"Es ist nichts."

I gave up reading Kristallnacht when I felt that most of the interesting accounts had been described in the first few chapters, hence why I have started reading the very highly recommended 'The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite'. I'm really into it and find it wonderful how the author, Beatrice Colin, manages to describe everything so delicately accurate that you can put yourself in the shoes of the character and imagine what they are hearing, feeling and even smelling.

There are lots of interesting quotes that I could pick out, but I have just read a passage that I found was very cleverly put together. The book is about decadent, tantalizing Berlin in a Germany torn apart by war at the turn of the 20th Century. War hadn't actually broke out at the time that this chapter was set, but it adapts in the key cause of WW1, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand;


"My tea was a little cold this morning," he would say. "Could you make sure the water has actually boiled next time?" And she would nod, because her voice would only betray her. When he was gone, her tears would roll into the sponge mixture and it would spoil. 'Es ist nichts,' she would tell herself. It is nothing.
'It is nothing,' Archduke Franz Ferdinand repeated as he lay bleeding to death beside his pregnant wife on the floor of his carriage in the middle of Sarajevo in June. But of course, on both counts, it was not nothing." - The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite, Beatrice Colin