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Redeye Flight posted:Shirer is one of my favorite go-tos for a breakdown of the rise of the Nazi party. Just... do NOT take his theories about the German people being uniquely suited for authoritarianism seriously, at all. Any time he opens his mouth about Martin Luther it's almost certainly bullshit. Calling it bullshit is a bit strong. The Sonderweg is a thesis that a lot of people latched on to early in order to explain why the early 20th C was such a poo poo show and from a view of "Germans turned into horrible monsters WTF is wrong with them?" it has its own logic. It's been thoroughly debunked by later scholarship but it's an interesting artifact in its own right of how people tried to come to grips with what a poo poo show Europe turned into coming off the long 19th C.
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Oct 13, 2016 06:25
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The Sonderweg idea is as far as I know still a part of the current German political zeitgeist. It's like their version of American exceptionalism. Bunk, yet widespread as an implicit assumption.
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Oct 13, 2016 11:38
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Cyrano4747 posted:Calling it bullshit is a bit strong. The Sonderweg is a thesis that a lot of people latched on to early in order to explain why the early 20th C was such a poo poo show and from a view of "Germans turned into horrible monsters WTF is wrong with them?" it has its own logic. Oh, in that aspect, absolutely. I'm just trying to emphasize that this was a book published less than ten years after the war's end, when the scars were still very fresh. All the parts involving captured Nazi documents are pretty drat timeless, and Shirer does a good job putting them into the framework. But the original hypotheses have to be taken in the framework of the time, rather than as gospel.
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Oct 13, 2016 11:45
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Baronjutter posted:We have this mythology that "surviving" some horrible experience grows you as a person, these people are heroes for getting through it and have gained some wisdom and insight. But it's really just bullshit we use to, I don't know, cope with tragedy better? In reality horrific traumatic events tend to just gently caress people up. Tons of holocaust survivors became horrible awful monsters after their humanity was stripped away. Freed slaves returning to africa ended up using what they learned from slavery to oppress people them selves. Quite often people that have been oppressed simply learn to become oppressors. For every person who comes out of a death camp or a horrible war with a deep understanding on the dangers of hatred, another comes out simply broken, while another comes out a hate filled monster only to repeat the cycle. It should also be noted that starting from childhood Hitler didn't seem to really care for people other than his own mother. His father beat him and was an aloof, stern figure, and while Hitler was social with other kids he didn't really form deep friendships. From his youth, the only remarkable camaraderie was formed with Kubitzek, and even this first proto-friendship tended to be one where Hitler was the focus of attention, and Kubitzek the passive listener and supporter. Given that, one could speculate (armchair psychology ahoy) that the death in WW1 didn't phase Hitler that much, since he didn't care much about random people in the first place. Another aspect of it is that this attitude about war being a formative, powerful experience was prevalent in the Völkish circles post-WW1, and Hitler certainly profited from it in the Kampfzeit.
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Oct 13, 2016 13:18
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A White Guy posted:Compound that with a quack doctor who treated his various intestinal problems with all kinds of drugs, add in the incredible stress of running a country at war, and finally add in lickspittles like Halder and Keitel, who kissed Hitler's rear end as hard as they could mush their faces into it, and you can see why he became crazier and crazier and more convinced of just how amazing he was. To add to that a book was recently published looking at drug policy and drug use in Nazi Germany. It starts by taking a look at the drug culture of the Weimar republic and the nazis' opposition to that, but also looks at the growing use of Perivtin (essentially crystal meth), from the mid-30s on wards, by large chunks of the German population as though it were coffee until it was actually officially issued to army units for the invasion of France. It also looks on Hitler's and other nazi leaders' personal drug habits, Hitler's in particular is like super crazy (whereas Himmler swore off drugs and did 3 hours of yoga every morning). Went to a talk about the book with the author a few days ago, seemed pretty interesting. https://www.amazon.com/Blitzed-Hard...ds=blitzed+nazi Randarkman fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 15:46
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Hitler's drug use is pretty famous in history nerd circles but on the whole all of that is less a Nazi Germany thing and more a pre-70s thing. Diet pills were a mix of amphetamine and methamphetamine into the 70s in the US. You could but meth as a decongestant too. Military use was rampant on all sides in WW2. The 70s is when you see a major change in how people thought about drugs, medicine, and trying to draw harder lines between therapeutic and recreational use.
