I remember Joseph Goebbels, in his diary, calling France “overcivilized”, though I guess that’s not quite the same thing.
IANAH, but this has always been my understanding: the punitive reparations imposed on Germany post-WW1, the national humiliation, the hyper-inflation and economic meltdown – all contributed to the rise of the Nazis. If Germany had been prosperous and stable, people would have sought to maintain the status quo rather than radical populist demagoguery.
Aside: it’s this kind of intelligent, thoughtful discussion (with sources) that sets the SDMB above other internet message boards/communities. Eat your hearts out, Reddit and Quora.
Carry on.
Italy was also cultured. It also went fascist.
When I was younger, I never heard anyone describe Germany as the most cultured and educated country in Europe. Such an assertion invites debate over which nation in Europe was the most cultured and educated which isn’t what you want to take away from any lecture about the Holocaust. When it comes to the Holocaust, most lecturers describe Germany as a very modern country that ostensibly held similar values to the rest of Europe as a cautionary tale that such atrocities aren’t limited to areas we think of as backwards.
I would say the population of Italy, collectively, just didn’t have the same enthusiasm for fascism that Hitler enjoyed in Germany. They didn’t fall in line as easily. Mussolini was summarily executed by his own subjects and his corpse was publicly mutilated by crowds of people. I just can’t see a similar scenario happening to Hitler.
So what is the premise behind the question?
That having centres of learning and culture offer some kind of protection from authoritarianism?
That totalitarian regimes that derive their political power from the insecurities of industrial workers or the rural poor defer to intellectual class?
Now Plato did envisage a government guided by philosophers to inform any guide rulers (presumably on the knottier problems of exercising political power.)
History suggests that totalitarian regimes have little need of the intellectual class to achieve their objectives. Sometimes they condition and weaponise culture to create propaganda. Sometimes they co-opt symbols and iconography - swastikas from India and eagles from the Romans. Military uniforms designed by Hugo Boss. Monumental architecture and statues representing the determined spirit of nation identity. They also had their pet philosophers - Nietzsche and musicians - Wagner. The intellectual class became the servant of political masters - or they were supressed.
The Nazis, The Soviets and Chinese were little different in their attitude towards intellectuals. In the latter case we saw the student democracy protest movement Tianiamin Square crushed. Putting intellectuals firmly in their place.
The question is surely an example of naive hubris that intellectuals, in their ivory towers of learning, are prone. Different rules apply in the exercise of absolute political power by regimes led by psychopathic dictators.
My memory from school (a long time ago and not that long after WW2) is that the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of the swingeing restrictions imposed on Germany after WW1.
Poor people got poorer and they became all too ready to blame their poverty and lack of opportunities on a minority. This is a pattern followed in many countries around the world: Jews, Blacks, Indigenous natives, anyone perceived as ‘foreign’ are blamed for “stealing our jobs”.
One could see a degree of naive idealism in the creation of a state with both an inherently unstable political/electoral system and a federal substructure that largely continued the pre-existing princely states. It made it too easy for extremists to gain a foothold nationally and form local strongholds. Also, there was a degree of over-caution in responding to anti-constitutional forces; though the underlying distribution of political attitudes and forces might well have made democratic government impossible once the Depression struck, whatever the constitutional system.
It’s really more like working class people got poorer. There are always poor people. But historically, when large numbers of people who were previously earning a moderate living, living their lives, and are basically doing everything right find themselves poor and disenfranchised for reasons they don’t understand, they experience the sort of frustration that leads to violence.
Countries aren’t “cultured and educated” uniformly. They typically have a large middle and working class who do the actual work and maybe aren’t as cultured or educated. Or their education is of a more practical nature. And they tend to be very proud too. So when a nation suffers an economic hardship and those groups feel their livelihoods threatened, they are quick to follow a leader who can point a finger at someone to blame.
You can see the parallels in our country. You have all these conservatives who are angry because their jobs in manufacturing and fossil fuel energy are threatened by globalization, automation, and obsolescence. And they don’t really understand the “Liberal elite” who look down on them and seem to get rich off these weird esoteric jobs in tech or the arts.
I guess the way I look at it is the Liberal elite try to explain how to solve problems through reason, logic, and science, a nations more conservative. While they pontificate, the frustrated less educated elements just want to know who they can punch in the face so they can go back to anonymously working their jobs, drinking beer and eating hot dogs (or bratwurst) on the weekends.
