“The Greeks were never what the Germans thought of them,” wrote Jens Jessen in an article in DIE ZEIT on March 4, 2010.
I give you this sentence after what you told me about your first trip to Greece: Inspired by the travel tale Iliad, you were in search of beauty and adventure. Perhaps after Winckelmann’s noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. Perhaps also full of admiration for the struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire? You found “garbage, carelessness and dead stones”. And I’ll give you the siren as a trigger object for this sentence: half bird or half fish, she is a quick-change artist, sensually beguiling, mentally disturbing, so they say, but above all she is never what she seems to be to the beguiled eye.
Theo Steiner
