22
" The honeyed sweetness of Mengele, of his words and of his smile, which he hoped would endow him with some resemblance to the Angel of Death, is the genuine, imbecile expression of every kind of fascination with evil; it is the expression featured in every demi-culture that expects the shoddy junk of the shadows to make amends for its own paltriness. The prohibited act, often as trite as throwing rubbish out of the window, is no less obtuse just because it torments or tortures. The Gorgon, said Joseph Roth about Nazism, is banal. Mengele's victims are characters in a tragedy, but Mengele himself is a figure in a farrago of gibberish. "
― Claudio Magris , Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
23
" There is very little light and the hand-rail is rusty, but in the shadows on every landing there are statues, majestic and banal, with that mystery which envelopes the most conventionally imitative and realistic art - the art which creates figures aping the trite transparency of persons in official poses. The arabesques of the Alhambra, or Michelangelo's Prisoners, are there for eternity, while the imposing, melancholy statues on this staircase, insignificant as ourselves, grow old like us, moulder away in this semi-darkness amid the understandable neglect of all and sundry. They exhibit the uselessness and solitude, the incomprehensibility of old age. "
― Claudio Magris , Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea