Word: nation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Alsace and Lorraine and imposed on France a heavy financial indemnity. But the Germans had their own view of this account, in which they had repeatedly been attacked and despoiled by the French, by Napoleon, by Louis XIV. Indeed, this conflict went back beyond the birth of either nation, to the time when the Romans subdued the Gauls but not the Germans, thus establishing the Rhine as the frontier of what was then considered the civilized world...
...mutinous army had virtually disintegrated. Kaiser Wilhelm II had fled into exile in Holland. The Social Democrats had proclaimed a republic, with themselves in charge, and the Communists were challenging them for control of the streets. And in a hospital northeast of Berlin, raging at the nation's defeat, lay a 29-year-old Austrian corporal partly blinded by mustard gas. "In vain all the sacrifices," Adolf Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf (My Struggle). "In vain the death of 2 million . . . Hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed . . . I decided to go into politics...
...illustrious liberals (Emile Zola) and Jews (Heinrich Heine) were consigned to the flames. Jews were barred from public office, the civil service and professions like teaching and journalism. The basic idea behind all this was embodied in the slogan "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" (One people, one nation, one leader...
...found that the French were reluctantly ready to meet a German invasion with force, a decision in which he unhappily concurred. In London people began digging trenches to provide shelter from the expected air raids. "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is," Chamberlain said in a radio speech to the nation, "that we should be digging trenches . . . here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing...
...meaningless offensives over a few miles of trenches and barbed wire; and each time the threat of a new war had ended with another few months of nervous peace, bought at the price of another diplomatic victory for Hitler. Yet even now, with the Fuhrer's armies invading a nation that Britain and France were pledged to defend, it seemed hard to believe war was really at hand. Virginia Woolf's husband Leonard recalled that he was planting irises under an apple tree. "Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: 'Hitler is making...