Tuesday, September 3, 2013

"Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa."

"'Your map of Africa is all very fine,' Bismarck famously told the traveller and writer Eugen Wolf, 'but my map of Africa lies in Europe.  Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa.'"

"'I h r e Karte von Afrika ist ja sehr schön, aber meine Karte von Afrika liegt in Europa.  Hier liegt Russland, and hier'nach links deutend—'liegt Frankreich und wir sind in der Mitte; das ist m e i n e Karte von Afrika.'"

     As quoted by Niall Ferguson (but with the emphasis in the original reinserted) in "Balancing acts," Times literary supplement no. 5758 (August 9, 2013), 4 (3-4), a review of Brenda Simms' Europe:  the struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present (London:  Allen Lane, 2013).  German (following Wikiquotes) from Eugen Wolf, Vom Fürsten Bismarck und seinem Haus:  Tagebuchblätter von Eugen Wolf, 2nd ed. (Berlin:  Egon Fleischel & Co., 1904), 16.  (I'm not seeing an earlier edition in WorldCat.)

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