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Oct 13, 2016 18:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:Hitler's drug use is pretty famous in history nerd circles but on the whole all of that is less a Nazi Germany thing and more a pre-70s thing. Diet pills were a mix of amphetamine and methamphetamine into the 70s in the US. You could but meth as a decongestant too. Military use was rampant on all sides in WW2. Well, with methamphetamine I'm not so sure on all sides using it, especially for the entire war. The British began issuing amphetamines, might have been meth, to pilots sometime after the Battle of Britain, if I remember correctly, and I'm not so sure about the Americans. Really it seems as if Germany was kind of at the forefront when it came to using amphetamines as a kind of combat enhancer (in that it kept you awake and alert) and other countries kind of followed suit, but mostly for airforces, from mid- or late war onwards. Whereas in Germany methamphetamine use was common in all branches from the get-go.
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Oct 13, 2016 18:19
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Randarkman posted:Well, with methamphetamine I'm not so sure on all sides using it, especially for the entire war. The British began issuing amphetamines, might have been meth, to pilots sometime after the Battle of Britain, if I remember correctly, and I'm not so sure about the Americans. Really it seems as if Germany was kind of at the forefront when it came to using amphetamines as a kind of combat enhancer (in that it kept you awake and alert) and other countries kind of followed suit, but mostly for airforces, from mid- or late war onwards. Whereas in Germany methamphetamine use was common in all branches from the get-go. Benzedrine was the combat drug of choice for the Anglo-Americans, starting with bomber crews (particularly the British, who flew at night) and spreading outward from there to the other service arms.
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Oct 13, 2016 18:22
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Both the US Army (certainly Airborne) and Marines were issued amphetamines during WWII. ^ ^ ^ Yes, Benzedrine.
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Oct 13, 2016 18:23
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My basic point is that amphetamines of all types weren't that big of a deal until much later. The civilian German use mentioned is right in line with what was going on elsewhere. People just didn't think about drugs/medicine the same way in the first half of the 20th C. The 70s were a real watershed on the road to our current understanding, especially when it comes to the moral facet.
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Oct 13, 2016 18:35
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This is one of the best books I've read about Nazi Germany, an incredible work of history IBM and the Holocaust is the stunning story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany -- beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s. Only after Jews were identified -- a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately -- could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor. IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed. IBM and the Holocaust takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries -- all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction. Just as compelling is the human drama of one of our century's greatest minds, IBM founder Thomas Watson, who cooperated with the Nazis for the sake of profit. Only with IBM's technologic assistance was Hitler able to achieve the staggering numbers of the Holocaust. Edwin Black has now uncovered one of the last great mysteries of Germany's war against the Jews -- how did Hitler get the names? http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
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Oct 13, 2016 18:41
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Basically everyone was on drugs back in the day. Redeye Flight posted:Shirer is one of my favorite go-tos for a breakdown of the rise of the Nazi party. Just... do NOT take his theories about the German people being uniquely suited for authoritarianism seriously, at all. Any time he opens his mouth about Martin Luther it's almost certainly bullshit. Martin Luther was basically the worst. A reformation of some sorts was needed because the Catholic church was a corrupt mess but Luther was an rear end in a top hat even by early modern religious zealot standards. I don't think that there is some straight unbroken line from Luther to Hitler but Luther's antisemitism and general assholery definitely had a huge impact on German culture. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Nov 3, 2016 |
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Nov 3, 2016 21:35
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FreudianSlippers posted:Martin Luther was basically the worst. A reformation of some sorts was needed because the Catholic church was a corrupt mess but Luther was an rear end in a top hat even by early modern religious zealot standards. Can you explain this in greater detail?
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Nov 3, 2016 21:38
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Hunt11 posted:Can you explain this in greater detail? The theory goes that Lutheranism invested Germany with some uniquely pernicious brands of antisemitism. It's kind of hard to back historically, though; the compelling counterargument is that every other great power of Europe had a much longer, more recent, and significantly bloodier history of jewish repression up until the Nazis took power. Cynically, for the last two hundred years Germany had either been too busy being an unending series of wars between city-states, too busy being unified by Bismarck, or too busy losing World War I for "uh, look, jews!" to be an effective distraction from internal political problems.