As determined by an influential member of the French government.
The level of scientific knowledge in a country has no direct relevance to how authoritarian the government of the country is. There have been authoritarian governments that with low levels of education and ones with high levels of education. There have been non-authoritarian ones with low levels of education and ones with high levels of education. The question is what they intend to use their high level of education (and the ability to manufacture weapons etc.) for. Three things made Germany dangerous just before World War II. First, it was the most educated country in the world from about the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Second, there was a general feeling of anger in the country because they couldn’t understand how they had lost World War I and then been penalized so much for it. Third, it was because a party took control of the government which was convinced that it could easily defeat any other country in the world (and that they deserved to defeat any other country).
Oh, I wasn’t trying to say that the Italian people didn’t go all-in on fascism the way Germany seemingly did just because they were “more cultured” - I was just pointing out that Hitler seemed to have way more of a popular mandate from his subjects than Mussolini did.
This. If you want to understand the politics of a country, you don’t go to the opera or a research lab. You watch the people in power, how people vote or influence government (or can’t), ask how much authority the military has, ask if the political culture treats everyone equally or favours particular groups. It’s the political culture which determines the outcome of political issues, not if the country has produced beautiful music or great scientists.
And also this.
Blaming the Treaty of Versailles and WWI reparations for Germany’s descent into fascism has been popular among certain historians and others.
What they overlook is that France was devastated and humiliated by losing the war of 1870, and was punished by Prussia/Germany with loss of territory (Alsace and Lorraine) and punitive reparations, amounting to five billion gold francs which had to be paid within five years; Germany occupied French territory until the money was paid in full (Russia was hit by the Central Powers with 9 billion gold marks in reparations payments). France after WWI had to cope with the results of scorched earth policies of retreating German troops and severe economic hardships.
And yet France did not become fascist, target millions of its own citizens for murder* and gear up for aggressive war in postwar years. That seems to indicate a particular sickness in Germany.
For what it’s worth, France was a cradle of culture at least on a par with Germany.
*the behavior of Vichy officials after surrender to Germany in 1940 not withstanding.
Or a particular weakness in France?
Yeah, there is pushback on the “Versailles caused this” narrative – mainly because it was something sold to the public by different factions within Germany as an excuse narrative: anything was going badly in your life? “It’s all because of Versailles”.
Really, yeah. I mean, look a bit eastward from Germany, to the home of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgski, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Mendeleev, Tsiolkovski – and of Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev and Putin.
To this day, we see that the general working masses are altogether eager to embrace simple populistic answers that boil down to, as was mentioned earlier:
I suspect an important factor was the shift in the centre of political power away from the traditional centres of patronage based around the courts of kings and nobles towards centres of industrial production.
There was a big leap in production at the beginning of the 20th century with the development of the assembly line. Factories became very large employing thousands of workers were targeted by radical groups to recruit to their cause. That was a very modestly educated constituency that responded to simplistic political solutions to their insecurities at a time of great economic crisis. Easy to peddle a nationalist or communist vision of a better future where enemies are defeated and triumphant glory assured.
Mass production created economies of scale that could arm a nation with the weapons of war in a way that had never been seen before. Militarism was a thing. Industrial nations keen to build bigger and better than their rivals. International arms races and new kinds of warfare.
Intellectuals tend to look back on history using rational academic methods of analysis and criticism. Their conclusions are always behind the times. When they do look to the future, it is open ended, blue sky theorising.
Politics, however, tends to be about the present and the immediate future because there is an immediate requirement for an answer to how we are to be governed. It favours the opportunist. It distorts and misrepresents the past and reduces complex issues to simple black and white choices. Intellectual assets then only have relevance if they are directed towards advancing technical designs for the weapons of war. Or, like eugenics, providing a convenient rationale for genocide.
I think people forget the enormous changes that happened in first half of the twentieth century. Inventions were introduced and manufacturing capability advanced dramatically. With that came economic instability and huge military potential. Nation states with less developed constitutions, became vulnerable to domination by totalitarian regimes that were able to centralise and control powerful industrial capacity to wage war.
It’s common and easy to blame such things on the supposedly dull-witted “working masses”, and to ignore the great deal of cooperation from people of both wealth and education.
Neither wealth nor education appears to confer resistance to demagogues; or resistance to enslaving or killing those who ought to be fellow citizens.