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LingcodKilla posted:I’ve talked to a lot of US vets and yes they were mad about having to leave home to deal with German bastards that their fathers and uncles had to deal with so recently. This bit also can't be understated. When you look at things that people thought were wrong with Germany in the '39-44 framework "Prussian militarism" floats to the top of the pile really loving fast. You see it among normal soldiers with the general sentiment that "gently caress we're doing this again?" and at the level of policy makers with these big thinkpiece articles about what the gently caress is wrong with Germany that they started* two wars of unprecedented scale inside twenty five years. I had to read a lot of things like that at one point. You see publications like The Economist talking about how hosed up Prussian militarism is and how badly it's hosed Europe and you also have internal papers written by the people planning post-war occupation saying the same thing. Frankly antisemitism barely even gets a mention in all of that. Most people at the time looked at things like Nazi racial laws ca. 1939 about the same way they looked at Jim Crow bullshit in the American south: maybe ugly if you were a liberal academic and thought Jews were people too, but not really all that notable and certainly not a threat that needed an international response. *Germany being the aggressor in WW1 was pretty much the assumed fact in the 40s. This ping pongs around a lot in the historiography, but for a person writing policy papers in 1943 it's a self evident truth.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:"Prussian militarism"
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Feb 11, 2020 20:40
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In the book, Erich talks about how green troops don't understand what it means to hate the enemy. He hates the English because he's witnessed them bombing a hospital and torturing prisoners, but he doesn't hate the Americans, and his guards don't hate him because they haven't seen combat. Corporal Nakamoto hates the Italians because his friends died and he was injured in Italy, but he doesn't mind the Germans either. If you asked individual American troops at Omaha beach why they hate the Nazis you'd get many individual reasons, but I'd be surprised if any Christian soldier had anti-Semitism at the top of his list.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:44
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I don't get what this discussion is about. Soldiers are supposed to hate the enemy. Not only are they trying to kill you, your propaganda also dehumanizes them in every possible way. Why wouldn't you be mad at those bastards???
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Feb 11, 2020 20:44
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:yeah i find it very hard to believe that the German POWs didn't comprehend how their enemies could be mad at them. i am certainly not saying that allied soldiers werent mad as hell at germans. i just really question the narrative of: I mean, if you take on the assumptions that 1) the average German soldier probably wasn't all that different from you, or I, or the average Allied soldier, and 2) that he didn't have much if any idea about the full depth and horror of the Holocaust, this seems like a plausible scenario to me. This isn't to say that there weren't a whole lot of Germans who were either complicit in or active perpetrators of the Holocaust and supporting activities, but I can certainly see how there'd be a segment of them that these assumptions would apply to.
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Feb 11, 2020 20:46
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Nenonen posted:I don't get what this discussion is about. Soldiers are supposed to hate the enemy. Not only are they trying to kill you, your propaganda also dehumanizes them in every possible way. Why wouldn't you be mad at those bastards???
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Feb 11, 2020 20:47
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HEY GUNS posted:in my period they don't, i have never seen it In your period, the soldiers don't hate each other, they hate the peasants and the peasants hate them, regardless of which side they're on.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:07
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Speaking of blind hatred, I just watched 1917, and boy the Germans seemed really despicable in that movie. Especially what the pilot does, yeesh.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:10
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bewbies posted:I mean, if you take on the assumptions that 1) the average German soldier probably wasn't all that different from you, or I, or the average Allied soldier, and 2) that he didn't have much if any idea about the full depth and horror of the Holocaust, this seems like a plausible scenario to me. i feel like i'm not making sense here or not being clear or something the original assertion was that allied troops, pre liberation of the camps, were angry at the Germans because of various atrocities, and that the German POWs did not understand why the allied troops were mad at them. and then once the Germans POWs saw what they had done through exposure to US newsreels, they understood why the Allied troops had been so angry. this makes absolutely no sense to me.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:11
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:i feel like i'm not making sense here or not being clear or something Which part of this specifically makes no sense?
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Feb 11, 2020 21:13
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sullat posted:In your period, the soldiers don't hate each other, they hate the peasants and the peasants hate them, regardless of which side they're on.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:36
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Speaking of blind hatred, I just watched 1917, and boy the Germans seemed really despicable in that movie. Especially what the pilot does, yeesh. Trauma from crash landing a burning plane and nearly dying does things to the brain, my guy.
