From William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, written in 1960. It was one of the first books of eyewitness history I remember reading.
Two things: it is a reminder that it was the university students and the professors - and the artists and philosophers - who were the main drivers of Nazism in Germany, not the thugs and "ignorant blue-collar folk" that the European and American left tried to sell us as the perpetrators in the years after. The intelligentsia brought us both communism and fascism. Hitler was a failed artist, remember? The common folk can be blamed for being so easily bamboozled and stirred to hatred, yes. That I will agree with. Dorothy Thompson's essay "Who Goes Nazi?" in Harpers is also instructive on the matter.
Secondly, I bought hook, line, and sinker Shirer's arguments about the German character and history leading to Nazism at the time. Since then I have backed off considerably. That is also a narrative that some people just like, and that informs their belief in it too much. I do note that that I am disagreeing with GK Chesterton as I say it, which worries me. Have I offended against the simple and obvious in this? Always a problem for me personally, and for anyone disagreeing with GKC.
One is reminded that Germany was the home of the Romantic movement that replaced the Enlightenment. All the political and social movements in Germany have a strong Romantic elements, and this is especially true of Naziism and the Greens. The essence being that the Romantics reject reason and science in favor of intuition and nature and "oneness" and "wholeness." There is a huge literature on this topic. For a start, see Anna Bramwell, "Blood and Soil," The Kensal Press, Buckinghamshire (1985).
ReplyDeleteEssentially all left movements are Romantic, irrational, hence the deep lunacy of all leftists.
PS. Martin Heidegger, often regarded as the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century (or at least the most obscurantist), was an unapologetic Nazi to his grave.
ReplyDeletesykes, if you can fight your way through it, I wrote a decade ago about the German roots of the all-natural movement. https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2012/09/german-pagan-all-natural-origins.html
ReplyDeleteI still had the style then of trying to clear out all the possible objections to my premise first before launching fully into it, and in this case I believe there are five paragraph-long qualifiers of the "yes, I've thought about that already, keep your shirt on" variety, but I eventually get to the intellectual roots of the green, organic, carrot-juice crowd. And there are links to lots of other stuff of that ilk. Some of it quite surprising and fun. Connecting Wandervogel to 50s California proto-hippies, for example.
"From William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, written in 1960. It was one of the first books of eyewitness history I remember reading."
ReplyDeleteThat would be like someone today writing a book about a regime which lasted from 1996 to 2008. With the subject matter so recent, is it really possible for a historian to be as detached and objective as they ought to be?
An interesting question is when the Holocaust will be totally out of living memory. I wrote a blog post about this back when I had a blog. My guess: Maximum human lifespan seems to be around 120 years, and with plausible advances in medical technology, this may be matched or exceeded by at least one Holocaust survivor. Generously assuming a lifespan of 125 years, Holocaust survivors could reach as late as 2070, but memories usually aren't retained from before age three, so that will be a few years too far. I'll say sometime during the 2050s or 2060s, by which time I might be old enough to not draw from Social Security, a pyramid scheme went insolvent decades ago.
sykes.1: The essence being that the Romantics reject reason and science in favor of intuition and nature and "oneness" and "wholeness."
ReplyDeleteWhen the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun. -- Percy Shelley, To Jane: The Invitation
sykes.1: Essentially all left movements are Romantic, irrational, hence the deep lunacy of all leftists.
Romanticism can be found on the political left or the political right; the former dreaming of the world to come, while the latter dreaming of a return to a mythological and heroic past. The Romantic Movement was a response to the collapse of the Enlightenment belief that all problems could be solved through reason. They couldn't.
It is quite possible to philosophically merge the intuitive and the rational. But always: reason is the slave of passion.
Everyone has blind spots, and GKC was no exception. One was his uncritical acceptance of anti-German propaganda during WW1, which was a lot of nonsense. Another was his uncritical acceptance of Catholic Social Teaching, which was also a lot of nonsense. Oh well, nobody gets to bat a thousand.
ReplyDeleteThe argument against book burning is that bad books burn themselves because readers are rational and good. This argument is obviously false because readers read books that confirm comforting illusions. The same people who shriek about Nazi book burning presumably wish that Nazi literature was suppressed, and also symbolically "burned." Burning books is not actually a means to destroy books. It is a gesture of public repudiation, just like burning a flag or an effigy. It is a way of saying "we abominate this literature." Would you have opposed public burning of pornographic books and magazines back when pornography was published on paper? The effect on some young men would have been salutary. Those who oppose censorship should defend book burning as a means of expressing an opinion.
ReplyDeleteC. S. Lewis gives a nice worked example of the intelligentsia as the pioneers of whack ideology in That Hideous Strength, when we see the kinds of literal fake news that Mark is asked to produce and their results, plus Miss Hardcastle's remarks about how the blue-collar folk only read the papers for the racing results and are very hard to sway directly.
ReplyDeleteGermany may give us Romantic atrocities, but the French gave us an Enlightenment atrocity ca. 1800.
ReplyDelete