Hannah Arendt
| "With this sudden abandonment it was as if one were surrounded by an empty space." |
| "Nous étions confrontés à un abandon soudain: comme si un vide se faisait." |
Gustav Obermaier
| "In 1952, I started to study. At that time, no one told us anything about it. It was a great hole, an absence." |
| "Quand je commence mes études, en 1952, personne ne parle de tout ça. Il y a un grand trou, un vide." |
Claus Rath
| "The fatherland was experienced as something empty by the first post-war generation of Germans. They had no symbolic fathers they could unquestioningly depend on or build on." |
| "La patrie, pour la génération d'après-guerre,était une notion vide de sens. Sans pères symboliques sur lesquels on aurait pu s’appuyer sur lesquels on aurait pu se construire." |
Jutta Prasse
| "There are wounds in the language which have healed badly, scar tissue which disrupts meaning and which locks the free flow of meaning." |
| "La langue comporte des cicatrices mal guéries, des boursouflures qui entravent le sens, qui le fixent, le brouillent." |
Hanns Zischler
| "That also had to do with the strange vitality of the ghosts in Berlin : their traces were more visible and the awareness of them was greater than in other cities." |
| "Cela tenait aussi à l'étrange vitalité des fantômes à Berlin leurs traces étaient bien plus visibles que dans d'autres villes." |