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Feb 11, 2020 22:09
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Which part of this specifically makes no sense? how would the allied soldiers be mad about something they had no knowledge of
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Feb 11, 2020 22:37
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:i feel like i'm not making sense here or not being clear or something People's subjective perception of the experiences they lived through does not always match reality. He did not read their minds to know what they were actually mad about, but this was the narrative he constructed out of those experiences. I'm not asserting that allied soldiers were actually well informed of the camps.
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Feb 11, 2020 22:43
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:how would the allied soldiers be mad about something they had no knowledge of The German guy thought the Allies were mad at Germany, not really necessarily understanding the character of allied resistance or its motivation. I don't really know what German propaganda taught Germans about the Western allies, maybe that had something to do with it. If somebody fights a war with you for 6 years and launches a massive amphibious invasion to destroy you, you might understand this as "being mad at your country", if you aren't very good at politics. Jobbo_Fett posted:Trauma from crash landing a burning plane and nearly dying does things to the brain, my guy. That's a possibility that isn't explored in the film, and the greater portrayal of the Germans is a bunch of faceless demons who live in a burning pit and are unflinchingly hostile.
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Feb 11, 2020 23:03
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:i feel like i'm not making sense here or not being clear or something Some random Fritz, especially one who gets captured in North Africa or off of a leaky U-Boat, will probably not really be aware of the full spectrum of all of this. Which in and of itself would be enough to give the Americans and British a mad-on. He then finds out that those prison camps where Hitler was owning the libs turned out to be torture and murder ranches complete with things like trenches of dead. Oh, he then thinks: So this is why.
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Feb 11, 2020 23:20
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I don't really know what German propaganda taught Germans about the Western allies, maybe that had something to do with it. Nazi propaganda said that they were simply restoring the German nation to its rightful borders by reclaiming Lothringen, Austria, and the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia. Treacherous Western bankers (understood to be backed by Jews) were afraid of the power of a unified Germany, so they attacked, but the Germans had been freed of impure influences and bravely struck back against their international oppressors. The Nazis portrayed themselves as a force for justice, not as aggressors. A typical German believed all of this, and wasn't given any information to the contrary. Some of the high-ranking Nazis believed their own lies, which leads to things like "kick in the door and the whole [Soviet Union] collapses."
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Feb 11, 2020 23:24
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P-Mack posted:This reminds me of some German prisoner accounts which had as a recurring theme that they just couldn't understand why the British and Americans who stormed the beaches and took them prisoner were so damned angry at their Aryan cousins. Were the allies mad because they had time machines?
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Feb 11, 2020 23:42
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ChubbyChecker posted:Were the allies mad because they had time machines? You could travel back in time to read the last dozen posts.
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Feb 12, 2020 01:41
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Jobbo_Fett posted:WW2 Data So is it obnoxious if I say "oh yeah?! Well **I've** written a blog post about this too! Or is this what Academia is, sorta
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Feb 12, 2020 02:30
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Nebakenezzer posted:So is it obnoxious if I say "oh yeah?! Well **I've** written a blog post about this too! Historiography is basically a forum thread only each post is an article and you have effort posts (aka “books”) sprinkled in. Once in a while two people get salty and get into a slap fight and that’s when you have a historical controversy good enough to merit its own Wikipedia page, like the historikerstreit or the Fischer controversy. The main difference is that it takes place over decades not a weekend. Once I a blue moon someone gets prosecuted by the French Government for Holocaust denial which I guess is kinda like a perma.
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Feb 12, 2020 05:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:the historikerstreit or the Fischer controversy. If you wanted to write more about these or give recommendations I'd love to read them. I got as far into Fischer's wiki page where he blamed Nazism on... *double checks notes cause it's insane* the Lutherans???? And I knew I needed a lot more context to wrap my head around this crazy.
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Feb 12, 2020 06:10
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ChubbyChecker posted:Were the allies mad because they had time machines? Yuri was far better than a chronotrooper, that's for sure.
