count Munster :

«Le despotisme, tempéré par l'assassinat, c'est notre Magna charta. »

"Tyranny, moderated by assassination, that is our Magna Charta."

deus ex machina

The Latin phrase Deus ex machina (“God from the machine”) is a loan translation from the Greek ἀπὸ μηχανῆς Θεός (“apo mechanes theos”) and originally denotes the appearance of a deity with the help of a stage machine .

In ancient tragedy , there were conflicts that could not always be resolved from the plot. Their solution came from the outside through the surprising intervention of a deity, who gave the event the decisive turning point. The deus ex machina hovered over the stage in a hoist or landed on the roof of the stage building. Slewing cranes were used, with the help of which the intervening deity could be hoisted onto the stage from outside.

A famous example can be found in the drama Iphigenie with the Taurern by the poet Euripides . There, at the last moment , the goddess Artemis appears above the temple to save Iphigenia and Orestes from the wrath of the Tauride king Thoas , and passes a just judgment to which all submit.

To be German means to do something for its own sake

The usually mockingly used expression relates to action that is not questioned and can be traced back to a differently intended utterance by Richard Wagner . In his essay, German Art and German Politics , published in 1867, Wagner wrote:

"Here it came to consciousness and was given its definite expression of what was German, namely: the thing that one does, for the sake of itself and the joy of it."

German workers, the SPD wants to take your villas in Ticino away from you!

The graphic designer Klaus Staeck published an ironic political poster for the 1972 federal election showing a modernist villa in poisonous yellow under a blue sky with the Gothic script :

“German workers! The SPD wants to take your villas in Ticino away from you! "

The poster, the irony of which was by no means unanimously approved by the SPD, hangs today in the Bonn House of History . As a postcard and sticker it reached a circulation of 70,000 copies.

Willi Winkler wrote in 2008 on Klaus Staeck's 70th birthday in the Süddeutsche Zeitung :

“The saying 'German workers! The SPD wants to take away your villas in Ticino 'has become proverbial, even if it soon lost its effectiveness when the fraud of the rulers of the union holding Neue Heimat became apparent. "

German revolutionaries only occupy a train station after buying a platform ticket

This joke about the Germans' sense of order and their inability to overthrow a revolution is mostly ascribed to Lenin in a wide variety of wording, but always without citing the source . This first happened apparently in 1938 in The Spectator and in German in 1946 in Frankfurter Hefte . Earlier Stalin on 13 December 1931 in his interview with the German writer Emil Ludwig , replied to the question of whether "the Germans as a nation more orderliness as love of freedom":

“In Germany, people once had great respect for the law. When I was in Berlin for two or three months in 1907, we Russian Bolsheviks often made fun of some German friends because they had this respect for the law. For example, the following anecdote was in circulation: When the Berlin Social Democratic Board of Directors scheduled a rally for a certain day and a certain hour, at which the members of the organization were to appear from all suburbs, a group of two hundred people from a suburb could, albeit she arrived in town on time at the appointed hour, did not show up for the demonstration because she stood on the platform for two hours and did not dare to leave it: the conductor who was supposed to collect the tickets at the exit was not there, and the comrades could therefore not hand in their cards. They jokingly said that a Russian comrade had to come first to show the Germans the easy way out of the situation: to leave the platform without handing in the tickets ... "

The fact that the Russian Bolsheviks' ridicule of the German Social Democrats was later attributed to Lenin personally may be due to the fact that in the biography Stalin - Eine neue Welt published in 1935 under the name Henri Barbusse , Stalin stayed in Berlin for some time in 1907, to consult with Lenin. Perhaps this information came from Stalin himself. Today, however, its accuracy is doubted: a trip by Stalin to Berlin (or Leipzig) in 1907 is nowhere else documented / attested, and Lenin was in England and Finland at the time. Stalin also told Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta conference at dinner on May 10 about two hundred workers who did not dare to leave the station when they arrived because of the absence of a conductor and therefore did not appear in time for an important rally February 1945, according to Averell Harriman . This time, however, Stalin did not speak of a circulating anecdote , but presented the event as something that he had experienced himself during a visit to Leipzig in 1907.

Compare Kurt Tucholsky , 1930: "Because of bad weather, the German revolution in music took place."

German Michel

The German Michel , the national personification of the Germans, probably goes back to the Archangel Michael (as patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire and later Germany ) or a certain Hans Michael Elias von Obentraut . The earliest documented tradition can be found in a dictionary of proverbs published by Sebastian Franck in 1541 - a few decades before Obentraut was born. The German Michel describes a booby and a fanatic.

Germany United fatherland

"Germany, united fatherland" is a verse from Johannes R. Becher's Resurrected from Ruins , the national anthem of the German Democratic Republic :

Risen from the ruins
And facing the future,
Let us serve you for the good,
Germany, united fatherland.

After the GDR withdrew from the reunification of Germany, the text became inconvenient. For example, Willy Brandt replied to Willi Stoph in 1972 when he said that there are two German states, referring to the first stanza:

"You sing in your hymn about Germany, united fatherland."

With the transfer of power to Erich Honecker , the text disappeared from the public in the early 1970s and the anthem was only performed instrumentally.

At the time of the fall of the Wall towards the end of 1989, the word became more and more popular when it partly used the word We are the people! replaced.

Germany has to live, even if we have to die

Inscription on a fountain in the pedestrian zone of Speyer

This saying comes from the poem soldiers farewell of Heinrich Lersch :

Let me go, mother let me go!
All the crying can no longer be of any use to us,
because we are going to protect the fatherland!
Let me go, mother let me go!
I want to kiss your last greeting from the mouth:
Germany must live, and if we have to die!

This sentence can be found on numerous war memorials, for example at the Dammtor in Hamburg, but also as the motto of the war cemetery in Langemarck . The memorial was regularly the target of paint bombs, graffiti and other actions.

In circles of the anti-German as well as parts of the Antifa this saying is reversed to "Germany must die so we can live", so there is a song by the punk band Slime (band) with corresponding text.

Germany over everything!

Facsimile of the original of the Deutschlandlied

The often misunderstood beginning of the Germany song “Germany, Germany above everything, above everything in the world” was not an invitation to subjugate non-German territories for August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben .

Kurt Tucholsky said:

“'Deutschland über alles', a foolish verse from a loud-mouthed poem. No, Germany is not above everything and is not above everything - never. But it should be with everyone, our country. "

The Scientific Service of the German Bundestag comments on the same topic as follows:

“With this beginning of the song - which was later often misunderstood by tendencies - the author wanted to express emotionally that he wanted a unification of the individual German states and thus the unity of Germany 'above all in the world'. His political concern was not geographical expansion, but an all-German constitution. "

Germany's future lies on the water

This vision comes from a speech given by the German Emperor Wilhelm II on the occasion of the inauguration of the Szczecin Free Port in September 1898. With these words Wilhelm expressed his conviction that Germany could only improve its global political position if it had an expanded merchant navy a strong navy to conquer and secure colonies.

Poetic freedom

To be more generous with historical facts in a fiction work is poetic freedom. This term appears for the first time in a scientific work by the Roman scholar Lucius Annaeus Seneca , who writes in the chapter on lightning:

" It is part of poetic freedom (poeticam istud licentia decet) to claim that Jupiter changes the power of his lightning bolts, depending on what he wants to hit with it."

Poetry and truth

Poetry and Truth is the shortened title of Goethe's autobiographical memoirs from the years 1749 to 1775. Goethe himself occasionally also used the version “Truth and Poetry”, but probably preferred the first version for reasons of sound. The full title is From My Life. Poetry and truth .

Today this phrase is used when one has doubts as to whether a representation is really true and suspects that the facts are fabricated.

