What impressed me most was that on a cold winter night, my sister and I sat by the fire. I read aloud to my sister the wonderful stories in Grimm's fairy tales, especially Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and I burst into tears. I still remember this scene clearly. ...
Bildunterschrift: Gro？ The majesty of Cologne Cathedral
As I grew older, I learned more about the subtlety and profundity of German culture, browsed Kant's and Hegel's philosophical masterpieces, understood the rigor of Marx's Das Kapital, and was even more surprised by the rationality and literary grace in Goethe and Schiller's literary and dramatic works. I still clearly remember that 1978, just after the catastrophe of the "Cultural Revolution", I got up at 5: 30 in the morning to queue up at Xinhua Bookstore in order to buy a new edition of Faust. I didn't buy books from the bookstore until 10:30. I held my new book high, my face was glowing red, and I struggled to get out of the crowd.
I am still very touched by German culture. In the past two years, my hometown Chengdu, through careful searching, found a large number of precious old photos left by1Weiss, Consul of the German Empire in Chengdu, China at the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 20th century. These photos of Mr. Weiss truly recorded the customs of mountains, rivers and temples in Chengdu in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, which made us truly feel the Xinhai nearly 100 years later. I think this is a wonderful reflection of German culture in China.
My preference for German culture is also related to my family background. According to my mother, at the beginning of the 20th century, when my grandfather Ren Yongzhen was studying in Peking University, because he loved German culture, he often visited the German minister's house in China and became good friends with the minister's family. After he graduated, the minister advised him to go to Germany for further study, but he resolutely returned to his hometown of Chengdu and became a professor at the School of Science of Sichuan University. In the mid-1980s, my sister Zhang Li was lucky enough to be selected to study forestry science in North Rhine-westfalen, the Federal Republic of Germany, and was one of the few Chinese mainland students studying in Germany at that time. All these have deepened my affinity for German culture.
Needless to say, in the modern history of Germany, the so-called "Third Reich" established by fascists headed by Hitler brought unprecedented disasters to people all over the world, including the German people. This is a dark page in German history. I learned from a large number of World War II works that German patriotic Democrats persisted in resisting fascist tyranny under extremely difficult circumstances. After the war, German culture has made great progress. Especially with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the German nation, German culture has entered a new period of development. I am very happy to see all this. I sincerely wish the German people that the ties of cultural exchanges between China and Germany are getting closer and closer and will last forever.