Word: prussianize
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...life, Käthe Kollwitz could remember her parents' bewilderment when, as a young girl in the East Prussian city of Königsberg, she first began to draw. They were perfectly willing to encourage her talent, but her choice of subjects was certainly unsettling. "After all," they would say, "life has its bright sides, too. Why do you show only the darkest?" As Käthe Kollwitz wrote many years later, "I had no answer. I simply wasn't moved by anything else...
...also a patron of the arts. He played the flute to the accompaniment of one of Johann Sebastian Bach's sons; he wrote indifferent poetry under the tutelage of his sometime friend Voltaire; he was an avid collector of paintings and sculpture. In affairs of state, he was Prussian to the bone, but in painting he admired what was foreign...
...table ("Since my youth I have not read a German book, and I speak it badly"), once consoled a visiting French intellectual by saying: "You don't know German? You are fortunate in your ignorance." He deplored Goethe. He even changed the name of the Prussian Academy to the Academic des Sciences et Belles-Lettres. Voltaire, before his increasing disrespect for authority led him to fall out with Frederick, wrote a doggerel tribute to him: All the morning the great king...
...Jackstraws. "Europe was a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws," writes Author Tuchman; "one could not be pulled out without moving the others." Germany's battle plan was drawn by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff from 1891 to 1906, a monocled Prussian with a mind that slashed through argument like a dueling sword. Schlieffen promised victory in six weeks by a massive, right-wing attack that would pivot across Belgium and fall on the flank of the French armies before Paris. Knowing of the scheme, France devised Plan 17, calling...
...modernizing" the church, will have plenty to do in both discipline and dogma. The Vatican Council of 1869-70, even though it was the first churchwide convocation in more than 300 years, did little more than define papal infallibility before it broke up at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War. Thus, in its present battle against the secular world, the flesh and the devil, Roman Catholicism lumbers along on a centuries-old collection of codes, rites and practices, many of which hinder rather than help its missionary objectives in the modern world. Among the significant issues that the council...