Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

distinguishing between a German and an Italian, a German and a Pole. They were a strange breed, a strange race. Whoever tried to compete with them in the realms of culture and the intellect was crushed with mocking indifference. The worst thing of all was the feeling one got of their intellectual power – a lively, unaggressive power that showed in their strange tastes, in the way they respected fashion while seeming indifferent or careless towards it, in the way they loved animals yet followed a totally urban life-style, in their gift for abstract speculation that was somehow combined with a passion for everything crude and primitive in both life and art . . . It was these men who were responsible for Germany’s advances in dye chemistry and the synthesis of nitrogen, who researched the properties of gamma rays and refined the production process of high-quality steel. It was to see them that foreign scientists, artists, philosophers and engineers visited Germany. And yet these were the men who were the least German of all. Their home was anywhere in the world. Their friendships were not with Germans. And their German origins were exceedingly doubtful.