I need to put this up front, I don’t want any actual discussion of Hitler or the Nazis because that will just derail the entire thread.
But I was listening to a podcast with a history professor that made that statement in regards to the whole
“It Can’t Happen Here” idea, but to me it just brought up further questions. Was Germany actually the most cultured and educated country in Europe? How do you measure it?
Putting in IMHO just because it’s highly subjective.
Hard to rank countries in that way (certainly regarding “cultured”) but it was in the top tier certainly. Close enough to the top to make the point valid
In both arts/humanities and science/engineering, Germans were highly regarded across Europe (and in someone like Goethe, in multiple fields of both), well before unification. The strength in depth of German technical/vocational education was (and still is) held up in the UK as an example we never quite seem to catch up with.
But what sort of cultural deficiency allows that to sit alongside extreme brutality is much-debated - and I assume the point being made here is that it can happen anywhere. As we know when we have to (finally!) acknowledge the full horrors of the slavery that financed the generosity of some great social benefactors.
well with some peoples way thinking it was they were worried so much about efficiency and the like that they lost their humanity in the industrial age and losing WW1 and the aftermath just progressed it to the point of nihilism by the 30s and der fuhrer filled the void of people who wanted to feel something with hate
It is highly subjective and, if you want to find quantifiable measures to justify such a highly subjective opinion, you will be able to do so. In the late nineteenth century Germany had the world’s highest literacy rate (or so I’ve read, but I haven’t seen any actual figures) and - possibly as a consequence? - in the early twentieth it had the strongest publishing industry - more books were published in Germany each year than in any other country. Its universities were as good as any in the world. Prussia had been the first country in the world to introduce free and generally compulsory primary education; following German unification this was rolled out to the rest of the new German Empire. Germany’s teacher education was a model for other countries. Etc, etc.
And while the standard of “culture” is less to quantify with metrics than “education”, nobody was going to seriously question the cultural credentials of the nation that included Goethe, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Handel, Brahms, Schiller, Mann, Brahms, Hegel, Kant, Leibniz, Gauss and Wagner, and that had given the world the printing press, the newspaper, the kindergarten, the telescope, the automobile and the welfare state.
IMHO, yes, but you could indeed argue that Germany was the most cultured and educated country in Europe, and they not only let the Nazis take over, it could even happen again. Here (Germany) and there (USA or Spain), I am sure.
As a matter fo fact, a part of Germany was totalitarian until reunification, it was called the German Democratic Republic. Yes, I know totalitarian is not the same as Nazi, particularly the antisemitic obsession is not there, still I find it interesting to note that the GDR was considered the pinnacle of the USSR satellite countries in terms of productivity, culture and efficiency, including efficiency of repression (see Stasi and the Life of Others)
Mozart was Austrian, actually.
And so was Hitler, which is no excuse.
Now that is a complicated history, but most say it was a Dutch spectacle maker, Hans Lipperhey. < / hijack >
In fact, Germany more or less invented the modern university system in the mid-nineteenth century. Before then, universities did a lot of just hiring their own graduates to be their professors. They didn’t even require them to have Ph.D.s, which were rarer anyway. The German universities first made Ph.D.s a big thing. They made sure that the research done by their professors were seen by the professors at other universities, in published papers or whatever. Hiring someone as a professor thus became something more based on their research rather than the current professors knowing that they had done well as students.
Soon students from other countries would come to Germany to do their Ph.D.s, even though this might require them to quickly learn enough German. Some new Ph.D.s from Germany would be offered jobs in other countries. Soon there was a system around the world in each subject where all the research got shared, through academic journals or whatever.
It wasn’t until the 1930s that the German university system ceased to be the best. A lot of the professors there (and not just the Jewish ones) saw what was happening with the Nazis and decided it would be best to get out of the country. They left for various countries around the world where they were offered jobs…
I remember my mom (born in 1913) commenting that, before the Nazis, Germany was one of the most civilized countries in the world. She said that many people, especially Jews, escaped from Eastern Europe for a better life in Germany.
Who was the professor, what was the podcast and episode?
Germany was only unified under Prussian domination in 1871. It was a young nation made up of some large and many small countries.
They weren’t all cultured and educated. That would have centred around the courts of the more wealthy states.
The trajectory towards an authoritarian state was helped by that marvel of the age: radio. It was employed by the Nazis to relentlessly disseminate their propaganda.
It was like the Twitter of it’s day but much more effective.
However cultured and educated Germany was or was not, I would argue that that is often sadly not enough defense against gullibility or susceptibility to the false promises of despots and strongmen. You’d think that being educated in the lessons of the past would inoculate people to repeating it, and it may help to some degree, but anybody of any education level can convince themselves of most anything they really want to believe is true.
