The Deutsche Welle tries to explain why Donald Duck, ‘modern Sisyphus,’ still Germany’s darling at 75

In their earliest days in Europe, comic books were looked down upon as lacking intellectual rigor and were thought to be bad for children. So when it first started publishing Donald Duck, the German publisher Ehapa asked Fuchs to make her translations more erudite.

And erudite she was. The German Donald quotes Goethe and Schiller, Hoelderlin and Wagner. He uses frequent alliterations and has coined phrases that have since worked their way into the language on the street. Moreover, Fuchs often gave the stories a more political tone than they’d originally had.

I can only imagine a cartoon duck quoting Goethe.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Perhaps the following quote is more likely. Imagine Donald’s voice as he says:

We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt
increases.

The article explains several of the elements that Germans find appealing in their version of the Duck character. First, perseverance:

Gerhard Severin is the acting president of the Donaldists. For him, Donald Duck represents a “modern Sisyphus, who always keeps trying. Despite constant setbacks he starts over again, and shows us that you should never give up.”

Second, a hot temper is said to be something Germans admire. Third, although I might be going out on a limb here, Donald has no pants. Maybe it would be more accurate to say Donald’s pants are down. Get it? Down. Either way, I bet this is also a factor that resonates with the German perspective on life.

The Krakow Post paints a detailed portrait of the great writer from Galicia. He passed away seventy years ago today, May 27th, 1939 at the age of 45, only months before the start of WWII:

Some have called Roth a poet of “Austroslavism,” owing to his longing for a peaceful coexistence of a multitude of nations under the formal roof of monarchy. “I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland,” he wrote of the Habsburg Empire, “and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and shortcomings.”

by Czeslaw Milosz (Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee)

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

His Nobel Lecture is worth reading (english | polish)

…by choosing solitude and giving myself to a strange occupation, that is, to writing poems in Polish while living in France or America, I tried to maintain a certain ideal image of a poet, who, if he wants fame, he wants to be famous only in the village or the town of his birth. (…wybieraj±c samotno¶æ i oddaj±c siê dziwacznemu zajêciu jakim jest pisanie wierszy po polsku, choæ mieszka siê we Francji czy w Ameryce, podtrzymywa³em pewien idealny obraz poety, który je¿eli chce byæ s³awny, to tylko w swojej wiosce czy w swoim mie¶cie.)

[…]

Simone Weil, to whose writings I am profoundly indebted, says: “Distance is the soul of beauty.” Yet sometimes keeping distance is nearly impossible. (Simone Weil, której pismom wiele zawdziêczam, powiada: “Dystans jest dusz± piêkna”. Bywa jednak, ¿e jego uzyskanie jest niemal niemo¿liwo¶ci±.)

His poem “So Little” takes an even darker turn from Encounter:

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn’t keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.

Milosz passed away in August of 2004 in Krakow, Poland. His writing during postwar Europe is said to have influenced many generations by tackling difficult and inherent contradictions in life.