That war cook book sounds fascinating - if I can’t find it in english, I will have to sit down with Christian and have him help me through it. Hits both areas of interest, history and cooking. We have a number of american cookbooks that tough on war cooking so it would be an interesting comparison.
My Dad was in Germany twice, slogging through the war, and then sent back in 1961-65. He had a sort of existential war experience, having grown up with a German nanny/maid and speaking a fair amount of German. It did make him more sympathetic to both the soldiers and the civilians - he was the best food scrounger because he was polite and offered good trades, and generally came back with the fresh vegetables, sausages, eggs and cheeses [and a fair number of surrenderees]
Well, arguably there are flaws in the U.S. Constitution as well. (That’s why we have so many amendments. )
I am reading a book on the rise of Hitler, and he notes that the folks in political power (which includes some in the military) were kinda willing to toss aside democracy and parliamentarianism, moving more and more towards and authoritarian state as early as 1931 or so, IIRC. Their mistake was underestimating Hitler.
I have nothing to add about how German children are taught, but something relevant: visiting the old battlefields in Normandy from the World Wars I remember there was a fairly stark difference in how the graves were presented. Allied graves like these ones are huge wide fields with rows of upright, white crosses, often with one large monument in the center, with the grass kept short and relatively few trees. The Germany graves, by contrast, tended to look more like this: black plates, low to the ground, often in shaded and secluded areas like in a small clearing amongst the trees.
Granted that’s maybe because they’re German graves in France, but I seem to remember being told that those forms of memorial were the Germans’ decision, and I thought it was an interesting contrast: the Allies simply set up their big, ‘glorious’ memorials, but the Germans had to try and balance the honoring of the soldiers themselves against the fact that they don’t consider their cause glorious any more.
i see my error. i didn’t mean it was an institution so-named following principles of christianity. but the individuals certainly borrowed and perverted some principles in doing all those things. robespierre most especially.
Are you kidding ? Robespierre was an arch-secular humanist. He wanted nothing more than the abolition of Christianity, or at least its complete removal from public life, to the point of creating his own “Cult of the Supreme Being” based on natural philosophy and civic virtues. It wasn’t really a religion, because it had no temples or ceremonies, just a bunch of festivals sprinkled throughout the year to celebrate the Revolution and what it brought.
While unlike most of his co-Revolutionaries he wasn’t an atheist (he did believe in *a *God, though it wasn’t one who intervened in the lives of people and certainly was not Yahweh ; and he did believe in the immortality of the soul), he was the furthest thing from a Christian one could imagine. Unless you mean to say that reason, logic, equality, freedom, happiness, justice, the death of tyrants and the pursuit of absolute virtue are “principles of christianity” ?
Many thanks to our German dopers for their thoughtful, engaged and insightful posts here, and for helping to build the Federal Republic into the constructive, healthy, democratic society it is today.
^^
i think you’re right. he did not call himself a christian. he was highly influences by humanist philosophers (rousseau i suppose.) he certainly carried on like an academic, which is the worst politician in my book. but consider his quotes and words, most of it during the reign of terror:
“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity.”
“If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country … The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
the most telling influence of his deist/christian beliefs:
“Is it not He whose immortal hand, engraving on the heart of man the code of justice and equality, has written there the death sentence of tyrants? Is it not He who, from the beginning of time, decreed for all the ages and for all peoples liberty, good faith, and justice? He did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery and falsehood. He created the universe to proclaim His power. He created men to help each other, to love each other mutually, and to attain to happiness by the way of virtue.”
Yes, he was a deist. I said so. He was not a Christian of any shape or stripe, the god he believed in was nothing like the god of the Bible, and the ideals he pursued (and tried to make people pursue) did not spring forth from that god, nor from the bible.
Virtue is not the exclusive prerogative of religion in general, certainly not christianity in particular. Most of the natural philosophy of the 18th century harkens back to themes already discussed in Ancient Greece centuries before Christ, and the ideals of freedom, equality, justice etc… predate even that by thousands of years.
Thank you, Elendil’s Heir, even though I’m a bit young to have built any sort of society, I do appreciate the forgiveness the world has let the German people experience after that first half of the 20th century. As we see in the case of the GDR, without generous outside help things could have turned a lot differently.
)