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Nov 3, 2016 22:34
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Ze Pollack posted:The theory goes that Lutheranism invested Germany with some uniquely pernicious brands of antisemitism. It's kind of hard to back historically, though; the compelling counterargument is that every other great power of Europe had a much longer, more recent, and significantly bloodier history of jewish repression up until the Nazis took power. Cynically, for the last two hundred years Germany had either been too busy being an unending series of wars between city-states, too busy being unified by Bismarck, or too busy losing World War I for "uh, look, jews!" to be an effective distraction from internal political problems. so there is no evidence to back up this theory that Martin Luther caused the holocaust
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Nov 3, 2016 22:47
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JFairfax posted:so there is no evidence to back up this theory that Martin Luther caused the holocaust That the German brand of anti-semitism took a lot of its essential character from Martin Luther is difficult to refute. That it was those elements of anti-semitism that made the Holocaust possible is, to put it most politely, difficult to support.
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Nov 4, 2016 00:30
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JFairfax posted:so there is no evidence to back up this theory that Martin Luther caused the holocaust There is evidence that Christian preaching about Jewish guilt for the death of Christ in general fostered feelings of antisemitism in Europe, but it's difficult to pin that to Lutheranism in particular. If anyone was predicting where anti-semitism would find its most virulent form in 1900 everyone would have agreed that Russia topped the list and France would have seemed a safer bet among rich countries than Germany. The one thing you could try to make out about Lutheranism is that it probably bent itself more readily than some other religious traditions might have to authoritarianism because there had never been a time in the history of Lutheranism where it hadn't associated itself extremely closely in an alliance with secular power Germany. But then again, Catholicism folded pretty easily to Nazism in Germany (allowing its unions to be destroyed easily that it had worked tirelessly to create and protect) and moreso elsewhere to fascism in Europe. In the end if you try to explain the holocaust with Luther you will probably be reaching dangerously close to discredited sonderweg historiography.
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Nov 4, 2016 00:50
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Ironically, a lot fewer U-boats might have been sunk if Admiral Donitz wasn't such a chatty motherfucker who wanted constant updates on where everyone was and what they were doing. 
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Nov 4, 2016 02:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:Calling it bullshit is a bit strong. The Sonderweg is a thesis that a lot of people latched on to early in order to explain why the early 20th C was such a poo poo show and from a view of "Germans turned into horrible monsters WTF is wrong with them?" it has its own logic. Disinterested posted:In the end if you try to explain the holocaust with Luther you will probably be reaching dangerously close to discredited sonderweg historiography. Has the Sonderweg really been discredited? My understanding is it basically just says that Prussian authoritarianism and sponsorship of romantic conservatism stunted liberal democracy in Germany and put its thumb on the scale in favor of fascism, which sounds reasonable to me? icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 03:20
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icantfindaname posted:Has the Sonderweg really been disproved? My understanding is it basically is just that Prussian authoritarianism and sponsorship of romantic nationalism had far-reaching consequences and stunted liberal democracy in Germany, which sounds reasonable to me? That's a really, really, really mild read of it. Without getting too far into the weeds, the core argument of the Sonderweg is that Germany's development as a nation-state was stunted in the 18th and 19th centuries such that they never had the liberal governmental reforms that gave rise to liberal democracies in the rest of Western Europe. They had, as the term implies, a "special path" to modernity that set them apart from the rest of Europe in ways that made them uniquely susceptible to both totalitarian authoritarianism in general and genocidal anti-Semitism in particular. What caused this divergence is where you get people talking about Martin Luther etc. There are a few big problems with this. The biggest one (in my opinion at least) is that it implies a "normal" path of historical progress that is both natural and somewhat similar across Western Europe. This is, frankly, bullshit. Just compare England and France and the political histories that led them to the forms of government they had in 1900. We're talking radically different evolutions in how political power was conceived of, to the point where you can't really