Kindle Notes & Highlights
Significantly, preoccupation with this type manifested itself less in the highly industrialized (that is, the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic) world than in the Latin-Catholic one, which observed the Industrial Revolution from a distance.
just as gymnastique gave physical expression to old-style republican nationalism, sports seemed to give physical expression to social Darwinism and imperialism. The concurrent appearance of sports and imperialism and the frequency of sports terms in imperialist language are too conspicuous to be coincidental.
The fact that imperialism in Europe from 1890 to 1914 was in many ways a utopian ideology has been lost in the emphasis on the crimes committed in its name.
The German capitulation of 1918 was historically unique not only in its suddenness but also because no nation had ever laid down arms while its forces were still so deep within enemy territory.
Eventually this caste, in order to shift the blame from itself, would invent the legend of the Germany military’s having been stabbed in the back. But another image of defeat came to the fore immediately after the German collapse—that is, before the stab-in-the-back legend took hold—and served temporarily to console the nation.
slogan was unable to bear the weight placed on it. In fact, it backfired. That Germany had lost the war without being defeated in a decisive battle could no longer be held up as a sign of heroic triumph. “Undefeated on the field of battle” could all too easily be reinterpreted as “capitulated without having put up a fight.”
Consequently, the Weimar Republic lacked a “legitimizing foundational myth,”
The idea of an internal enemy lying in wait to overthrow the rule of law, an enemy against whom it was legitimate to employ any and all means of defense, was one of the political-psychological foundations of Wilhelminian culture.
many years, this enemy was the Social Democratic Party. Chiefly responsible for the demonization of the Social Democrats was Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck,
Ultimately, the various factions agreed on the version that cleared everyone of blame: it was not the home front in its entirety that had stabbed the military in the back but rather the revolution.
“There’s always someone,” he wrote, “be it Lohengrin, Walther, Siegfried, or Wotan, who can do everything and beat everyone, who rescues suffering virtue, punishes vice, and offers general salvation, forever striking a pompous pose to the sound of trumpet fanfares and with the help of lighting and theatrical effects. Today this sort of opera is mirrored in politics.”56
“We Germans must come up with something as our world-historical mission that no other people can achieve as well as we can, indeed, that will remain unachieved if we do not carry it out.
Culture and power did not merely reinforce each other; as the example of England showed, a self-confident imperial culture was the prerequisite for global power.
Even a figure as strongly identified with political saber rattling as former minister Karl Helfferich joined in. “It was not clever,” he wrote, “to talk incessantly about the sword, thus enabling our foreign enemies to portray the most peaceful people and monarch on earth as being obsessed by war. In this way, we unintentionally promoted the myth of our warlike intentions and helped produce an international mood that provided the coalition against us with the necessary, mass-psychological underpinning.”
This belated discovery of propaganda repeats the familiar German pattern of appropriating a foreign concept—one that was viewed simply as a means to an end—and subjecting it to an idealistic transformation that renders it into a kind of theology of salvation. The start of the process was the publication of The German Way of Thinking, which Rohrbach expected to have a transformative effect on the international battle of ideas. What he and others overlooked in their missionary zeal, however, was the fact that unfavorable images of Germany were not just the result of clumsy public relations.
As Max Scheler showed in 1917 in a book on the origins of Germanophobia, anti-German public sentiment had concrete economic and political causes that could not be dismissed with soothing words.79 The view of propaganda as simply a weapon that functioned and could be deployed like traditional military weapons was not restricted to Ludendorff,
seemed to comprehend that propagandistic effects could not simply be produced on demand but were dependent on the prevailing mood of the target population.
General Herbert Plummer’s justification of his refusal to distribute propaganda leaflets on the front lines: “No, that wouldn’t be fair,” he declared. “We have to defeat these boys on our own merits.”
Even the stab-in-the-back legend might lose its unique heinousness through such an admission, since it was the Russian troops, if anyone, who had been stabbed in the back by a foreign-propaganda-induced revolution on their home front. (The destruction of Russian fighting morale paved the way for the revolution carried out by Lenin, who was sped into Russia by the German military high command, and the subsequent acceptance of the punitive peace treaty dictated at Brest-Litovsk.) The postwar German propaganda debate hinged on how Germany, having opened the Pandora’s box of propaganda in the war
...more
The transformation of France in world public opinion from the Bonapartist conqueror state it had been before the Franco-Prussian War into the republican martyr nation it became after its defeat could hardly have failed to appeal to a vanquished Germany.
From Ludendorff to Tönnies, the prevailing wisdom was that effective propaganda was an instrument, a kind of whirling fan that, if operated properly, could vent a certain opinion, conviction, or message out into the world. Perhaps the most concise image of this take on propaganda is Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, who directs the applause of the masses with a single hand gesture, turning it on and off like a radio.
