Friedrich Schiller’s play Die Piccolomini, first performed in Weimar on 30 January 1799, opens with a greeting. Spät kommt Ihr – Doch Ihr kommt! You come late, but you come! The line became a common German saying. It is said, half as a reproach and half as a welcome, to someone who arrives late.
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Trust Comes at the End
In 1995 Deutsche Bank advertised with the line Vertrauen ist der Anfang von allem, trust is the beginning of everything. In 2017 the brand consultant Klaus-Dieter Koch corrected it in the trade magazine Horizont: Vertrauen ist eben nicht, wie mal ein Claim der Deutschen Bank gesagt hat, der Anfang von allem, sondern der Endpunkt von allem. Und das gilt es sich zu erarbeiten. Trust is not, as a Deutsche Bank slogan once said, the beginning of everything, but the end point of everything. And it has to be earned.
The Best or Nothing
Das Beste oder nichts, the best or nothing, has been the slogan of Mercedes-Benz since a campaign that began in June 2010. The company presents it as the motto of its founder, Gottlieb Daimler. The trade journal Horizont reported at the launch: Der Spruch geht auf Firmengründer Gottlieb Daimler zurück. The saying goes back to company founder Gottlieb Daimler. Every source for the attribution that we found leads back to the company. None of them cites a letter, a speech or a note by Daimler. The head of brand communications at the time called the slogan generisch und damit authentisch, generic and therefore authentic.
In Black and White
In the study scene of Goethe’s Faust I, a young student asks for advice. Mephistopheles tells him to take notes as if the Holy Spirit were dictating. The student answers: Denn, was man schwarz auf weiß besitzt, / Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen. For what one has in black and white, one can carry home with confidence. Schwarz auf weiß, black on white, is the everyday German phrase for something in writing.
In the play the line is usually read as ironic. Mephistopheles is teasing a student who trusts paper.
The True Is the Whole
In the preface to his Phänomenologie des Geistes, published in 1807, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote: Das Wahre ist das Ganze. The true is the whole. The whole, he went on, is only the being that completes itself through its development. Of the absolute he said that it is essentially a result, and that only at the end is it what it truly is. A result without the path that led to it is worth nothing to him. Das nackte Resultat ist der Leichnam. The bare result is the corpse.
Theodor W. Adorno later turned the sentence around in Minima Moralia. Das Ganze ist das Unwahre. The whole is the untrue.
Understanding Before Application
Dem Anwenden muss das Erkennen vorausgehen. Understanding must come before application. The Max Planck Society calls this sentence the motto of its namesake, Max Planck, and its own guiding principle. The society was founded on 26 February 1948 and works mainly in basic research in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The society does not say where Planck first said or wrote the sentence.
The Hardest Structure to Break
In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, economy and society, published in 1921–22 after his death in 1920, the sociologist Max Weber wrote: “Eine einmal voll durchgeführte Bürokratie gehört zu den am schwersten zu zertrümmernden sozialen Gebilden.” A bureaucracy, once fully developed, is among the social structures hardest to smash. He called it a practically unbreakable form of rule.
The Spirit of Thoroughness in Germany
In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, dated April 1787, Immanuel Kant names the philosopher Christian Wolff as the originator of der Geist der Gründlichkeit in Deutschland, the spirit of thoroughness in Germany. Wolff showed, Kant writes, how a science should proceed. It needs principles established by rule, clear definitions of concepts, rigorous proofs, and no bold leaps in its conclusions. Kant adds that this spirit had not died in Germany. It had only been shouted down for a short time by a fashion for genius-style freedom of thought.
We Must Know, We Will Know
In the early 1920s, in talks in Hamburg in 1921 and in lectures at Göttingen, David Hilbert set out his Beweistheorie, proof theory. Its aim was to make the proofs of mathematics themselves the object of investigation, and to show that no contradiction could ever be derived within the system.
On 8 September 1930 Hilbert spoke at a congress of German scientists and physicians in Königsberg. In mathematics, he said, there is no Ignorabimus, no “we shall not know.” He ended with the words Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know. We will know. The words are on his gravestone in Göttingen. On the day before, at a conference in the same city, Kurt Gödel had announced the result that dealt Hilbert’s program a severe blow.
Typically German, Say the Germans
In autumn 2012 the brewery Oettinger commissioned a survey on German virtues. According to the Tagesspiegel, 90 percent of respondents said that virtues such as reliability, diligence and order were typically German. Two thirds also admitted that Germans are not all as honest, punctual and conscientious as people always think. The newspaper also quoted Winfried Kretschmann, Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, on troubled large building projects such as Berlin’s new airport: “Wir ruinieren doch mit solchen Desastern allmählich unseren Ruf als Ingenieurnation.” With disasters like these, we are slowly ruining our reputation as an engineering nation.