As for the “It Can’t Happen Here” idea, I think Rainbow addressed it quite eloquently:
However, a lot of these people and their accomplishments were not the product of the nation-state of Germany. I’m not nitpicking here - there was a lot of variation between the different German states that became the German Empire.
It is not possible to ignore that the largest of those pre-unification states, Prussia, was one of the most militaristic states in all of Europe. One commentator (can’t remember the source) stated that Prussia was not so much a country as an armed camp. Prussia had crushed the 1848 democratic uprisings.
That extremely strong militarism, authoritarianism, and anti-democratic politics became a crucial part of the DNA of the German Empire, and then the Weimar Republic. For instance, the votes in the elections in Prussia in the Empire were weighted. The vote of a Junker counted for three times as much as the vote of a poor person.
There was a strong anti-democratic element within the Weimar Republic. The army never really accepted the democratic principle.
Personally, I would say that those political heritages counted for far more to explain the Nazi takeover than that Bach made beautiful music three centuries earlier.
They certainly had the lead in cutting-edge Physics. Almost any scientist you can think of from that period studied in Berlin or Gottingen. And the list of scientist that emigrated after the initial Nazi “purification” laws include: Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Otto Frisch, Fritz London, Lise Meitner, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Eugene Wigner.
However you look at it, that’s a lot of scientific firepower, and the fact that “Nazi Physics” cost the German Reich access to that much brainpower is a massive failure of the regime. Many of those went on to do essential work on the atomic bomb.
One thing that was possibly mentioned in the podcast is that most revolutionary movements are built on the working classes, not the elites. So having a massive amount of cultural or scientific elite doesn’t really count for much when you are trying to counter a right-wing (or left-wing) political takeover.
The actual revolutionaries are always going to be primarily the working class, because that’s where the numbers are. But the notion being countered is that the ideas of the elites filter down to the working class to the extent that you wouldn’t expect such diametrically opposing perspectives in the same country, with lofty intellectuals on the one hand and bloodthirsty Nazis on the other. And yet, that’s what happened.
Personally, my own thought is that the people are extremely fickle. The fact that a survey shows overwhelming support for something or other is not at all an indication that a couple of years later you can’t have another survey showing overwhelming support for the opposite position. (I think Shakepeare depicted it well in the Ceasar eulogy speeches, where the public sentiment changed diametrically from Brutus’ speech to Antony’s.)
I once saw where Ben Hecht wrote that he had been living in Germany as a correspondent for some newspaper in the 20s, and the average German would have sworn on the lives of his children (or something like that) that mass murder would never become a staple of German policy. But what a difference a decade or two makes.
In sum, I think the fact that Germany was a highly cultured and educated country probably did filter down to the masses. But that influence was a mile wide but an inch deep, and was ripe to be completely discarded under the right conditions.
Of these, Szilard, Wigner, and Teller, as well as John Von Neumann and aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, both of whom also left Germany in the 1930s, were all born in Hungary. In fact, they all went to the same high school and graduated from the same technical university in Budapest.
I’ve been meaning to read a book about them, The Martians of Science, that looks at them and influences that made Budapest in the late 19th and early 20th century such a fertile ground for prominent Jewish scientists.
Truly an amazing crop of scientist to emerge from the same general path. I’m reading “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” which (while a bit dated) goes into some of their backstory. Fascinating stuff.
Isn’t it clear that without the racist portions of fascism in Hungary and Germany those scientist would have remained within the Axis sphere? In fact I think I got the sense that Von Neumann’s family was far more right-wing (supporters of Horthy’s regime) than left (they left Hungary during the Bela Kun regime), and would have been comfortable in an autocratic regime that wasn’t also viciously anti-Semitic.
ETA: Maybe not Szilard - he was already seeing the need for a scientific community that transcended national boundaries well before WWII. But Teller and Von Neumann certainly didn’t seem opposed to warfare in the name of the right ideology.
German artists, authors and composers (for instance, Richard Strauss) were widely admired in the years leading up to WWI, but that flourishing of the arts coincided with strong nationalistic and militaristic tendencies. A similar heritage was in play in the interwar years during the buildup to Nazi dominance.
A love of the arts, belief in ethnic supremacy and urge to dominate the world are not mutually exclusive. I’ve heard that hardened Nazis would weep during concerts featuring German symphonic masters.
If you think the Germans were entirely responsible for Hitler, remember that Hitler based his racist theories partly on American ones:
Henry Ford and Hitler certainly had a long-distance bromance:
Indeed, as a vocal antisemite, he [Henry Ford] used his status as one of America’s most well-known and trusted business leaders to systematically spread conspiracy theories about Jews. His screeds against Jewish people became so well-known at home and abroad that he is the only American whom Adolf Hitler compliments by name in Mein Kampf .