Theodor Heuss, a politician critical of Hitler, remarked that the section on propaganda in Mein Kampf was “better and more precisely written” than anything else in the book: “Here we see a man who knows what he’s talking about.”
In its methods of mass manipulation and mobilization, National Socialism was thus “more American” than any of the other political movements.
Nowhere was the Nazis’ skill with propaganda more evident than in their ability to keep both public morale and food supplies steady, a problem that had stumped Germany’s leaders during World War I. During World War II, the Nazis knew their calls for steadfastness would succeed only with a people who had enough to eat. That was the simple, nonideological, but thoroughly Machiavellian lesson they had learned from the collapse of 1918.
One might ask, if the pre-1939 German army—like the threat of the atomic bomb after 1945—was such an effective deterrent that it didn’t actually have to be used, was it not then primarily propagandistic in function, much like food supplies and Gestapo terror?
Moeller van den Bruck’s conviction that Germany’s road to demise began with the “accursed riches”—the five billion francs in reparations exacted from France in 1871—cast German defeat as a necessary corrective.
Neither Italian Fascism nor German National Socialism can be understood without the idea of the march back home. Nor can their respective death cults be understood without reference to the fallen who were “left” or “remained behind” at the front. The surviving veterans from whose ranks came the earliest Fascists explicitly portrayed themselves as the advocates of their departed comrades.
Among the “unfriendly services” that, in Arnold Toynbee’s phrase, Germany and France provided for each other in their regularly recurring conflicts were the educational reforms, modeled on the respective victor’s systems, that were carried out after every defeat.
The Politisches Kolleg debated how parliamentarianism and the party system could be most quickly overthrown so the work of national renewal could progress.
1930. In a 1919 pamphlet, he enumerated the ways in which German universities had contributed to national decline and collapse: overspecialization (“We’ve produced ear, nose, and skin specialists but no doctors”);
Berlin boasted the first imitations of American popular culture on European soil, like the massive Rheingold restaurant, in whose half-neo-Gothic, half-Oriental main hall more than four thousand customers could dine simultaneously at rock-bottom prices.
In essence, scientific management aimed to replace the industrial entrepreneur with the technocrat, or in Marxist terms, the owner with the manager.
idea of a postwar return to dependence on the whims of entrepreneurs did not
In late 1922, almost a decade after assembly-line production of the Model T had begun, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung introduced Ford to its readership under the headline “Curiosities from America.” He was described as a kind of charlatan: “A relatively uneducated man full of futile, harebrained ideas for world salvation,” the article read, “a personality not … to be compared to the old capitalist barons Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc.,… a ‘loudmouth’ who supposedly produces 2,000 of his automobiles a day.”
the technical journals, Henry Ford was not even the object of scorn. His name simply did not appear before 1924. What happened next is history. The German edition of Ford’s autobiography was published in November 1923, at the very moment the German mark was stabilized. The book became an overnight best-seller, and Ford himself in the following decades became the messiah of the new religion of mass production.
As long as the infatuation lasted, those few critics who pointed out that Fordism was hardly more than Taylorism with a conveyor belt found no audience.
even the invitation to a memorial service for the murdered Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht stated that there would be dancing.
There was no doubt that the “sleepless night” referred to the old regime. The political significance of the jazz and the shimmy was to eradicate “any hint of dignity, correct bearing, trimness, and starched collars.” As one wag remarked, “If the kaiser had jazz-danced, none of this [war and defeat] would ever have happened.”180 Jazz dances were “the revolution, the expressionism, the Bolshevism of the ballroom.”
NUMBER OF neologisms created between 1924 and 1929 shows that the Girl phenomenon transcended dance and even Fordism. Linguistic creations like “girl culture,” “girl idea,” “girl problem,” “girlification,” and “girlism” point to an underlying philosophy or psychology of gender.
The extermination of the Indian population influenced Hitler as profoundly as the Monroe Doctrine, which codified America’s hegemonic aspirations.
National Socialism learned from America how to secure people’s allegiance materialistically and hedonistically, rather than ideologically. The years after 1933 witnessed an almost twentyfold increase in Coca-Cola consumption in Germany, the development of an affordable popular automobile patterned on the Model T, and the conception of “Volk radio, television, and washing machines.” An institute for consumer market research was also founded in Nuremberg in 1935, the same place and time the racial laws were announced. In all these moves, the Nazis’ goal was a politically directed consumerism
...more
In truth, though, the Cold War was the third phase of the global civil war (as historian Ernst Nolte called it) that had commenced in 1917.
Warfare became a phenomenon in which human and material resources were delivered for destruction to the battlefield until only the economically more robust side—the victor—remained standing.
In her book The Economic Horror, Viviane Forrester even referred to the unemployed as the “defeated.”
