Bismarck quotation?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Apr 19 06:13:34 UTC 2001


>When I was looking at Larry Horn's examples using "man", I thought of a
>favorite quotation of my father's, supposedly from Bismarck: my father
>expressed it thusly:
>
>"The Bavarian is intermediate between the Austrian and Man."
>
>I've found versions on the Web, slightly different, often with "a/the human
>being" for "man". [I think it sounds better with "man", with a slight
>grammatical incongruity to mark the "punchline".]
>
And it definitely sounds better that way than in this Web-located version:
=========
At the center of this era is Bismarck, but instead of the blood and
iron militarist whom we expect, we find a powerfully shrewd
statesman, wise enough to know Germany's limitations and adroit
enough to play the powers against each other for the preservation of
European peace. Quotations from the Iron Chancellor spark the pages
of Book One. For example, on the German ally, Austria: "A Bavarian is
a cross between a man and an Austrian"

from a book review of The German Wars, 1914-1945  By Donald J. Goodspeed
==========
If Goodspeed's version is more or less literal, the man came first,
but an attempt at finding the German version by searching "Bismarck
Bayerische zwischen" in various combos came up dry. Presumably the
variation between "(a) man" and "a human being" suggests that the
original also contained "Mensch", but I still couldn't find the quote
when I added that to the search string.

larry



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