In mathematics, Germans were preeminent. Out side of a couple Hungarians and the French Henri Poincaré, all the top 19th century mathematicians were German, with Gauss, Riemann, and Hilbert heading the list. A few were even Jewish, e.g. Hausdorff, but he was nearly blocked from a professorship by the already antisemitic university establishment.
Then there was Wagner. Great musician, but total asshole.
Well, because “culture” is really just kind of an average, and simply doesn’t actually dictate any one individual’s actions. In Germany of the 1920s, you could have had Albert Einstein sitting next to Adolf Hitler. The actions of the one had basically no influence over the other, but they both shared the same “culture”.
Personally I think he seemed to be the guy who was getting thinks done. He had solutions to the depression they were in and and the humiliations which the country had suffered at Versailles. Honestly from what I have read the previous government was kind of inept in handling problems and issues and Hitler seem to be the guy claiming he could fix things. He recognized some issues,highlighted them and for a time was addressing them.
If you have not read his book **Mein Kampf gives some insight into his thinking and methods of gaining support among the German people. I do not know if Amazon still sells it,but you can down load it from other sources on the internet.
Yes you are correct. I have not read that book in a long time,but I remember Hitler mentioning the genocide against the Native Americans as being impressive and inspiring to him.
Leonard Bernstein: “I hate Wagner, but I hate him on my knees.”
It’s probably also worth noting that the % of the population that the academics and artists represented in prewar Germany is probably not far off of the % represented by those folks in other advanced economy nations today.
[Though the seeds of Third Reich ideology were sown in primary education and through the arts from very early on]
Meaning: Everybody Else is a helluva lot of people. And they tend to be the ones who are vulnerable to demagoguery.
I often point to the Third Wave Experiment as a not-so-distant-past ‘proof’ that the same thing can easily happen again/here.
And what’s changed since that time and place that would dramatically reduce the likelihood of ‘it’ happening again ?
IMHO: nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Just to give @Wendell_Wagner due credit, I think you’re complimenting his observation that I was quoting in my reply to him.
A key factor in the rise of Adolph Hitler was the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was devastated by it. When you are starving and seething with resentment, you are ready for someone like Hitler who galvanizes you and gives you someone to blame. So under these circumstances education or lack thereof takes a back seat
By that standard, nearly everyone in UDS1’s list belonged to one of the numerous german states that were not yet “Germany” in their lifetimes. It was just the way history turned out that Austria wasn’t included when Germany united in 1871, nothing to do with it not being ‘German’.
I see a clear difference between States that would unite into Germany in 1871 (Bismark and the Kaiser) and Austria-Hungary, which remained a separate entity until the end of WWI. The Netherlands / Holland / call-them-what-you-like were never a part of Germany, they were sometimes occupied. And then there is Swizzerland.
Austria was part of the German Confederation until Prussia gave it the boot in 1866. Austria was always included in the desire for a united german state, its just that certain political realities by the mid 1800’s made it problematic by the time unification was in sight.
The Nazis may have shed a tear or two during recitals of the greatest German musicians, but that appreciation did not extend to artists who were not sufficiently German or not sufficiently Nazi.
That included many of the more radical and creative artistic movements. They had special exhibitions of degenerate art so the German people could know what was forbidden.
This was Goebels idea. Culture became propaganda it served the interests of the party and state.
Stalin and the Bolsheviks had a similar approach, as did China later under Mao and his ‘Cultural Revolution’.
My father went to a Catholic university because it was one of the few that would, at the time, admit Jews.
In the United States.
There was nothing remotely unique about the existence of anti-Semitism in Germany. It had actually, for some time before the rise of Hitler, been one of the easiest and safest places in the world to be Jewish.
Following WW1 if western allies don’t run away right after the war, perhaps Germany doesn’t sink into as big a depression which may have led to better economics and less of a foothold for Nazism. Pure speculation on my part, but the rise to Nazism is in large part the result of the desperate economics Germany faced in the years following WW1.
There was a Swiss psychologist, a woman named (I think) Miller (but I don’t have her books any more). Her specialty was family dynamics and children, and she published a book or essay some time back that explained Hitler’s appeal to Germans using a background of family dynamics. Something like this: he was the angry father whom they were trying to please.
She didn’t say that was the entire reason Hitler came to power and stayed there so relatively long, she didn’t say economics and race hatred and other things weren’t involved, just that his manner of speaking and so on were a good fit for the average German psyche at the time.
Okay, it was Alice Miller, the work was called For Your Own Good (in English), and her thesis was that the beating of children during their formative years, which was so prevalent at the time, caused the adult population to knuckle under to abuse as they had done as children, and to try to please the substitute angry parent by behaving as he wished (very roughly and approximately).
Alice Miller, IIRC.
Whether true or not, the consensus over the last 500 years has usually been that France is the most cultured country in Europe, if not the world.
Yeah see that’s my primary thought, I don’t care about the Nazis or Hitler. I want to know why Germany is seen as most cultured and not France.
Certainly the consensus in France, if nothing else.