Only the wind knows the answer

Only the wind knows the answer is the title of a 1974 novel by Johannes Mario Simmel , which in turn takes up the refrain of the song Blowin 'in the Wind by Bob Dylan . The pacifist song has three stanzas. Questions are asked that are answered with the same last line of text each time:

"The answer is blowin 'in the wind."

"The answer is blowing in the wind."

In the German lyrics translation:

"The wind alone knows the answer."

The song was considered an anthem of the folk-rock movement. This quote is often used to indicate that a question remains open.

The poverty comes from the Powerteh

This saying goes back to a quote from Fritz Reuter's work Ut mine Stromtid , where Inspector Bräsig concludes his speech at the Rahmstädter Reformverein with the following words:

"The great poverty in the city comes from the great power."

The word "Powerteh" is a twisted form of the French word pauvreté , which means poverty.

The eyes of the world are on you

Into the Jaws of Death : US Army troops land on
Omaha Beach on D-Day

In his order to land in Normandy on June 6, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said in English to his soldiers:

"The eyes of the world are upon you."

In his address, Eisenhower said among other things:

Soldiers, sailors, air force soldiers,
you are about to embark on the Great Crusade that we have been zealous for so many months. The eyes of the world are on you. The hopes and prayers of the freedom-loving peoples everywhere march with you. Together with our brave allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over Europe's peoples and security for ourselves in a free world.

Similar formulations existed even before 1945. The satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1931 under the heading The Eyes of the World :

In Germany, when it comes to foreign policy, the domestic regulars' table dominates. One of its iron principles is the phrase: 'The eyes of the world are on us'. That sentence is just a lie.
Germany is not playing the role in the world that it thinks it is playing.

Today the quote is mainly used in modifications:

  • "The eyes of the world on Vienna." (Summit 1961 Khrushchev - Kennedy)
  • "The eyes of the fashion world are once again on Paris."

The ax in the house saves the carpenter

This quote - often used with reference to DIY enthusiasts - comes from Friedrich Schiller's drama Wilhelm Tell . There it is described how Tell repairs the gate with an ax , how his wife does domestic work and how his son plays with a bow and arrow. The conversation revolves around the boy, because his mother has something against shooting, while Tell praises the early practice. (See " Early practice is what a master wants to be. ") Then Tell's wife says what fear she endures when he goes into the mountains. At the end of the conversation, Tell appraises his work with satisfaction and says the above words.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung it says under the heading On these phrases you can build on this famous quote:

“A sentence from one piece, seamlessly sealed and yet freely accessible to any association. There is a bit of self-praise, but it is ironically amusing broken. The saved carpenter is by no means the quintessence, but rather the pleasure of doing it yourself. "

The base of a healthy order is a big bin

Messie apartment

With these words, Kurt Tucholsky wants to indicate that it helps order if you part with the superfluous. He writes this in a newspaper article with the sensible title You can still use that -!

With a swipe at the throwaway society in the United States, Tucholsky writes in the article:

“The American throws everything away: tradition, old cars, the house where he was born, vacuum cleaners and old boots. Why? - Because the new one doesn't cost that much; because nobody and no company there is prepared for lengthy repairs - because nobody understands that one preserves an object for its own sake when another is already on the next corner. "

It is different in Europe:

“The Europeans, however, have an affectionate disposition and keep everything for themselves. For example in politics ... "

Tucholsky understands the inhibition to throw away goods, but writes:

“It is an atavistic respect for the thing, from the time when an object was still made by hand… Today the machines spew it out - throw it away! throw it away! "

The best of all possible worlds

Candide meets a mutilated slave

The postulate that we live in the best of all possible worlds is part of the larger philosophical argument of the 17th century, according to which God could produce nothing less than the best of all possible worlds with the cosmos . Otherwise he would not have been God, the perfect being.

From Voltaire's satirical novel Candide or Optimism comes the sentence:

«Tout est pour le mieux in le meilleur des mondes possibles. »

"Everything is in the best order in the best of possible worlds."

Voltaire lets his protagonist Candide go on a world tour with Pangloß, the caricature of a philosopher. Despite the shipwreck, earthquake, inquisition, illness and execution, Pangloß sticks to his opinion:

"This is the best of all possible worlds."

Candide replies:

"If this is the best of all possible worlds, then I would like to see the rest of them first!"

In the theodicy of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz it says:

“… Nisi inter omnes possibiles mundos optimus esset, Deus nullum produxisset.”

"God would not have created a world if it were not the best of all possible."

The best wife of all

The Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon used this topos (also: "the best of all wives") to describe his second wife Sara Kishon (née Lipovitz). She is the mother of his son Amir and his daughter Renana. Sara Kishon herself wrote a satirical response to her husband's stories in 1996 entitled “My Beloved Liar. The Confessions of the Best Wife of All ” . In this book, she tells some of the stories that are already known from her husband's point of view, from her point of view.

The term has entered the German vocabulary and is used widely, such as:

  • "The little book for the best of all wives"
  • "What does the best of all wives say?"

The bombing of Russia begins in five minutes

With a microphone test on August 11, 1984, the US President Ronald Reagan sparked a serious diplomatic crisis by saying shortly before a radio broadcast:

“My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. "

“Dear fellow Americans, I am delighted to announce that I have signed a law that will make Russia forever outlawed. The bombing of Russia begins in five minutes. "

The media published this sound sample, which led to severe criticism worldwide.

The White Man's Burden

Caricature around 1823

Poem by Rudyard Kipling : The White Man's Burden

The earth has me again

This quote comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama Faust I , where the desperate Faust is reaching for the poison vial. But he is prevented from doing so by the choir of angels who announce Easter morning ("Christ is risen") and exclaims:

O ring out, you sweet heavenly songs!
The tear wells up, the earth has me again!

The quote is used when you have just stepped off a plane or disembarked from a ship with relief.

The earth be easy for you!

This saying occurs as a funeral saying in different versions:

"The earth be easy for you!"
"May the earth be easy for you!"

In the Latin form the saying goes:

"Sit terra tibi levis."

These words have been on tombstones since ancient times. They go back to a place in the Second Elegy book of the Roman poet Tibullus and refer to a girl who died young. It is said by Tibullus:

"Terraque securae sit super ossa levis."
"And the earth is light for those who are safe above the bones."

Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven

Michelangelo : Fall of Man and Expulsion from Paradise

This quote comes from the Impromptus published in 1812 , which I will in future write in the family books of the writer Jean Paul . (Mostly wrongly assigned to the novel The Invisible Lodge .) This finding was certainly not new at the time, but it was summed up by Jean Paul:

“Memory is the only paradise from which (often quoted: from which ) we cannot be driven (mostly quoted: driven out ). Even the first parents couldn't be brought out of it. "

By the “first parents”, Jean Paul means the first parents Adam and Eve , who were driven out of Paradise but were able to keep the memory of it.

The writer Arthur Schnitzler comments on this quote as follows:

“Memory, says Jean Paul, is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven. Sometimes that may be true. More often, however, memory is the only hell into which we are condemned without guilt. "

The first will be last and the last will be first

This comforting reference comes from the Gospel of Matthew , where Jesus explains to his disciples during a discussion about who will enter the kingdom of God and how:

"27 Then answered Peter and said to him, Behold, we have left everything and followed you; what will we do for it? 28 But Jesus said to them, Truly I say to you, you who have followed me will be born again, when the Son of man will sit on the throne of his glory, also sit on twelve stools and judge the twelve families of Israel. 29 And whoever leaves houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my name's sake will take it a hundredfold and inherit eternal life. 30 But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. "

The owl of Minerva does not begin its flight until dusk falls

Owl on the Acropolis in Athens

The owl of Minerva is a metaphor for understanding philosophy or wisdom. The ancient Italian deity Minerva was equated with Athena , the Greek goddess of wisdom, whose most famous attribute is the owl.

