The Orientalist Quotes

“Unless we get the Baku oil, the war is lost,” Hitler shouted at a top commander, and he sacrificed the entire German Sixth Army at Stalingrad rather than redirect a single division out of the Caucasus to come to its aid.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“matter of form, rather than substance.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“1938, Italians from Milan to Naples had opened their newspapers to discover that they were all “pure Aryan Nordics” and that their Jewish colleagues were dangerous aliens. Jews, including die-hard Fascists, were dismissed from all military, university, and government posts. By that fall, Italian Jews were not allowed to have listed phone numbers, presumably because it corrupted the sea of pure Nordic names in the Italian telephone directory.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“eclipsed and forgotten by Mussolini’s brief but disastrous alliance with Hitler.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Mussolini’s mistress, a leading Fascist intellectual and theorist of the movement, was openly Jewish. Perhaps less well known is that the Israeli Navy was born out of a 1930s Fascist training program, and the Duce even endowed a Fascist chair at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“(Hitler responded by calling Mussolini’s movement “Kosher fascism.”)”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“the regime had been notably anti-anti-Semitic.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“most of its existence, Mussolini’s regime had not been anti-Semitic, and early on, the Duce had explicitly criticized Hitler’s racism—probably in part because Nazism did not include modern Italians in its pantheon of Aryan supermen.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Nazism and use the alliance among Fascists to steer the Nazis away from the racial policies.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“What the novel portrays is basically the reality of Vienna today: one of the world’s great cities robbed of its lifeblood, reduced to a bland provincial capital filled with beautiful old buildings.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“the Stefansplatz, where the largest spontaneous demonstration in Austrian history was held—to celebrate the Anschluss and Hitler’s surprise tour of the city—in the spring of 1938.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Dr. Barazon had maintained that Elfriede would not have needed to provide an Aryan cover for the real author of Ali and Nino, because the book contract was signed in April 1937, almost a full year before the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“likely explanation for Elfriede’s connection to Kurban Said first presented itself to me a few weeks after I visited the castle.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“considering that lexicons and dictionaries are practically a high art form in German- speaking countries. The entry merges Essad Bey and Wolfgang von Weisl into one person. It explains that “Wolfgang (von) Weisl” also used the pseudonyms Leo Noussimbaum, Essad Bey, and Kurban Said—and hence the Austrian journalist, who otherwise had only a travel book and a book on Austrian artillery to his credit, suddenly was the prolific author of approximately twenty works of fiction and nonfiction”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“He also gives a good picture of the profound chaos unleashed in Muslim countries in 1924 by Ataturk’s sudden abolition of the caliphate, an institution they had superficially not taken much notice of but which was central to a Muslim’s whole identity.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“the perfect preparation for active Zionism. Von Weisl’s early journalism is full of prescient observations of the Middle East power struggle. His article called “Islam’s Iconoclasts at Mekka’s Gates,” published in the fall of 1924, warned of the growing power of the Wahhabis in Arabia, and stated that “Hussein will have reason to regret that he refused to sign the Anglo-Hejaz Treaty, and to recognize the Jewish rights in Palestine. For Jews in Erez Israel—Israel—are far less dangerous enemies for him than are Wahhabis at the gates of Mekka.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“this fails—then woe to Europe!”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Allah Is Great concludes with advice and warning: since Europe clearly does not want to ensure its hegemony through undisguised force, there is no alternative but to form a “community of interests with the Islamic world,”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Allah Is Great concludes with advice and warning: since”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Hitler’s core—“The fact that a man is decent is no reason why we should not eliminate him.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“he”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“[Putzi’s contribution to the Harvard cheerleading repertoire], to show how it could be done by adapting German tunes,”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews of Europe began to take on the new role of interpreters of the East. In addition to their own search for identity in the Orient, they were encouraged by Europe’s new openness to the East, now that the Muslims were in a state of decline and not threatening”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German “work commandos” would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Thus, the armies that would slaughter each other in the 1940s in the most massive mechanized battles in history trained together in the 1920s.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“Wrangel”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“He was the more moderate kind of nationalist. He did not sport a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache or excel at massacring Armenian civilians.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“bluster—Enver sent Turkish troops to fight in the Caucasus in winter with no overcoats and without even boots—but the increasingly fanatical Young Turk junta looked for someone else to blame for the failure of the Turanian dream. Thus, the infamous Armenian massacres of 1915 were set in motion.”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

“a kind of Turkish parallel to the German idea of lebensraum, the future was to be found in the East—in an invasion of Russia to reclaim ancestral lands from the thirteenth century and earlier, not only those of the Ottomans but of the other great Turanians, the Mongols and the Huns.*21”
― Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life