say there is a singular turning point that Germany "missed." Now expand out beyond the two big, obvious examples of countries that ended up with what people in 1945 thought of as "good governments." Spain is a completely different beast with a radically different political history. You also have a lot of very large, very powerful countries that never go in that direction yet are hand waved away because they're in Central or Eastern Europe. When you look at Austria-Hungary alongside it Germany doesn't look so special in 1900. The other big problem I have with it is that it implies that because Germany failed to develop in a certain way (namely as a liberal democracy along the Anglo-American-French model) it was inherently predisposed to doing the poo poo it did. This ignores a whole fuckload of historical context which helps inform why things shook out the way they did in those specific circumstances. It also rather heavily implies that those model nations would be incapable of either militaristic adventurism or wanton acts of racially-inspired barbarism. A quick glance at the colonial histories of any of them (and let's throw Belgium and the Netherlands in for good measure) should indicate that this isn't the case. The circumstances are different, the results are different, but it's hard to argue a special path that leads to the Holocaust when, by any standard you care to use, Germany in 1900 is actually the European power with the cleanest hands. It should be noted that the 1904 Herero Genocide, which was the German military's first real foray into such matters, was a pretty much bog standard colonial operation for the time. As a side note, it also ignores the fact that a whole lot of non-Germans participated eagerly. It's hard to blame the failings of German culture and political progress for the eagerness with which some Polish (and Ukrainian, and Latvian, and . . . ) populations participated in exterminating their neighbors. As a second side note it also ignores the fact that Germany in 1900 wasn't exactly a monolithic entity. When people talk about the Sonderweg they're usually pointing to a very narrow reading of Prussia (and one that's not even unchallenged now - check out Clark's excellent recent history of the region) and how it cocked up Germany. The country today is still incredibly regionally diverse, and at the turn of the 20th century it was even more so. It's not nearly the top down autocratic monolith that it's frequently portrayed as. It's basically a post-war answer for the question of "why the gently caress did the Germans do all this" from a very specific Anglo-French-American viewpoint. It's the western victors of the war trying to find some fatal flaw that made the Germans so murderous, and in doing so conveniently reassuring themselves that their chosen form of government inoculates them against such things. Germany had a "bad" culture, history, and political structure which is why they turned out so rotten. What's more, it's also a convenient way to point out that there are other countries that are also not liberal democracies who do bad things (see: Stalin, Mao, et al.) and it lets them group them all conceptually.
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Nov 4, 2016 03:50
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I'll look into Clark's book, thanks. It does seem to me though just based on what I already know that Prussian authoritarianism is a reasonable explanation for why Germany was what it was prior to 1945, even if it didn't necessitate it doing the Holocaust. Compare Japan, which had a very similar sort of authoritarianism much more strongly entrenched and with a much weaker opposition to it in terms of regional difference and you get a country that retains those less-liberal-democratic features to this day. It seems a little ridiculous to completely reject the idea that bureaucratized military-style authoritarianism had anything to do with the political and economic development of Germany or Japan, even if it is obviously more complicated than that
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 04:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:That's a really, really, really mild read of it. You add to this that often sonderweg hypotheses often also are selective in what they take from Germany (let's ignore it's giant 19th century liberal currents, for example) and misreading by hook or by crook what things they do take (depicting Nietzsche or Kant or Herder as proto-Nazi, Frederick the Great as a meaningful prototype for Hitler) etc. etc.
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Nov 4, 2016 04:24
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icantfindaname posted:I'll look into Clark's book, thanks. It does seem to me though just based on what I already know that Prussian authoritarianism is a reasonable explanation for why Germany was what it was prior to 1945, even if it didn't necessitate it doing the Holocaust. Compare Japan, which had a very similar sort of authoritarianism much more strongly entrenched and with a much weaker opposition to it in terms of regional difference and you get a country that retains those less-liberal-democratic features to this day You need to try to unpack this to try to make it a credible claim, because I don't think it is one.