See also: Γλαῦκ᾿ εἰς Ἀθήνας. ( Carry owls to Athens )

The quote expresses that knowledge is only possible from a certain time interval. It comes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's preface to his basic principles of the philosophy of law , published in 1821 . There it says:

“If philosophy paints it gray in gray, then a figure of life has grown old, and with gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; Minerva's owl does not begin its flight until dawn. "

Hegel compared philosophy with the owl that only flies out at dusk. He is of the opinion that philosophy only comes into play when the evening of events (= history) has come. Philosophy therefore only has the opportunity to analyze processes when they have passed, and always comes too late with its teachings.

Often in allusion to the fact that philosophers, writers and other humanities scholars prefer to think and debate in the evening and night.

Raise the flag!

These words are the beginning of the National Socialist Horst Wessel song , a battle song of the SA , which became the party anthem of the NSDAP . It bears its name after the SA man Horst Wessel , who wrote the text between 1927 and 1929 on a melody presumably from the 19th century. It was published in August 1929 by the SA organ The Attack with the title The flag high! printed as a poem and begins with the following stanza:

Raise the flag!
The rows tightly closed!
SA marches
with a steady steady step
|: Kam'raden, the red front
And reaction shot,
marching in the spirit
In our ranks with: |

After Hitler came to power in 1933, the song functioned as the second national anthem, modeled on the Italian Giovinezza . The Allied Control Council banned the song in 1945 after Germany's defeat in World War II. August 1, 1968 (a year before the criminal form ) one was § 86a of the Criminal Code ( "Use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations") to the Criminal Code of Germany added. Similar provisions apply in Austria (Section 3 of the Prohibition Act 1947 ).

When the Nazi regime issued the slogan “cannons instead of butter” (armaments instead of consumer goods), joke counters invented “Horst Wessel butter” (“marches in spirit on our bread”).

Bertolt Brecht parodied this Nazi song in his drama Schweyk in World War II with his calf march :

“The butcher is calling. The eyes tightly closed
The calf marches with a steady, firm step.
The calves, whose blood has already flowed in the slaughterhouse.
They move in spirit in his ranks. "

It should also be mentioned at this point that the SA also had a storm song with the ambiguous title We are the leader's brown heaps . Horst Wessel himself wrote in a letter to the Hitler Youth :

"We are Hitler's brown pile, and we want to be one of the first to carry our swastika banner to the storm."

The woman is silent in the community

In Greek, verses 14.33b-35 of Paul's 1st letter to the Corinthians reads :

This commandment of silence for women is unique in the writings of the Apostle Paul . In biblical theology and text research it is controversial whether the sentence is from Paul's or an afterthought.

The saying is modeled on a gnome by the Greek poet Menander , who says:

"Looms and not community meetings are women's work."

The Latin version is better known: Mulier taceat in ecclesia.

Goethe writes in the 7th book of his Zahmen Xenien :

What good times they were! In ecclesia mulier taceat!
Now that every voice has what does Ecclesia mean.

The whole world is a theater

Replica of the Globe Theater

At the Globe Theater in London, which has a place in theatrical history primarily through performances of works by William Shakespeare , Shakespeare had a Latin saying added:

The English version is from Shakespeare's play As You Like It (2.7.138-9):

All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players.

The whole world is a stage,
and all men and women are just players.

Irish playwright Oscar Wilde made it:

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

The world is a stage, but the play is poorly cast.

The guard dies and does not surrender

Romanticizing depiction of the Imperial Guard

The French general Pierre Cambronne is said to have said at the battle of Waterloo :

«La garde meurt et ne se rend pas. »

"The old guard dies and does not surrender."

In this context, the following slogan is occasionally quoted:

"Let's die here and save the emperor!"

But the fact is that he surrendered himself and has resolutely denied this saying. Nevertheless, the statue was given the saying in his native Nantes .

The saying probably comes from the journalist Balisson de Rougemont, who had it printed in the magazine "L'Indépendant" in 1815. In addition, the sons of General Michel protested the inscription on Cambronne's statue and claimed the copyright for their father.

The Imperial Guard of Napoleon (French: Garde impériale ) was founded in 1804 Elite - Corps of the Grande Armée . Until Waterloo, it was considered almost invincible. Napoleon often used the guard as a last reserve in his battles and preferred to deploy them in decisive battle situations.

The secret seducers

The secret seducer is a non-fiction book on the subject of advertising, which the US consumer critic Vance Packard published in 1957 under the English original title "The Hidden Persuaders". The subtitle "Reaching for the subconscious in everyone" refers to what is known as motivational research. Packard criticizes the persuasion to make purchase decisions that have nothing to do with actual needs or the quality of the product.

The curved road is the donkey's way

This sentence comes from the Swiss architect Le Corbusier , who claimed in 1925:

"La rue courbe est le chemin des ânes, la rue droite le chemin des Hommes."
"The curved road is the donkey's way, the straight road is the man's way."

Le Corbusier was concerned with the car- friendly city . In 1988 Manfred Sack wrote in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit about this quote:

"" He meant the city of the mass automobile. His radical suggestion was never followed because one was attached to the old city, to the varied, surprising, confusing, well-designed, unmistakable city that one loves, that one has also learned to experience as an architectural and a refined spatial event. ““

Take hold of the opportunity

Francesco Salviati: Head of
Cairo's hair

This phrase goes back to the Greek myth of the god Kairos (καιρός = favorable opportunity), who was portrayed with a curly forehead and bald neck flying away because one tries to seize the good opportunity only when it has disappeared. The god of the favorable moment is represented in art with a bald back of the head and a mop of hair on the forehead, on which one could easily grasp the favorable moment.

In Greek it says:

Γίγνωσκε καιρόν.

"Gignōske kairon."

"Know the right time!"

The saying is attributed to the Pittakos of Mytilene , the military leader of the Mytileans in the fight against the Athenians. With their leader Phrynon (Olympic champion in pankration ) he agreed to fight the fight only among the leaders. In hand-to-hand combat he threw a net over Phrynon and defeated or killed him; thereby the battle against Athens was won without further bloodshed.

The straight line is godless

This dictum comes from the so-called mold manifestation , which the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser initiated on July 4, 1958 with a speech in the Seckau Abbey :

“The straight line is godless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative, but a reproductive line. It is not so much God and human spirit as the comfort-hungry, mindless mass ant that lives in it. "

Hundertwasser sees the ruler as a symbol of the new illiteracy. He believes that in the past, the straight line was a privilege. Today, however, “every idiot has millions of straight lines”.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier took a different view , who maintained:

"The curved road is the donkey's way, the straight road is the man's way."

The heroes are tired

The heroes are tired is the German title of a French feature film from 1954 (French: Les héros sont fatigués). The title is mostly quoted mockingly when people lose their zeal in accomplishing a task.

Hell is the others

In Jean-Paul Sartre's play With Closed Doors (also: Closed Society ; French: Huis clos ) three people who have just died find themselves in a salon that is identical to Hell .

The three cannot leave the room and are therefore dependent on each other. They have to recognize that their personal freedom is limited by the demands of the other. But they cannot even kill each other, because they are already dead. The man among the three then comes to the conclusion:

"Pas besoin de gril: L'enfer, c'est les Autres. »

"You don't even need a grid, hell, that's the others."

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on

The translation of the Turkish proverb "it ürür kervan yürür" was an expression often used by the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl . His attribute of sitting out problems and not responding to his counterpart was also known as the "Helmut Kohl Syndrome". This strategy of pretending that you don't need to react to criticism and wait for your opponent to give up can only be allowed if you are in a much stronger position.

