March 29, 2012
Was the Nazi rise inevitable?
From The Telegraph:
German history has been shaped by one central trauma: the rise of the Nazis culminating in the horror of the concentration camps. There has been an understandable tendency for scholars to interpret everything that went before as a prelude to the emergence of fascism. Just as the Whig school notoriously interpreted the path of British history as an inexorable process leading to the triumph of parliamentary democracy in the 19th century, so the rise of Hitler has haunted German historians.
One major victim of this tendency has been the Holy Roman Empire, a sprawling confederation of German-speaking states that embraced Italy, Germany and much of France at one point in the high Middle Ages. Contemporary historians have tended to lose interest in the Holy Roman Empire after the death in 1250 of Frederick II, the powerful and charismatic emperor who challenged the authority of the Pope. Thereafter they have assumed that the empire fell into decline, part of a pattern of neglect and institutional collapse that sowed the seeds for the failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Indeed, in the words of one historian, the Holy Roman Empire had “no history at all” after the mid-17th century, though “it continued for a while longer to lead a miserable, meaningless existence because its patient, slow-moving subjects lacked the initiative and in many cases the intelligence to effect its actual dissolution".
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:29 AM | Permalink
Comments
Very interesting review. Thanks Azra!
Too little importance in much history of Germany is put on German fears of other countries and their historical predations on Germany.
The Thirty Years War was enormously destructive. France in particular, continued to occupy and annex historically German lands for two centuries before the rise of Napoleon, who just accelerated the process before his defeat.
In many German circles, the 1871 war was seen as a defensive measure to protect Germany against French predation.
Fears turned to Russia later as it became more powerful.
There is a long argument about whether these fears are justified, but there is an interesting parallel.
Like Poland, Germany tried a loose union with substantial local autonomy, and they were invaded and conquered by their centralizing neighbors.
The world might be a very different place if France had had a very different political culture.
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Mar 29, 2012 10:05:26 AM
Well, post-Nazi Germany makes some great cars, despite their dumbfounded post-Roman Empire forest-life and subsequent slothfulness, or a continent soaked in blood... I'd never own one, mind you ~ either a German car or a German, for that matter.
Posted by: M. Kruger | Mar 29, 2012 10:15:49 AM
An interesting subject which deserves more attention (and thus I'll probably read the book), despite trollish comments (whether earnest or ironic) to the contrary.
As someone born (as an ex-pat) ten miles or so from Dachau, and in the same neighbourhood (Schwabing) where some of the creative artists I admire, such as Wim Wenders, got their start, who has what I hope is a balanced understanding of the good and evil that has arisen there, and whose own country of citizenship (the US) suffers from exceptionalism (something always psychologically unhealthy), I am often distressed by recurring examples of the persistence of a kind of negative exceptionalism re "the German national character" (if there can be said to be such; a sweeping generalization.)
That is, that the Nazi horrors were uniquely German, that no other nation could ever sink so far into moral depravity, that those depths arose from attributes solely belonging to German peoples. (Which of course is immediately problematic, since nations and cultures are to some degree intellectual constructs, especially where large nation-states are concerned, and the situation on the ground - the boundaries between supposedly well-delineated and distinct groups of people, and the supposed homogeneity within such groups - is a much fuzzier matter.)
Such an assumption of course absolves its holder from fully considering his or her own culture's potential for such crimes.
We need not downplay, let alone trivialize, the gravity of Nazi crimes to also recognize that, given the right circumstances, the right context, they could arise in any human society. There's no zero-sum equation at work here, where to recognize that potential means to lessen one's estimation of the degree of evil of the Nazi regime. (Indeed, the presence of such zero-sum thinking usually indicates a strong emotional impetus to the attitude, which can swamp and hinder its possessor's self-critical abilities.)
Of the factors that can lead to Nazi-like regimes, one (not the only, but certainly an important one) at which we might look is the rise of the modern, highly-centralized, large nation-state, rather than some supposed "national character". Thus, a closer look at this long period when German-speaking peoples lived in a heterogenous patchwork of small states should prove fruitful as a comparison and contrast to analyses which focus primarily on the post-Bismarck eras.
Posted by: Kai Matthews | Apr 1, 2012 5:21:09 PM
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