Elon Musk discussing Storm of Steel with Matthias Döpfner
"For the national man there is just as great a danger, and that is that he forgets the present. To have a tradition is to have an obligation to live up to it. A nation is not a house in which each generation, like a generation of coral, must only lay a new floor, or in which it must exist, bad and good, only in a space defined once and for all. A castle, a solid bourgeois house that, once built, seems to stand forever. But soon a new generation, driven by new needs, sees the need for a major change. Either it burns down or it collapses, and a renovated, renewed building rises on the old foundations."
"Trench fighting is the bloodiest, wildest, most brutal of all... Of all the war's exciting moments none is so powerful as the meeting of two storm troop leaders between narrow trench walls. There's no mercy there, no going back, the blood speaks from a shrill cry of recognition that tears itself from one's breast like a nightmare."
"Every frenzy will shatter against the ruins, unless it meets a steel fist capable of harnessing it."
"Every authentic spiritual guidance is related to this truth— it knows how to bring man to the point where he recognizes the reality. This is the most evident where the teaching and the example are united: when the conqueror of fear enters the kingdom of death, as we see Christ, the highest benefactor, doing. With its death, the grain of wheat brought forth not a thousand fruits, but fruits without number. The superabundance of the world was touched, which every generative act is related to as a symbol of time, and of time’s defeat. In its train followed not only the martyrs, who were stronger than the stoics, stronger than the caesars, stronger than the hundred thousand spectators surrounding them in the arena— there also followed the innumerable others who died with their faith intact. To this day this is a far more compelling force than it at first seems. Even when the cathedrals crumble, a patrimony of knowledge remains that undermines the palaces of the oppressors like catacombs… With this blood, substance was infused into history, and it is with good reason that we still number our years from this epochal turning point. The full fertility of theogony reigns here, the mythical generative power. The sacrifice is replayed on countless altars."
— The Forest Passage