That I called, the ghosts

Towards the end of Goethe's ballad The Sorcerer's Apprentice it becomes clear to the careless sorcerer's apprentice that the spirits he conjured up can no longer be brought under control, and since he cannot think of the right magic formula, he groans desperately in the penultimate verse:

Oh, here comes the master!
Lord, the need is great!
Who I called, the ghosts,
I won't get rid of them now.

The quote is used today when a development gets out of hand. In a speech by the Green MP Stefan Wenzel on the subject of the establishment of a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Asse mine :

“With nuclear power, it's a bit like the broom in Goethe's 'Sorcerer's Apprentice'. He is a subservient spirit until at some point the flowing floods, which he brings in buckets, can no longer be stopped:
And then the horror cries come:
'Oh you godless hell, should the whole house drown?'
'The ones I called, I will not get rid of the ghosts!'
Do you know what the difference is between the sorcerer's apprentice at Goethe and you, Mr. Environment Minister? The sorcerer's apprentice had just forgotten the word to stop the madness. There is no magic word for their nuclear power. And if there is one thing, it is: nuclear power - no thanks! "

The ghosts I called ... is the German title of the American comedy Scrooged (actually: "The Miser").

You can't see those in the dark

The most popular song from Bertolt Brecht's play The Threepenny Opera is The Moritat by Mackie Messer . The last stanza of the film version in particular takes up the topic of social injustice:

Because some are in the dark
and the others are in the light.
And you see them in the light.
You can't see those in the dark.

“… You can't see them in the dark!” Was the title of a conference on poverty and health risks in children, which was held in July 1998 at the Hannover Medical School.

The one you can't see in the dark is the title of a novel by Johannes Mario Simmel and the headline to an article about the people behind a corruption affair in Manager Magazin .

We don't like the right direction!

"We don't like the right direction!" Was the answer of the Berlin police chief Freiherr Bernhard von Richthofen in 1890 to the question of theater director Oscar Blumenthal why the drama "Sodom's End" by Hermann Sudermann was banned. In the play, the urban clique of the nouveau riche was the subject of a biblical story. It is a pioneer of the naturalistic movement in Germany.

In the Sixteenth Chapter of the Memoirs of a Socialist - Apprenticeship Years , an autobiographical novel by Lily Braun from 1909, it says about the play:

"So we saw" Honor "and" Sodom's End ", the original prohibition of which was traced back to the emperor's direct intervention and had ensured the success of the work from the outset. The deep impression we received was made up of amazement, horror and emotion. But while it was triggered in my mother by the liberating thought that the depraved bourgeoisie and the hated parvenus were being held up to a hideous reflection that was basically none of their business, it had a painful effect on me. "

The imperial, the terrible time

This is a formulation from Friedrich Schiller's ballad Der Graf von Habsburg . There it says about the coronation of Rudolf von Habsburg , who ended the interregnum :

Loudly mingled in the trumpet sound
The cheering shouts of the crowd;
For ended after a long pernicious dispute
was the imperless, the terrible time,
And a judge was again on earth.
The iron spear no longer rules blindly,
The weak, the peaceful, no longer fear
becoming the prey of the mighty.

This politically motivated ballad by Schiller dates back to 1803 at the time of the Napoleonic Wars in view of the fall of the Holy Roman Empire . If Schiller characterizes the interregnum as a terrible time, this term comes from a historical image of the 19th century that glorified the Hohenstaufen rule, which saw the interregnum as an age of turmoil. It is historically incorrect that Schiller describes Rudolf von Habsburg as emperor in his ballad, as at the beginning of the third stanza: And the emperor grabs the golden goblet Rudolf von Habsburg was never crowned emperor by the pope, but remained until his king was elected Death of the Roman-German king .

In 1885 M. Barack published with an addendum in 1888 a rhyming list of the German emperors and rulers from Charlemagne to Wilhelm II under the title: The German Emperors , in which he took up Schiller’s quote from Rudolf von Habsburg:

After a long and pernicious quarrel
, the impereless, the terrible time came to an end

The culture of a people is based on the consumption of soap

This very serious sentence was widespread in the second half of the 19th century. It is the modification of an idea that the German chemist Justus von Liebig had formulated in his "Chemical Letters" published in 1844:

"Soap is a measure of the prosperity and culture of states."

The art goes after bread

In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's tragedy Emilia Galotti, these words are the painter Conti's answer to Prince Hettore's question about what art is doing. Lessing uses a proverb attested to as early as the 16th century. The quote is used today when one wants to suggest that art and commerce cannot be separated.

In 2004, director Hellmuth Matiasek said in his laudation on 30 years of Paul Klinger's social work for artists:

“Of all things, he puts it in the mouth of a painter employed at the court. Was it possible for Lessing to suspect that exactly 200 years later another creative lateral thinker would take up this taboo and proclaim: 'We artists do not want to be the day laborers of the cultural gift!' "

The situation has never been so serious

Rudolf Augstein said in an interview about the Spiegel affair and its consequences for the then 86-year-old Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer :

“With all the caution and cunning that kept the old gentleman in office for 14 years, Adenauer was also rigid and, by the way, a master of superlatives and catchy formulations. With the slogan “No experiments” he won an absolute majority in the 1957 federal election. The number of times he said "The situation has never been so serious" couldn't be counted. "

Adenauer's saying also recurs in several book titles:

  • Erhard Kortmann and Fritz Wolf: The situation has never been so serious. Konrad Adenauer's winged words
  • Karl Hoche: The situation has never been so serious. A history of the Federal Republic in its satire

The last days of humanity

The Last Days of Mankind is the title of Karl Kraus ' tragedy about the horrors of World War I, which is depicted in 220 documentary scenes with 500 characters.

The title is used today as a quote in connection with visions of the end of the world.

Read the riot act

Around 760, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz set up a rule of life to improve the overgrown clergy, which obliged the clergy to meet before the bishop or his deputy after the morning prayer; He read them a chapter of the Bible, especially from the 3rd book of Moses, Leviticus , which contains religious laws for priests and Levites and often attached admonitions to it.

A number of special laws and regulations apply to the Levites, who to this day exist as a separate group in religious Judaism . Among other things, the Levites were responsible for keeping the rules in Leviticus .

Love comes from gypsies

This cliché comes from the song with which the main character in the opera Carmen introduces himself .

L'amour est enfant de Bohême,
Il n'a jamais connu de loi;
Si tu ne m'aimes pas, je t'aime;
Si je t'aime, prends garde à toi! ...

Love comes from gypsies,
Do not ask about rights, law and power!
If you don't love me, I am inflamed,
And if I love you, be careful.

Gisela Blau writes about this cliché under the heading Between 'Carmen' and Auschwitz :

“Carmen has become the most famous gypsy in the world because 'love comes from the gypsy', as the heroine sings in her first great aria from all the opera stages in the world, wrapped in the pucked up 'gypsy skirts' and wide-open bodice blouses under swaying shawls , all the way down to the golden ear creoles and ringing bangles that were (and are) ascribed to the travelers as costumes. And those audiences, which frequented the opera and operetta houses less often, tore the laundry from the linen in the villages when it was said that the gypsies were back. "

In 1920 the film The love of the gypsy originates from…. turned.

People like to believe what they want

The Roman general Gaius Iulius Caesar wrote this insight in Latin in his report on the Gallic War :

"Libenter homines id, quod volunt, credunt."

The Greek version of this sentence is as follows:

The murderers are among us

The Murderers Are Among Us is the first German feature film in post-war history and the first German debris film . The film is set in bombed Berlin in 1945.

It is told by a former captain who shot over a hundred Polish civilians on Christmas Eve 1942. He is now a popular citizen and successful businessman who produces saucepans from old steel helmets.

The director Wolfgang Staudte dealt not only with the German, but also with his own past, because he was involved in the production of the Nazi propaganda film Jud Suess .