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Nov 4, 2016 04:26
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Disinterested posted:You need to try to unpack this to try to make it a credible claim, because I don't think it is one. Well, for example it can explain why Germany had such a restricted voting franchise until 1918 and took an abortive Communist revolution to change it (as compared with Britain), and why German conservatism, at least the non-Catholic kind, was so comfortable with an undemocratic regime both before and after 1918, to start icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 04:39
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icantfindaname posted:Well, for example it can explain why Germany had such a restricted voting franchise until 1918 and took an abortive Communist revolution to change it (as compared with Britain), and why German conservatism, at least the non-Catholic kind, was so comfortable with an undemocratic regime both before and after 1918, to start What are you talking about?! Germany had universal male suffrage from 1871 and a powerful parliament. It took until 1918 for the UK to have universal male suffrage. Germany in a lot of ways was a paradigm for certain forms of progressive politics before WW1. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 05:22
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Where's the sonder in Sonderweg then? All you're describing is a country not being a fully fledged democracy prior to WW1, which is a charge you can lay at the feet of most countries. For what it's worth I think you're also selling Imperial German democratic structures short. Yes they were nowhere near what you see in a truly democratic system, but a lot of importamt practices were in place. An understanding of a universal (for a certain value of universal - makes over 25 in this case) franchise and the sanctity of the secret ballot are two huge ones. I'm basically cribbing Andersens argument from Practicing Democracy so check that out it's really good.
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Nov 4, 2016 05:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Where's the sonder in Sonderweg then? All you're describing is a country not being a fully fledged democracy prior to WW1, which is a charge you can lay at the feet of most countries. Plus Germany gets women's suffrage in 1919, which is also way ahead of the curve. I think this is also a good talk to look at for the more time limited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdYev31IYgg quote:He seems to forget that one of Britain's two main allies was the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II, a despotism of no mean order, far more authoritarian than the Kaiser's Germany. Until Russia left the war early in 1918, any talk of fighting to defend "western" values was misplaced. Britain wasn't a democracy at the time either: until the Fourth Reform Act of 1918, 40% of adult males didn't have the vote, in contrast to Germany, where every adult man had the right to go to the ballot box in national elections. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 05:26
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Disinterested posted:What are you talking about?! Germany had universal male suffrage from 1871 and a powerful parliament. It took until 1918 for the UK to have universal male suffrage. Cyrano4747 posted:Where's the sonder in Sonderweg then? All you're describing is a country not being a fully fledged democracy prior to WW1, which is a charge you can lay at the feet of most countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_three-class_franchise quote:Those eligible to vote were men over 24, divided by their direct tax revenue into three classes. The three classes were calculated according to how much tax one paid, by dividing the entire range of taxes into thirds. The first class ranged from the highest tax payer on down until one third of total tax revenue was reached; the second was for those with a lower income until another one third of total tax revenue was reached; the third was for the bottom third of tax payers. While the last were generally poor people paying little to no tax individually, it could happen that a rich person living in a particularly rich tax district ended up in the third class, which happened to chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1903. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 05:42
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icantfindaname posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_three-class_franchise Other countries had plural voting. In the UK a university degree conferred another vote in a university constituency. 40% of men had no votes, unlike all of them in Germany. And anyway, the Reichstag elections were universal suffrage; state ones were weighted by property depending on state. Swing and a miss I'm afraid. There is no way to coherently argue that Germany was unusually authoritarian before WW1, really. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 05:45
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The strongest case you can make against Prussia is probably this: 
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Nov 4, 2016 05:51
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Disinterested posted:Other countries had plural voting. In the UK a university degree conferred another vote in a university constituency. 40% of men had no votes, unlike all of them in Germany. Huh, never mind then
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Nov 4, 2016 05:52
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs Disinterested posted:The strongest case you can make against Prussia is probably this: Even then, it's only the far Eastern portions of Prussia that voted NSDAP. The Rhine provinces, also part of Prussia, were the most strongly opposed. That national vote map also does a good job of obscuring the role of the Prussian state institutions, which strongly resisted NSDAP advances (because they were largely controlled by the SDP).
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Nov 4, 2016 07:30
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Disinterested posted:Other countries had plural voting. In the UK a university degree conferred another vote in a university constituency. 40% of men had no votes, unlike all of them in Germany. A country where most men sang and baked bread was turned into a phalanx of military automatons by British propaganda. The true study of a "special way" would involve how one country and its people could become so thought of as uniformly evil. You could even divide this discipline into pre- and post- 1945 areas. I've always hated the sonderweg hypothesis for imagining that mass murder was a German thing, when it has categorically proven to be an anybody thing.
