Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Sunday, August 6, 2017

Descent into the quagmire

At just this time I read a dangerous, alluringly ambiguous sentence of Stendhal’s.  He wrote it as a coda after the restoration of 1814, an event that he felt to be a “descent into the quagmire,” just as I viewed the events of 1933.[1]

~ Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (2002)



[1] Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. Oliver Pretzel (New York: Picador, 2002), p. 205.  This memoir was first written in 1938.  Rediscovered after the author’s death in 1999, it was published in Germany in the year 2000 and later translated into English by the author’s son.

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