Deutschland

The New York Review of Books recently ran a 4,000+ words long review of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar winning fim "The Lives of Others" by Timothy Garton Ash. It's the last paragraph though that's worth the lengthy read. So now, whenever I'm getting into my how-on-earth-could-I-move-to-this-planet-of-joyless-mooks-country, I'm gonna read it to myself:

"The Germany in which this film was produced, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is one of the most free and civilized countries on earth. In this Germany, human rights and civil liberties are today more jealously and effectively protected than (it pains me to say) in traditional homelands of liberty such as Britain and the United States. In this good land, the professionalism of its historians, the investigative skills of its journalists, the seriousness of its parliamentarians, the generosity of its funders, the idealism of its priests and moralists, the creative genius of its writers, and, yes, the brilliance of its filmmakers have all combined to cement in the world's imagination the most indelible association of Germany with evil. Yet without these efforts, Germany would never have become such a good land. In all the annals of human culture, has there ever been a more paradoxical achievement?"