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Feb 12, 2020 06:55
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I got a weird question that's bouncing around my brain, I swear the original quote from.... Someone I think Early Modern was "Kerls, wollt ihr immer leben?" that later morphed into, you know, this thing plus various other forms that have been found. I randomly wanted to check this cause I have brain spiders, and the closest I can find is Frederick the Great saying, "Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben". Anyone know what I'm talking about or is this the first sign of my inevitable stroke? (Non-German speakers, they're "You [bastards]*, want to always live?" and "You dogs, do you want to live forever?" Or close enough. I hate translating cause it never gets the nuance.) Also just cause you all might like the most extremely German idiom ever that this reminded me of : "Nach der Schlacht, zahl die Koerper" (After the battle, count the bodies). It's the equivalent of "don't count your chickens before they're hatched". *Jerks? I don't know how to translate "Kerl". It's slightly offensive but also the kind of thing you might call a friend. Think like the kind of thing where you'd lightly punch a friend in the arm and call them an rear end in a top hat, I guess.
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Feb 12, 2020 07:11
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Translated like old-timey English "churl" or different? Same root, I guess, along with Afrikaans "kerel"
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Feb 12, 2020 07:47
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It's the same root but I still can't think of a good one-to-one analogue with English. And "churl" basically is a dead word. It'd be kind of rude to say to a stranger but if you knew someone it could have a kind of a gruff sign of friendship. Maybe like a (severely less strong) form of how some British English speakers use "oval office"? Like if I called some rando that they'd probably get mad at me, but if I called a friend that it'd be a sign we're close rar rar you rear end in a top hat rar butt-slapping all around ha ha football rar. This is why I hate translation.
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Feb 12, 2020 08:04
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It's probably related to karls, the most despicable part of your clan. they probably want you to gently caress with the ducks
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Feb 12, 2020 08:05
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Yes. It's in the link I just posted. But good King of Dragon Pass reference.
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Feb 12, 2020 08:06
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Speaking of blind hatred, I just watched 1917, and boy the Germans seemed really despicable in that movie. Especially what the pilot does, yeesh. And yet, the protagonist does an equally despicable thing later on
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Feb 12, 2020 08:25
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:That's a possibility that isn't explored in the film, and the greater portrayal of the Germans is a bunch of faceless demons who live in a burning pit and are unflinchingly hostile. War makes people behave in unpleasant ways OP. Its not the christmas truce of 1914, its the nadir of the war, everyone is cold, traumatised, likely hungry or starving if German and have lived through gas attacks, relentless shelling and seen maybe half their mates killed or wounded and constant demonisation of the enemy by propaganda. Hostility is the baseline and people will do quite a lot to survive if they think they are about to or are about to die or be killed. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Feb 12, 2020 |
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Feb 12, 2020 10:22
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Xiahou Dun posted:*Jerks? I don't know how to translate "Kerl". It's slightly offensive but also the kind of thing you might call a friend. Think like the kind of thing where you'd lightly punch a friend in the arm and call them an rear end in a top hat, I guess. this is also the word the guy who nearly killed pappenheim at white mountain used for "hey you! you have good pants, you've got to die" guy, dude, bro. Hey man.
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Feb 12, 2020 11:52
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In the scandi languages, 'karl' is just a signifier meaning you're a dude, or possibly of the unlanded worker class. In German it's also mostly 'dude'.
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Feb 12, 2020 12:00
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Yeah exactly. But without context if you just call a dude a Kerl he’ll think you’re mocking him. “Bro”?
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Feb 12, 2020 12:28
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https://twitter.com/MykeCole/status/1227294561426427907?s=19
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Feb 12, 2020 13:28
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WH Auden posted:Through art we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.
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Feb 12, 2020 14:08
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I use the Dutch "kerel" similary both ironically and unironically. Can be used both with exaggerated rural farmer or posh fraternity student accent for opposite effect. Dictionary lists bloke and lad as english translations, which seems about right to me.
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Feb 12, 2020 14:14
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i have compassion for the guys i study, but i do not speak for their interests
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Feb 12, 2020 14:22
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Hobedierie, Kerl. Was is'enn los?
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Feb 12, 2020 14:23
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1917 pointedly does not comment on the morality of the Germans, but it does comment on some things. The character who dies trying to rescue the pilot is described as good, courageous, and his act is not regretted at all.
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Feb 12, 2020 14:26
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Meanwhile in the American tradition that line is pretty much universally delivered with "sons of bitches" or similar, most notably by Dan Daly in WWI. Somehow this was not when he got either of his medals of honor. The pre-WWII US loved getting into situations that gave dudes medals when doing a colonialism.
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Feb 12, 2020 17:07
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