The title is usually quoted when it comes to coming to terms with crimes of the National Socialist era:

  • "The murderers are among us. The Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial 1958 " (exhibition)
  • "The murderers are among us!" (Nationwide day of action)
  • "Looking away is not possible: the murderers are among us."

The seagulls all look like their name is Emma

Seagull

This is the much quoted beginning of a poem from the gallows songs by Christian Morgenstern , the first stanza of which reads as follows:

The seagulls all look
like their name is Emma.
They wear white fluff
and can be shot with shot.

But Morgenstern does not intend to shoot the seagulls :

I don't kill a seagull,
I prefer to let it live
and feed it with rye bread
and reddish zibeben.

Zibeben (from the Arabic zibiba ) are raisins that are dried on a stick .

In the third and final stanza, Morgenstern states:

“Oh man, you will never
fly the seagull on the side.
If your name is Emma, ​​be
content to resemble her. "

In an article about the seagulls as "ravens of the seas" Georg Rüschemeyer writes:

“How the poet came to this assessment is not known. But his 'seagull song' reflects a positive image of the elegant birds, as it apparently still prevailed at the beginning of the 20th century. "

The seagulls served the seamen as messengers from the nearby mainland. The zoologist Alfred Brehm praised her intelligence and flying skills.

The top ten thousand

In an editorial in the New York Evening Mirror newspaper on November 11, 1844, Nathaniel Parker Wittis wrote:

"At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the City."

"Right now there is no difference among the city's top ten thousand."

He chose 10,000 because that was the number of socially acceptable New Yorkers in his day. In England they usually only say The upper ten .

In addition, the term “upper ten thousand” can also be found in the Old Testament . There it says of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar after the capture of Jerusalem:

"And he carried away all Jerusalem, all the rulers, all the soldiers, ten thousand prisoners and all the carpenters and all the blacksmiths, leaving nothing but a few people of the land." ( 2 Kings 24:14  LUT )

The German saying of the "upper ten thousand" is traced back to this passage in Luther's translation.

The film musical High Society , remake of the night before the wedding , was released in German as The Top Ten Thousand .

The party, the party, is always right

This saying comes from a song of praise for the SED, which was written by the German-speaking Czechoslovak Louis Fürnberg in 1950 under the title Das Lied der Party . The refrain is as follows:

The party, the party, is always right!
And, comrades, keep it that way;
Because whoever fights for law
is always right.
Against lies and exploitation.
Whoever offends life
is stupid or bad.
Whoever defends humanity is
always right.
So, from Lenin's spirit,
Growing, welded by Stalin,
The party - the party - the party.

The convinced communist Fürnberg was the first time not invited to the congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1949, which offended him deeply. As his widow Lotte Fürnberg explained in 2001, he wrote the song to call himself back to order:

"He wrote it to justify the insult to himself."

Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, but what matters is to change it

Karl Marx saw the task of philosophy in its abolition, that is, in its practical realization.

In his eleventh Feuerbach thesis, Marx criticizes all forms of idealistic philosophy, and in particular religion, which, in his view, only serves to make human existence bearable through dreams and consolation in the afterlife and thus to prolong and legitimize misery.

Political power comes from the barrel of the gun

Mao Zedong stated in his 1936 essay "Problems of War and Strategy":

「枪杆子 里面 出 政权」

「Qiānggǎnzǐ lǐmiàn chū zhèngquán.」

"[Every communist must understand this truth:] Political power comes from the barrel of a gun."

During the Cultural Revolution , this statement was included in his "Selected Works", the so-called Mao Bible , and thus spread worldwide.

The police, your friend and helper

This slogan is intended to create a friendly image for the police and probably goes back to the Berlin politician Albert Grzesinski , who was the Prussian interior minister from 1926 to 1930 and previously the Berlin police chief. In the foreword to a book for the Berlin International Police Exhibition, which opened in September 1926, he mentions the police's motto: "To be a friend, helper and comrade of the population". The slogan also served as the motto of the exhibition ("The police, your friend and helper - please come closer!"), Which attracted half a million visitors from home and abroad. In 1937 Heinrich Himmler used it in a preface to the book "The Police - once different" (Franz-Eher-Verlag, Munich) by Helmuth Koschorke .

The alleged (co-) inventors are Carl Severing , who, as Grzesinski's predecessor in the office of the Prussian Minister of the Interior, gave the opening speech, and the Berlin detective Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg .

Grzesinski turned down the post of Reichswehr Minister in 1920 because he knew the spirit of the Reichswehr and its effects. From November 1922 to March 1924 he was President of the Prussian State Police Office. When this office was dissolved, he acted as police chief of Berlin from May 1925 to October 1926.

The revolution is eating its own children

Rubens : Saturn devours his son

In Georg Büchner's drama Dantons Tod , Danton says in the first act:

The revolution is like Saturn, it eats its own children.

The saying on which this quote is based were the last words of the French lawyer and revolutionary Pierre Vergniaud shortly before his execution on October 31, 1793. He witnessed the execution of his political and personal friends, such as Brissot, Gensonné, Boyer-Fonfréde or Ducos and was called Last led to the scaffold. Shaken, he said these famous last words:

La Révolution est comme Saturne: elle dévore ses propres enfants.

The ancient god Saturn came to power by overpowering and castrating his father. However, one prophecy foretold that he would be disempowered at the hand of his own son. That is why Saturn ate all his children except for his sixth son Jupiter , whom Saturn's wife Ops kept hidden on the island of Crete. She offered Saturn a stone wrapped in clothes in his place.

See also French Revolution # Erosion and End of the Reign of Terror . Further examples are given in the article Political cleansing (e.g. Roman coup , arrest and execution of Beria , 1938–1953 head of the Soviet Union's secret services and as such a central figure in Stalinist terror - also against top communist officials ).

In a modification of this bon mot, the historian and ex-communist Wolfgang Leonhard (1921–2014) named his bestseller book Die Revolution dismisses her children , published in 1955 .

The harshest critics of the moose used to be themselves

The elk in front of the Museum of Comical Art in Frankfurt

This well-known two-liner is attributed to the writer and draftsman Robert Gernhardt , but comes from the caricaturist FW Bernstein . Both received the Göttingen Elch , an award from the city of Göttingen for “a life's work of satirical provenance and / or a multiple satirical talent”. This award is named after the above quote.

In an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt , FW Bernstein replied to the question whether he was offended that this legendary quote was often attributed to Robert Gernhardt:

"Oh well, he always denies well. A second after this occurred to me while we were driving together, he remembered: 'The harshest critics of the newts used to be themselves.' And mine has become so popular in the meantime that nobody actually has a copyright on it. "

The saying was a Finnish proverb in a newspaper, was attributed to Bertolt Brecht and was even found on a tombstone. FW Bernstein saw it calmly and said:

“If I came along now and kept shouting: 'This is from me, this is from me!' - then they say: 'Yes, of course, this is from you. And now be good and eat your soup. '"

The school of the nation is the school

This sentence from the government declaration of Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt of October 28, 1969 changes an older sentence that had been applied to the German army since the Wilhelmine era. Brandt said among other things:

“The school of the nation is the school. We need the 10th year of school, and we need the highest possible proportion of people in our society who receive a differentiated school education up to the age of 18. The financial resources for education policy must be increased accordingly in the next few years. "

Let your mind wander

Tucholsky and Lisa Matthias in Läggesta, Sweden, 1929

"Let your mind wander" goes back to the first sentence of the 6th chapter of the summer story Gripsholm Castle by Kurt Tucholsky. There it says literally:

"We were lying on the meadow and dangling with our hearts."

The story is about the narrator's summer vacation with his girlfriend Lydia in Sweden. After some searching, both end up in Gripsholm Castle , where they spend about three weeks.

The phrase “let your mind wander”, derived from this, stands for rest, relaxation or a vacation from everyday life .

Germany's security is also being defended in the Hindu Kush.

With this key statement, the then German Defense Minister Peter Struck established the new Defense Policy Guidelines (VPR) of the Bundeswehr in May 2003 . He was referring to the Afghanistan mission in the Hindu Kush mountains there.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on March 16, 2008, Struck reiterated his view:

“It is absolutely clear that the SPD, but also the Union, the FDP and large parts of the Greens, with the clear support of the Afghanistan mission, are against the will of the majority of the population. Still, I stick to it: Germany's interests are also being defended in the Hindu Kush. "

The sun brings it out.

This sentence is the title and the refrain of a poem by Adelbert von Chamisso :


Master Nikolas sat leisurely in the workshop for an early drink,
The young housewife poured him a
drink , It was in the bright sunshine. -
The sun brings it out.

The poem tells of a murder that is solved in the end. In the end it says:

The sun brought it out.

The Romans are crazy!

This phrase comes from Obelix , one of the heroes in the French comic series Asterix . The Gauls , invincible because of their magic potion, are in constant conflict with the Romans , whose behavior often seems incomprehensible to the simple-minded Obelix. His comment in French is:

«Ils sont fous, ces Romains! »

With this remark, Obelix provokes a scandal at the Condate theater in the magazine Asterix und der Kupferkessel when he is asked to simply say what was going through his head:

“Altogether, Obelix and other characters use the quote in the Asterix adventures published so far almost 30 times (of which Obelix: 22 times), whereby the target group is replaced depending on the situation. With these variations, this idiom is used almost 80 times, which has already found its way into everyday language. "

In the issue of Dispute over Asterix , Obelix says of the contentious villagers:

"The crazy, the human!"

Cunning Asterix fans are of the opinion that the Roman sign SPQR ( S enatus P opulus q ue R omanus) is the rendering of a modern Italian winged word:

“Sono pazzi questi romani!”

"The Romans are crazy!"

Language is given to man in order to hide his thoughts

When the Spanish ambassador Izquiero reminded Talleyrand in 1807 of the promises he had made in favor of the Spanish king Charles IV , Talleyrand replied to him in a modification of a saying by Voltaire :

"La parole a été donnée à l'homme pour déguiser sa pensée."

In Voltaire's fable The Capon and the Broiler , the capon says :

"Les hommes ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leur injustices et n'emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées."
"People only use the thought to explain their injustices and they only use the words to hide their thoughts."

The above quote is the reverse of a quote from Molière's play Die Forced Marriage ( Le mariage forc é):

"La parole a été donnée à l'homme pour expliquer sa pensée."
"Language is given to people to explain their thoughts."

His master's voice

"His Master's Voice" record label, ca.1928

His Master's Voice (German: "The voice of his master") is the brand name of various record labels.

The name and the associated logo go back to the painter Francis Barraud, who in 1898 portrayed his dog Nipper while listening to an Edison phonograph. The newly founded Gramophone Company bought the picture, including copyright, for £ 100 to use in newspaper advertisements. The condition was, however, that the originally shown Edison phonograph was painted over with a Berlin gramophone.

The logo became so popular that Gramophone Records changed the name of their record label to His Master's Voice in 1909 .

The grapes hang too high

This expression is also used in the form “The grapes are too sour”. It is used on someone who pretends not to want something, but is in fact unable to achieve it. The saying is based on the Aesopian fable The Fox and the Grapes . It tells of a fox who wants to get grapes and, when he notices that they are hanging too high, leaves with the remark that the grapes are sour after all.

The unbearable lightness of being

The unbearable lightness of being (Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí ) is a novel by the Czech author Milan Kundera , which he published in 1984 during his exile in France.

According to Kundera, the lightness of human existence is unbearable because life evaporates like dust. The central thoughts revolve around Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of ​​" eternal return ".

The book title is occasionally quoted in a modified form:

The past should be a stepping stone, not a sofa

This request comes from the British publisher and politician Harold Macmillan . The phrase is often used in speeches and as a motto for schools. For example, a speech says:

"... and can confidently quote Harold McMillan: 'The past should be a stepping stone, not a sofa'"

Down with the weapons!

In 1889 the Austrian writer Bertha von Suttner published the novel Die Waffen Nieder! , with which she fought against the idea that war could be a legitimate means of resolving conflicts between states. The novel was considered to be the most important work in anti-war literature until the publication of the novel In the West by Erich Maria Remarque in 1929.

The title has also been translated into other languages:

  • "Lay Down Your Arms!"
  • "Abbasso le Armi!" (Italian)
  • "Bas les armes!" (French)
  • "Abajo las armas!" (Spanish)

Seek the truth in the facts

Deng Xiaoping's saying is intended to illustrate his departure from Maoist phrases. In Chinese it reads:

chinese   {{{c}}}
Shí shì qiú shì.

The cautious introduction of market economy elements into the planned economy initially concentrated on agriculture and in a short time ensured a significant improvement in supply.

Ironically, this slogan comes from Mao Zedong himself. It can be found in Mao's essay On The Practice . Deng Xiaoping was quoted as follows in the Beijing Rundschau on the fourth anniversary of Mao's death in 1980 :

"... the core principle of the Mao Zedong ideas is to seek the truth in the facts and to combine the general truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution ..."

Unhinge the world

Archimedes turns the world off its hinges.

According to a comment on Aristotle by the philosopher Simplikios, this phrase goes back to a saying by the ancient natural scientist Archimedes , who said in his Sicilian Greek:

" Δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω. "

"Dōs moi pā stō, kai tān gān kināsō."

"Give me a fixed point and I'll move the earth."

Unhinge the world today means fundamentally changing everything . With the point he means a fixed location outside the earth, where he would lift the earth off its hinges by means of a pulley . Later one saw a reference to the law of leverage in this sentence .

The world wants to be betrayed

In Sebastian Brant's 1494 ship of fools it says:

"The wave that wants to be cheated syn"

It is often quoted in the Latin form:

"Mundus vult decipi."

Sebastian Frank's Paradoxa , published in 1533, states:

The world wants to be cheated and lied to and only to be baffled and ruled with madness, as that monk says, who believes his subject is:
Mundus vult decipi that's
why I am here, whose
sacks were filled with wages.

This is the basis of:

"Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur."
"The world wants to be cheated, so be cheated."

World history is not the basis of happiness

The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said in his lectures on the philosophy of history :

“World history is not the basis of happiness. The period of happiness is empty sheets in it. "

In world history and the rise and fall of individual states, the objective spirit becomes the general “ world spirit ”.

The historian Leopold von Ranke wrote on the same topic:

"The happiest times of mankind are the empty pages in the book of history."

The French state theorist Charles-Louis de Montesquieu wrote:

"Happy the people whose history is boring."

The wonderful years

The wonderful years is a collection of prose texts by Reiner Kunze , which was published in 1976 in the Federal Republic of Germany. The author, who was still living in the GDR at the time, wrote the texts around 1975 and had the manuscript secretly transmitted to the Federal Republic. The publication of the text in the West meant that Kunze was excluded from the GDR writers' association and 15,000 copies of Kunze's children's book The Lion Leopold that had already been printed in the GDRwere pulped.

The book and film are about the miracles that are possible between young people, and about years that these miracles are barren because people are deprived of their youth. The title refers to a passage in Truman Capote's novel The Grass Harp :

I was eleven and later turned
sixteen. I
didn't earn any merit , but those were the
wonderful years.

A nostalgic song by Sportfreunde Stiller is called In all the wonderful years .

Human dignity is inviolable

The first articles of the Basic Law in the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus

This formulation of human dignity can be found in Art. 1 of the German Basic Law :

"Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect them is the duty of all state authority. "

It also says:

"The German people are therefore committed to inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every human community, of peace and justice in the world."

