The British Prime Minister during World War II is credited with the phrase: “We are not fighting Hitler, but the German spirit, the spirit of Schiller, so that this spirit is not revived.” We found out whether Churchill said this.
The authors of most publications in which this quote is given usually do not specify in what source these words of Churchill were found. Moreover, it is not so important which author we are talking about: this phrase is attributed to the British politician and ordinary users of LiveJournal, and professor at MGIMO Elena Ponomareva, And Andrey Fursov, former head of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Most often, the phrase is dated back to 1940, sometimes specifying that it was contained in one of Churchill’s letters.
In 2002, following the results of a large television project on BBC Winston Churchill recognized the greatest Briton of all time. It is not surprising that all his meetings and speeches are documented in detail, and the texts written and spoken by him at different times have been preserved and digitized. These materials are now available in electronic archive, with which we started our check. Schiller is mentioned in only one text by Churchill - article 1935 in the magazine The Strand: “It is amazing that the Germans, educated, learned, philosophizing, romantic... the heirs of Goethe and Schiller, Bach and Beethoven, Heine, Leibniz, Kant and hundreds of other great people, not only were not outraged by this bloodbath, but also approved and welcomed its author not even as a ruler, but as God.”
On the Russian-language Internet you can find only a few mentions of the phrase we are interested in until 2014. The already mentioned Andrei Fursov brought it up at least twice. In 2011 he wrote article about educational reform in Russia, and it contains the following passage: “Churchill once said about the war with Germany: we are not fighting with Hitler, but with the spirit of Schiller - so that it will never be reborn. The “friends” of Russia could and can say the same thing - they are not fighting a specific regime, they are fighting the spirit of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin so that it does not revive.” Two years later Fursov made a report at the "New Paradigm" conference, which took place in Frankfurt (ironically, at the Schiller Institute). The speaker himself noticed this coincidence, emphasizing that holding such a meeting is an “asymmetric response” to the British Empire and “imperialist Churchill.”
Apparently, it was Fursov who can be called the popularizer of this quote, which he attributes to Churchill. However, for the first time in Russian it used in 2009, Hrant Arakelyan is the author of the books “The Empire Goes On the Offensive” and “The War in Syria (Origins, Background and Reality).” Unlike his colleagues, Arakelyan cites the source in which he found this quote: Hughes Emrys. Winston Churchill: British bulldog: His career in war and peace. Exposition Books, 1955, p. 145; quoted as per: Adrian Preissinger, Von Sachsenhausen bis Buchenwald, p. 23. The author provides this note and a link to online collection statements of famous people, where the phrase is also attributed to Churchill. Although the creators of the resource warn that they did not check the accuracy of the quotes, the words about the spirit of Schiller have a link to the same books by Hughes and Preissinger.
First, let's look at Preissinger's book. Its name can be roughly translated as “From Sachsenhausen to Buchenwald. Communist death factories", she really was published in 1997. The book was published by the publishing house Vowinckel Verlag, incoming to the group Verlagsgesellschaft Berg, which is called one of the main German book publishers of right-wing extremist leanings. The author of the book himself headed a radical magazine, and in 2002 he sentenced to three years in prison for sedition. Now Preissinger leads its own publishing house, which it describes as a "one-man, nonconformist micro-company taking increased political risks" and publishes reprints of Hitler's My Struggle and other Nazi texts.
Although Preissinger's activities and worldview are questionable, this is not enough to accuse him of inventing the "quote." The German author refers to a book by Emrys Hughes, a contemporary of Churchill, a Welsh journalist and politician. His book about the prime minister was first published in 1950, then again five years later. Unfortunately, such old publications are not so easy to find in the public domain. And still alone online library allows you to check whether certain words are in the text on certain pages. Preissinger refers to page 145—it does mention Hitler and uses the word “German,” but does not include the word “spirit.” A search for the word “Schiller” yields no results at all. Most likely, it was Preissinger who made up Churchill's words about the fight against the German spirit, while the British Prime Minister himself did not say such things.
Incorrect quote attribution
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