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Nov 4, 2016 08:08
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I don't know much about this but supposing the regional character, does this Prussian character influence the desire for eastward expansion?
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Nov 4, 2016 08:16
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:A country where most men sang and baked bread was turned into a phalanx of military automatons by British propaganda. This is also a kind of nonsensical point because the Germans themselves were heavily involved in this own critique/identification of their society. Ed: And even if one doesn't accept this, the effort is pretty equally joined in the United States, France, Russia and elsewhere. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 08:35
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Ron Jeremy posted:I don't know much about this but supposing the regional character, does this Prussian character influence the desire for eastward expansion? A great deal of the territory we identify as Prussia was obtained by way of an aggressive series of conquest, colonisation, and intensive government; a number of Nazi historians of the middle ages wrote approvingly of these expansions, and critically of German kings who did not expand eastward or relinquished power in any way to non-Germans (e.g. by allowing local dioceses to form not under the control of a German metropolitan, etc.). So that's definitely in the air as an idea among Nazis that the drive east is a great historical German tradition, but does it actually create a strong impetus toward expansion? Much less clear.
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Nov 4, 2016 08:41
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Ron Jeremy posted:I don't know much about this but supposing the regional character, does this Prussian character influence the desire for eastward expansion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung German territory east of the Elbe was Slavic prior to the Middle Ages and was slowly Germanized over its course, but this process is mostly complete by the 1400s and the Prussian state doesn't really become a thing until the 1600s, so no, it is not an inherent quality of the Prussian state. German romantic conservatism as an ideology, however, is a different story. From its beginnings in the 1700s it was preoccupied with the medieval Ostsiedlung and the mystical, spiritual connection between the German Volk and the land in the east, and in the Slavic East as a contrast against the rational Greco-Latin West. Herder was obsessed with the idea of the Slavs as a people in touch with their spiritual essence and superior to the rationality of the West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder#Works_and_ideas quote:Following a trip to Ukraine, Herder wrote a prediction in his diary (Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769) that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity and rot away, while the eastern European nations would stick to their religion and their idealism, and would this way become the power in Europe. More specifically, he praised Ukraine's "beautiful skies, blithe temperament, musical talent, bountiful soil, etc. [...] someday will awaken there a cultured nation whose influence will spread [...] throughout the world." One of his related predictions was that the Hungarian nation would disappear and become assimilated by surrounding Slavic peoples; this prophecy caused considerable uproar in Hungary and is widely cited to this day.[23]
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Nov 4, 2016 09:11
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Disinterested posted:This is also a kind of nonsensical point because the Germans themselves were heavily involved in this own critique/identification of their society. I think you'll find that Germans were pretty down with portraying themselves as fat, rosy-faced merchants who loved opera and Rhine wein and poetry and building pretty farmhouses. It's Prussians who believed in Teutoberg Forest and Siegfried and Leuthen. Also, yes, the anti-German stuff came from elsewhere at times, but it was the British who were the harshest critics and the most efficient disseminators of the most virulent propoganda.
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Nov 4, 2016 09:15
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PittTheElder posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs Yeah, the Prussian State government was by far the largest state government in the country. Papen's coup against the SPD-aligned Prussian government and the Reichsbanner not opposing it essentially doomed the SPD to irrelevance and made it much easier for Hitler to make the moves that gave him absolute power.
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Nov 4, 2016 11:02
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Ze Pollack posted:The theory goes that Lutheranism invested Germany with some uniquely pernicious brands of antisemitism. It's kind of hard to back historically, though; the compelling counterargument is that every other great power of Europe had a much longer, more recent, and significantly bloodier history of jewish repression up until the Nazis took power. Cynically, for the last two hundred years Germany had either been too busy being an unending series of wars between city-states, too busy being unified by Bismarck, or too busy losing World War I for "uh, look, jews!" to be an effective distraction from internal political problems. Another argument against said theory is that if Lutheranism leads to anti-semitism the it's hard to find a satisfactory explanation for why the Nordic countries, which were even more Lutheran than Germany, never developed the same kind of virulent anti-semitism that existed in eastern Europe and later in Germany and were actually ahead of the curve when it came to Jewish emancipation.
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Nov 4, 2016 11:25
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