Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...number of lines in the book about how God needs man to sin so he can punish him. That's an interesting concept, could you speak a little bit about that? I had just done this hideous radio interview in Berlin for German public radio. At one point, I meant to say "Sieht so aus als haettest du all dein Deutsch vergessen," which means "I guess I've forgotten so much German." Only I misconjugated the verb vergessen to vergast, and when I came out of the interview, the publicist was a furious with me. Vergast is the past tense...
Sept. 11 wasn't the first foreign attack to foil the statue's visitors. For 30 years, Lady Liberty's 29-foot torch was accessible via service ladder. But early on the morning of July 30, 1916, as World War I raged in Europe, German agents attacked a waterfront munitions depot in nearby Jersey City, N.J., triggering a massive explosion that caused the equivalent of more than $2 million in damage to the statue. The torch never re-opened...
...Holocaust, neither its roots in anti-Semitism nor the place where it was launched. "This is a place where we speak of the importance of memory," Shalev told reporters after the ceremony. "To not specifically mention the perpetrators, the murderers... He missed that point." Shalev also wondered why the German-born Pope, who was an unwilling conscript into the Hitler Youth, chose to offer no reflections of his personal experience. (The Pope had condemned anti-Semitism during his remarks at Ben Gurion airport earlier Monday, when he'd arrived from Jordan as part of his eight-day Middle East trip...
...same speech hit several sour notes in the ears of Jewish leaders, as the Pope failed to cite anti-Semitism as a cause of the genocide. Instead, he wondered if Christianity wasn't ultimately Hitler's final target, and summarily disposed of the complicated moral question of German society's "collective responsibility" by blaming the systematic extermination of millions of Jews and other innocents on the deeds of a "ring of criminals." The Bavarian native concluded: "Our people was used and abused as an instrument of [the Nazis] thirst for destruction and power." (Read a story about the Pope...
Vatican observers make a point to not constantly compare Benedict to his predecessor: two different men facing two different challenges. Still, their biographies are linked in a way that gave the German Pope a unique chance to complete the legacy of his Polish predecessor in helping to reconcile the 20th century Christian Europe that failed to save its Jews from near annihilation. Instead, eloquent and heartfelt as he may have been, Benedict came to Israel's Holocaust memorial and spoke neither as a man of his times nor his place. With reporting by Aaron J. Klein/Jerusalem