This basic right is to be understood as a conscious reaction to the massive disregard for human dignity by the National Socialist state.

This was the first trick

"This was the first trick."

In the picture story Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch , the text announces the second prank of the two rascals with these words, while widow Bolte goes into the house with her dead chickens.

This was the first trick, but
the second will follow soon.

The quote is used today to comment on a successful campaign that is seen as the start of further campaigns:

  • "This was the first prank ... - Bad neighbors make the DS unsafe."
  • "Alexa was just the first prank."

thing in itself

The philosophical expression thing in itself is found in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason , where it says:

"... consequently we cannot have knowledge of any object as a thing in itself, but only insofar as it is an object of sensual perception."

Elsewhere Kant wrote:

"What kind of connection it may have with objects in themselves and apart from all this receptivity of our sensuality remains completely unknown to us."

Outside of philosophical terminology, one speaks of a thing in itself when the essence of a thing is to be described.

Do ut des

This ancient Roman legal formula, which was used to conclude contracts or barter transactions, translates as:

"I give so that you give."

This indicates that one expects something in return or a counter-service. This formula can be found in the main work of the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius , which he published in 1625 under the title De jure belli ac pacis libri tres ("Three books on the law of war and peace").

But the blessing comes from above

This quote comes from Friedrich Schiller's poem Das Lied von der Glocke :

The
sweat must run hot from the forehead ,
Should the work praise the master;
But the blessing comes from above.

With these words the first stanza ends.

Today this quote is almost only used ironically, for example when a rain shower comes from above.

But the circumstances are not like that

This quote comes from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera . There the poor businessman Peachum, with the Bible in his hands, states:

But unfortunately you have never heard
that someone got his rights - oh where!
Who wouldn't have liked to be right?
But the circumstances are not like that.

Do not worry Be Happy!

"Do not worry, be happy!" (In German: "! Sorg not, whether you happy" ) were the last words of the Indian guru Meher Baba in front of his vow of silence . He criticized people yelling at each other and therefore remained silent from July 10, 1925 for the remaining 44 years of his life. From then on, he used letter boards and hand signals to communicate.

In the 1988 hit Don't Worry, Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin, McFerrin processed Baba's last words. His song begins like this:

Here's a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don't worry, be happy.
In every life we ​​have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double
Don't worry, be happy.
Don't worry, be happy now.

Where you burn books, you end up burning people

This quote comes from Heinrich Heine's tragedy Almansor from 1821. The play takes place around 1500, a few years after the conquest of Granada , the last Islamic empire of Moorish Spain . The hero of the title, Almansor ben Abdullah, speaks to Hassan, a Muslim who is desperately fighting against the Christian conquerors, about the burning of the Koran ordered by the Spanish inquisitor , Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros .

Almansor:
We heard that the terrible Ximenes, in the
middle of the market, at Granada -
my tongue stares in my mouth -
threw the Koran into a pyre's flame!
Hassan:
That was just a prelude, where you
burn books , you end up burning people.

The sentence is understood as a criticism of the rather symbolic book burning that took place in 1817 on the fringes of the Wartburg Festival in Eisenach . Heine wrote about the festival that "stupid things were said and done there that were worthy of the most stupid Middle Ages" . Last but not least, the quote is considered prophetic in relation to the book burnings of the National Socialists.

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

Illustration of the meeting between Stanley and Livingstone

With this English phrase of courtesy (Dr. Livingstone, I assume?) The young journalist Henry Morton Stanley addressed the Scottish missionary David Livingstone in the Tanzanian town of Ujiji, who had been believed lost since 1869 , and was sent to find him. Livingston responded as formally as it should be among British gentlemen:

"'Yes', said he, with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly."
("'Yes,' he said, with a friendly smile and lifted his hat.")

With no other white men around and the two Brits not having been formally introduced to each other, this was the correct way to greet each other without breaking etiquette . The fact that both men adhered to this etiquette in what was understood at the time in a secluded and "uncivilized" environment was seen by contemporaries as evidence of European civilization and the self-evident superiority of the "white race". This has made a decisive contribution to the fact that a greeting phrase that is banal in other contexts has become a popular phrase, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Livingstone was surprised to Stanley that he was missing. The two fundamentally different personalities then went on voyages of discovery together for the next five months.

In the Stuttgarter Zeitung under the heading Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

“He is considered one of the greatest heroes of the Victorian era and even gave the British a household word: when he was thought to be missing, a New York newspaper hired a journalist to look for him. When Henry Morton Stanley met a European for the first time in weeks on his long journey, he said, 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume (I presume)? '"

Draconic punishment

The laws of the Drakon have become proverbial for their severity and hardness. Aristotle also points to this in his Politics (II, 1274b), where he states that apart from their severity there was nothing remarkable about them. In his rhetoric (1400b) he quotes Herodicus, who calls them "laws of a dragon" , not those of a human being.

Outside the door

Outside the door is a play by Wolfgang Borchert with the subtitle "A play that no theater wants to play and no audience wants to see" , which was initially broadcast in 1947 as a radio play.

A man named Beckmann comes home from prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia with only one kneecap, hobbling and freezing, and finds everything different from how he left it. He is one of “those who come home and then don't come home because there is no longer a home for them. And your home is then outside the door. "

Three graces

The three graces are daughters of Zeus and the Eurynomial and are called Euphrosyne ("joy"), Thalia ("blooming happiness") and Aglaia ("shine"). The three graces were a popular subject in the visual arts.

Moved three times is as good as burned down once

This expression can already be found in Benjamin Franklin's preface to his Poor Richard's Almanac :

I never saw, an oft removed Tree,
Nor yet an oft removed Family,
That throve so well, as those that settled be.
And again,
Three removals are as bad as a fire.

“I never saw a tree that was often transplanted, nor a family that had moved often, that thrived as well as those that had their permanent home. And again: three moves are as bad as a fire. "

The phrase is still used today to express that something is always broken or lost when moving. The generation that experienced the Second World War also knows the saying in its modified form: "Moved three times is like bombed once."

Third World

The three worlds
1st world: blue
2nd world: red
3rd world: green

The term Third World (Tiers Monde) is of French origin and has been in use since the 1950s to denote countries that did not belong to the first world of the industrialized countries or the second of the state-trading countries. Since the term soon met with rejection, it was gradually pushed back by the term One World, which was coined for different reasons .

The term Third World (from French tiers-monde ) was coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy , who in his article Trois mondes, une planète in L'Observateur 1952 developed the expression analogous to the Third Estate (French tiers-état ). When Frantz Fanon, in his 1961 publication “The Damned of this Earth” , equated the Third World with the colonized , underdeveloped world and introduced the term into international usage, it was already in use, at least in the French-speaking world. The Third World originally referred to the non-aligned states that, as a distinction from the East-West conflict, called themselves the third bloc ; today, however, the term is often used as a synonym for developing country .

Therefore, examine whoever binds forever…

Schiller's song of the bell was very popular with bourgeois idealism of the 19th century , which is shown by the abundance of expressions adopted from it in linguistic usage. Today, however, many are often only used jokingly:

Therefore check who binds himself forever,
Whether the heart finds itself to the heart!
The madness is short, the regret is long.

Jokers have made it “So check who binds himself forever, whether there is something better” or “So check who binds himself forever, where the registry office is” or “So whoever binds himself forever, whether there is also money to find divorce ” .!
If couples who have been friends for a long time (should) decide to marry, the short form of the expression is also changed to:

"So bind whoever tested himself forever."

You are Germany

You are Germany.

Du bist Deutschland is a social marketing campaign aimed at positive thinking and a new German national feeling. It was launched by 25 media companies as part of the Partner for Innovation initiative and coordinated by Bertelsmann . The large-scale campaign was controversial. The campaign was initiated by Gunter Thielen , CEO of Bertelsmann AG.

