I like the Rock Band Rammstein and have seen them a few times, both in Germany and here in UK. It’s interesting that because they sing in German mostly) and the lead singer Till Linderman rolls his Rs around certain words, they got a “Nazi” tag for a bit. Apparently because Hitler in his speeches used to accent words with Rs in them! yet you listen to the lyrics and they are nothing to do with war, socialism, ideaology or whatever…
My next door neighbour is of german extraction, and worked for MTV for a while and met the Band, and found them quiet, respectful and appalled that they’d got this poor reputation in some quarters!
At the risk of recommending a book, that’s a book that you should read Qin.
Constanze’s description of the German view of patriotism is exactly how I feel about it. The rise of overt flag-drooling my-country-right-or-wrong patriotism in the last couple of decades is one of the most disturbing trends in the US.
As a Brit that has lived in Sweden for eleven years, can speak the language and these days works for a Norwegian company, I feel it is my duty to let you know that if your only vaguely Germanic language is English then no, you cannot read Swedish or Norwegian. You may get some vague gist but you’ll be clueless towards the vast majority of things and concept like context and anything underlying/reading between the lines would be way, way out of your reach.
Hell, I’ve met Germans that think they should be able to read Swedish due to the much, much closer links between their languages that can’t even grasp the basics of the text.
Almost. The correct translation of “We all live in a yellow submarine” is “Wir leben alle in einem gelben U-Boot”
U-Boat songs are probably rather sad, given that most submarines were sunk (see the movie Das Boot for a good portrayal of submarine warfare).
In sharp contrast is the Nazi propaganda movie Morgenrot (Reddish Dawn) about members of a submarine crew making a heroic sacrifice which makes their surviving comrades determined to fight harder. The song it was named after “Morgenrot, Morgenrot, leuchtest mir zum frühen Tod” (Red Dawn, you are giving me light to my early death) was used for propaganda along with the movie, too.
I wouldnt be surprised if that was a Catholic tradition, as it is (or was) quite common in neighbouring Catholic countries (mostly Italy, France, and Spain has that too IIRC), and always linked to specifically Christian names.
Qin, can I ask you something? I’m not accusing you of neo-Nazism, but I’ve noticed that you seem to have an infinity for WWII German history, and that you seem to have this idea that the Wermacht was somehow benign.
I’m not being nasty, I’m merely trying to ask if this is the case.
This book was fist published in Germany in 1929, at the dawn of the rise of nazism, and you bet that there were a lot of people who found that it was an “overreaction in the opposition to patriotism and militarism”. Guess what these people did a few years later? For instance, they burned this book (and many others) and showed the world their brand of patriotism and militarism.
Good gracious! I’m going to go with ‘reacted’ rather than ‘overreacted.’
Since the 2006 World Cup in Germany, it’s been acceptable to display German flags and flag-colored paraphrenalia, but anything else tinged with patriotism or militarism is still viewed with exceptional skepticism.
And Qin, I’m an American who has lived in Germany for 15 years and has learned the language to a fair degree of fluency. Believe me when I say, from long and deeply bitter experience: if you’re coming at it strictly from English and looking for cognates and such, you absolutely in no way whatsoever understand the German language, let alone the context of any part of it.
To answer: While I am a German history buff I certainly don’t endorse the ideology of National Socialism. IN addition I don’t think the Wehrmacht was benign, but at the same time it shouldn’t be equated with say the Nazi Party or the SS. Yes there were war criminals and Nazis in it but there were plenty of decent people in there too.
I didn’t say the book was an overreaction. I’m talking about the post-World War II German attitudes. Indeed it should be noted that Hitler and the Nazis were in many ways complete opposites of old Prussian conservatives like Otto Von Bismarck.
I don’t think so. Patriotism and militarism are both blind, knee-jerk emotions not based on anything logical. They only serve to exploited by populists, without a better purpose, and are contrary with an enlightened, critical thinking citizen of a democratic country.
If you want to be proud of your country, then do something to improve it and be proud of that, and remember what else is sub-optimal. Remember that it’s a quirk of fate - esp. in Europe, where borders changed so much after wars in the past - on which side of the border you were born, and hence, which nationality and country you belong to, and how easy you could have ended up as French/ Belgian/ Dutch/ Tzech/ Polish/ … instead of German (or not been born at all, if your parents hadn’t met here after leaving their own country). So why be proud of something you have no influence over? Should I be proud of my blue eyes, which I did nothing to deserve or get, other than genetics? I can be proud of my figure if I do sports to keep it and thus deserve it, but other things I can’t influence, why should I be proud of them?
The same goes for artists and other famous people: Mozart is not the most famous German (or Austrian) composer, he’s a famous European composer. He didn’t regard himself as belonging to any one nation (also, the concept of nationality didn’t exist back then).
Artists don’t exist in a vacuum; Mozart travelled extenisvly with his family, partly because of the difficulty of finding steady employment, partly to get exposure to different styles. During Goethe’s time, German artists travelled to Italy to study there and spread the style in Germany (later, English painters came to Germany and vice versa).
Kafka is a famous author who wrote in German; but he was a Jew living in Prague, so both Jewish and Czech culture influenced him in addition to German literature he was reading. To claim him as German author only denies part of his heritage.
That’s also correct, but OTOH what do you think made the Wehrmacht officers and soldiers who were ideologically opposed to Hitler willing tools for all his evils? It was exactly the Prussian/German traditional militaristic and patriotic mindset that was ingrained to them by their upbringing. Although they might’ve not liked the Nazis that much, they believed their service was a good thing because they were doing it for Germany. And that’s why the “my country right or wrong” attitude is a fallacy.
There were many German intellectuals, artists, authors and journalists between the two wars like Erich Maria Remarque (the author of “Im Westen nichts Neues”) who recognized this and tried to make the public aware of this fact. They failed because the public didn’t listen, and after the rise of the Nazis their books were burned, their art exposed as “degenerated art”, and they were forced to shut up or to emigrate or even legally persecuted.
It took some time for Germany after WW II (at least until 1968 and its aftermath) to overcome its tradition of militarism and accept that blind patriotism is the wrong basis for a successful polity, but I think that by now we have learned our lesson pretty well.
And Qin, I have to ask you: Who would benefit from a Germany that would return to the kind of patriotism and militarism like that of Prussian tradition?
That’s not entirely true. German and Japanese patritism and militarism may have started WW2, but to a large degree, it was Russian, American and British patriotism and militarism that ended it. They’re useful tools, to be applied when needed.
Not that I’m agreeing with Qin, of course. As far as I’m concerned, the less militaristic Germans are, the better.
