Parenting & Family Quote by Jack Steinberger

The chill of Steinberger's phrasing is the point: history’s catastrophe arrives not as a single thunderclap but as paperwork, “followed quickly,” made “systematic,” quietly normalized. A physicist’s voice helps here. He writes like someone trained to describe a process, and the sentence reads like a lab report on moral collapse: first a regime change, then predictable downstream effects, then measurable outputs. The horror is in the procedural calm.

The specific focus on schools is not incidental. Targeting “Jewish children” exposes the Nazis’ logic at its most strategic: choke the future. Higher education isn’t just a privilege; it’s access to professions, citizenship, belonging, and the authority to speak. By excluding children from public institutions, the state turns discrimination into an everyday civic routine, recruiting teachers, administrators, and classmates into complicity. Persecution becomes a timetable and a form.

Subtextually, Steinberger is also pushing back against the comforting myth that authoritarianism looks immediately monstrous. “Laws were enacted” is a warning disguised as a plain fact: legality is not morality, and governments can launder cruelty through statutes that sound bureaucratic, even reasonable to those who want to look away.

Context matters. Steinberger, a Jewish refugee who later became a Nobel-winning scientist, is implicitly mapping how quickly a society can move from political shift to the deliberate shrinking of a people’s horizon. He doesn’t need rhetorical fireworks. The restraint is the indictment: if it could be done through school policy once, it can be done again anywhere that treats rights as revocable permissions.