The slogan was criticized and parodied by various media. There is the variant “You are a terrorist” by Alexander Lehmann, which is used in a slightly modified form as an election commercial by the Pirate Party Germany . A historical photograph from the 1930s shows, under the face of Adolf Hitler, a large banner with the almost literal quote: “ Because you are Germany”.

You are what you eat

With this statement, the famous Ludwig Feuerbach dictum " Man is what he eats" paraphrases, it is intended to express that one can judge a person based on his diet. In addition, the phrase is often used in the context of nutritional science , dietetics, and similar fields.

The psychologist Paul Rozin considers the sentence to be a form of magical thinking and thus the "essential cause of food rejection", which he tried to prove with a corresponding study in 1987.

You are like a flower

In Heinrich Heine's series of 88 poems entitled Die Heimkehr , No. 47 begins with the following words:

You are like a flower
So lovely and beautiful and pure.

This love poem was set to music by Franz Liszt , Robert Schumann and Hugo Wolf .

You always stay what you are

In the study room scene in Goethe's Faust I , Mephisto instructs Faust that all his efforts are of no use to him:

You are finished - what you are.
Put on wigs of millions of curls, put
your foot on socks as high as a half,
you always stay what you are.

You see the vest, not the heart

This is a quote from appearance and being. Leftover poems by Wilhelm Busch :

My child, things are here, no matter
whether large or small,
essentially so packaged
that they cannot be cracked like nuts.

How did you want to subdue yourself
to fathom people in a short way .
You only know them from outside.
You see the vest, not the heart.

This quote can also be found as the motto for an article about the difficulties executives experience during interviews and personnel selection.

Look silly from the laundry

The expression means: going empty-handed, you are left behind, you therefore look stupid. This phrase is said to have come up in the First World War. The word has a similar meaning: look into the moon or look through the tube .

Dumb fucks well

The saying alludes to the alleged instinctiveness of those with poor education and attests to less intelligent people, especially women, better copulation or greater satisfaction of the (male) partner, combined with easier availability. The saying has proven to be incorrect in various studies; in fact, the opposite is true.

Dark continent

1878 British-American journalist published Henry Morton Stanley 's report on a trip to Africa, entitled Through the Dark Continent (through the dark continent) . Stanley honestly admitted he loathed the continent. In Stanley's eyes it was not just the skin color of the inhabitants of Africa that was dark.

When Africa was identified as a dark continent, the idea of ​​the unknown mixed with that of the area inhabited by dark-skinned people.

Love: Dark continent is also the title of a volume of poetry by Ingeborg Bachmann . Arno Widmann headed an article in the Berliner Zeitung about the Queen of England's first visit to London's proletarian district, East End, with “The Dark Continent” .

In the dark continent of Africa is the title of a nonsense poem by Joachim Ringelnatz , which reads as follows:

In the dark continent of Africa
an accordion died.
She was buried with music.
Twenty ravens sat by the grave.
The raven Num'ro twenty-one
took the sailing ship to Danzig
and a little later founded
a home for childless fathers there.
And the moral of the story? -
Unfortunately I don't know that myself.

Shine through absence

"Shine through absence" (French: Briller par son absence ) originally goes back to Tacitus , who in his annals (Annales III, 76) tells how Iunia Tertia , the wife of Cassius and sister of Brutus , was buried. According to Roman custom, the pictures of the relatives were carried before a funeral procession ,

“But Cassius and Brutus shone precisely because one did not see their portraits” ( Latin sed praefulgebant Cassius atque Brutus eo ipso quod effigies eorum non visebantur. ).

Under Roman law it was forbidden to show pictures of murderers in public. At this funeral, this concerned Cassius and Brutus, who were among the murderers of Gaius Julius Caesar .

Based on this source, Marie-Joseph Chénier (1764–1811) formulated in his tragedy “Tibére” (1811):

"Brutus et Cassius brillaient par leur absence." ("Brutus and Cassius shone through their absence.")

and created a commonly used phrase .

Germany has to be jolted

The German President Roman Herzog said in his Berlin speech on April 26, 1997 at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin :

“But it's not too late either. Germany has to be jolted. We have to say goodbye to what we have loved. Everyone is addressed, everyone must make sacrifices, everyone must participate:

  • employers by cutting costs, not just layoffs.
  • workers by bringing working hours and wages into line with the state of their operations.
  • the trade unions by enabling company-level collective agreements and more flexible working relationships.
  • Bundestag and Bundesrat, by moving the major reform projects forward quickly.
  • the interest groups in our country by not acting to the detriment of the common interest. "

This jolt is still often quoted with pleasure, often also in satirical terms. The future Federal President Horst Köhler also referred to Herzog's "Jerk" speech in his inaugural speech on May 23, 2004:

“Why are we still not getting the jolt? Because we're all still waiting for it to happen! "

Through the woods, through the meadows

This is the beginning of the aria by the hunter boy Max from Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz , the text of which is from Johann Friedrich Kind :

Through the woods, through the floodplains
, I moved lightly.
All I could see
was Rohr's sure profit.

He has to come through this hollow alley

The quote comes from Wilhelm Tell's monologue in Friedrich Schiller 's drama of the same name, where Tell is waiting for Reichsvogt Gessler to kill him:

“There is no other way to Küssnacht. - Here I finish it. - The opportunity is favorable. "

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung it says under the heading These phrases you can build on this famous Schiller quote:

“No actor who has to execute the assassin's monologue in the third scene in the fourth act of“ Wilhelm Tell ”can get past these tormentors.
Unlike the “beautiful passages” of an opera aria, they are one thing above all: stumbling blocks. "He has to come through this hollow alley", the verse wants to be taken like a hurdle, and the only consolation is that the actor who gives the Gessler will not fare any differently a little later when he says "This is tell's floor" groans and fears death much less than the laughs in the audience. "

The Hohle Gasse is an artificially built ravine between Küssnacht am Rigi and Immensee . In 1307 Wilhelm Tell is said to have shot the Habsburg bailiff Hermann Gessler in Hohlen Gasse .

Through my fault

"Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!"

"My guilt, my guilt, my oversized guilt!"

These Latin words were in the confession of guilt of the Catholic Mass, where it says:

“Confiteor Dei omnipotenti, beatae Mariae Virgini […] et vobis, fratres, quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!”

"I confess to God Almighty, the Blessed Virgin Mary [...] and you, brothers, that I have sinned a lot in thoughts, words and works: through my fault, through my fault, through my exceedingly great fault."

The formula is found for the first time in the Ordines Romani , whose author was probably Cardinal Jakob Cajetan , and has also passed into the liturgies of the Protestant Church. In front of the Second Vatican Council only the Latin version was prayed, the use of which was compulsory. Prayer is part of the stages prayer which the priest, alternating with the altar or the congregation for the Zutreten to the altar at the beginning of Mass praying.

The truth is always made known through the mouth of two witnesses

This sentence is found in Goethe's drama Faust . Mephistopheles wants to testify together with Faust the death of Marthe Schwerdtlein's husband:

Your husband is dead and sends his regards.

Marthe.

Oh tell me quickly!
I would like to have a certificate of
where, how and when my darling died and buried.
I have always been a friend of the order,
I would also like to read it dead in the weekly paper.

Mephistopheles.

Yes, good woman, through two mouths of
witnesses the truth is always made known;
I still have a fine fellow,
I will put him before the judge.

Mephistopheles takes up a passage from the Gospel of John :

"It is also written in your law that the testimony of two people is true."

The Evangelist John thus refers to the 5th Book of Moses , where it says:

"No single witness should appear against someone about any wrongdoing or sin, ... but the matter should stand in the mouths of two or three witnesses."

Individual evidence

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