Chris Claremont Quotes

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.

As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.

The Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, in open court before an international tribunal, had a profound long-term effect in bringing Germans back to democracy and humanity.

When you look at the startling ruins of Nuremberg, you are looking at a result of the war. When you look at the prisoners on view in the courthouse, you are looking at 22 of the causes.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

I thought my story, my experiences as a 2-year-old 'evacuee' from London at the outset of the war, could be important. What happened to me as a child was very light compared to what happened to many children, but... in Britain, there are so many people who just don't know our history.

My father took me and my about-to-be-traumatized friends to Stanley Kubrick's '2001' for my 10th birthday party.

Before I moved to the Isle of Wight, I lived in the suburbs of London and saw 'Fantasia,' and it scared the living daylights out of me. And I didn't go back to the movies until many years later to see a Lasse Hallstrom film.

German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.

I don't think my generation carries the weight of World War II anymore. But I've got to tell you, even if we don't really talk about it, we get reminded constantly by other people or other countries. I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.

Yes, I remember the bombings. Yes, I remember, because - yes, I remember being in air raid shelters. Even though I was evacuated because I was very young, I remember being in air raid shelters and the tremendous feeling of compatibility with everybody.

In 1940 I was just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight and become heroes.

It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors.

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

As I have said many times before, I was among the first people to experience the German Occupation of France during the Second World War. I was 7-13 years old during the War and did not really internalise its significance.

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America...

If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.

You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

There's a difference between a Nazi and a German.

I've loved you ever since that day you broke your slate over my head in school.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

After the war, the Austrians just denied their role in it all. They didn't teach it in school. But since 1990 they have openly acknowledged their role in the Holocaust and I feel more comfortable in Austria. I feel a sort of reconciliation.