re: OT history nerds: East Germany/Berlin

Yes I was thinking of the German settings but yeah all of Europe they had some damn good movies, especially the Noirs

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jlovel7

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great thray

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It really is one of the defining features of Modern European history. The rise of the left, made up from the recently displaced peasants turned urban poor, against the landowning aristocracy, which drove many of the major events of the late 18th and 19th century. Fascism grew out of a desire to have a ‘third way’ that wasn’t communism or liberal capitalism, and in the German case, served as a big-tent movement for various militarists, monarchists, nationalists and other sundry ‘conservative’ groups who didn’t want to share power with the SPD or want communism to take hold in the country.

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Well, let's qualify "conservative", which is perhaps some of what you meant by enclosing it in quotes.

The term "Nazi" is a contraction short for "National SOCIALIST German Worker's Party" - NSDAP. You're correct that they tried to make Nazism a third way, but it was going to be socialist from the start. Its Nationalistic and military side attracted the Prussian officer corp, probably the only remaining monarchists.

Tracing fascism back to its roots, you see that its core philosophy was the same as communism and other forms of socialism - the state controlled all means of production. It's a continuum of state control. In communism, the state also owns the means of production, in fascism, private parties theoretically own the means of production, but in reality, there was little separation between the owners and the state. In both cases, you were expected to worship the government and its leadership. Any other religious beliefs were inconvenient at best, and fatal at worst.

It is also important to understand that there is a difference between fascism and Nazism. The latter adds in all of the pagan rituals, the Aryan Master Race BS, etc, which leads straight to death camps and wartime atrocities. The Italians, though die hard fascists, lacked the pagan religious fervor of the Nazis and as a result committed considerably fewer wartime atrocities. The Japanese, though not strictly fascists, shared the Master Race-based religious zeal of the Nazis, and were all in on wartime atrocities.

The Nazi Germans hated the Russians not so much due to their communism, but more because they considered all Slavic peoples "untermensch" - sub-human. Germany and the USSR were at first allied to each other in the early days of the war. Ask the Poles how that went.

You can make a pretty strong case that fascism (little f) never died in Europe. Consider how closely held by a few controlling families the EU stock markets are, and how deep in bed, even in some cases directly owning and controlling, the states and the large companies of Europe are. VW, ZF (major automotive supplier) and others are partially/wholly state-owned. Bosch is a weird hybrid entity. Fiat was state-controlled in the past, as was PSA (now a those two are 2/3rds of Stellantis). Many large EU companies are controlled by one or a few families, with no public float (contrast to Ford and Wal Mart here, both public). You'd better believe those families have all the access they need to the EU bureaucracy. EU fuel consumption and emissions rules were long written to specifically favor the capital investments made by the big EU carmakers. You can go on and on.

All that to say, fascism wasn't very far off from communism at all. It was easy enough to find Germans who would sign up to support communism.

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Well, let's qualify "conservative", which is perhaps some of what you meant by enclosing it in quotes.

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I did qualify it. In the German context specifically, there was what was called the Conservative Revolution, which included several famous writers and thinkers, as they struggled to adapt to the end of Imperial Germany. They were deeply skeptical of democracy, critical of Marxism and sought a way to unify the German nation through new ideas about nationalism and brotherhood. While some of these thinkers famously became Nazis, others were critical of them.

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You're correct that they tried to make Nazism a third way, but it was going to be socialist from the start. Its Nationalistic and military side attracted the Prussian officer corp, probably the only remaining monarchists.

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That they were ‘socialist’ is a matter of significant academic debate, but they included many conservative ideas explicitly as well, as the point was that they were trying to be the big tent party in opposition to the SPD and KPD, which were incredibly popular.

The major difference that needs to be noted is that outside of taking the property of people considered undesirable, they generally did not confiscate private property and in many cases allied with capitalists. And the actual implementation of state interference with production lead to some major problems well before the Nazis transitioned to a war-time economy.

I enjoyed that one you know since the stroke I've watched far more television than I ever would have liked and I really search for quality in entertainment


I went early into a deep dive in all kinds of shows, movies about this time since the stroke
in subtiles

so im classy

In between undergrad and grad school, I decided to “backpack“ through Europe....actually I Eurailed it it. The Eurail Pass was fairly cheap for students (compared to the price of buying all those tickets individually) and you could pretty much go anywhere in Western Europe. This was right when the Berlin wall was coming down. There were a few Eastern block countries you could go to like Hungary. However, most of the Eastern block countries were still closed, including East Germany.

You could go to West Berlin, however, you had to pay extra to go because you had to ride through East Germany to get there. I went there once. it wasn’t all that great. The ride through East Germany was extremely bleak.

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I'm pretty sure you're one of the guys on this board that I particularly enjoy these history threads with


I'd be very interested in why you know it so well
but I understand if uh you can't

but i'm in the Illuminati so you can tell me

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Thanks!

40-50 years ago, I was po' and knew I would have to pick a college major that would pay for itself. I looked at my two loves - history and engineering. There was no doubt - engineering it was. But I took extra hours in history, especially related to how technology shaped civilization, starting with the written word as the first technology.

I was always an avid reader, then 25 years ago, I went through a demanding exec Master's program where the reading load was ~400 pages/week for a year. It was traumatic, in a good way, in that I literally can't be without a book since then. I have probably 2k books at my house, and another 500 or so on my phone, spanning history, various aspects of technology, physics, engineering, and fiction. So that's why I'm an opinionated a-hole on everything history or technology.

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40-50 years ago, I was po' and knew I would have to pick a college major that would pay for itself. I looked at my two loves - history and engineering. There was no doubt - engineering it was. But I took extra hours in history, especially related to how technology shaped civilization, starting with the written word as the first technology.

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TigerHorn, you must have taken Tech and Civ with Dr. Lewis. He was a great teacher. I never took Tech and Civ, but heard him as a guest lecturer with the Ascent of Man series. I had a similar choice to make in those days, but loved journalism in those days. I became a JM major, but had nearly twice as many hours in history as I did in my major. We may well have had classes together.

Check out Fredrick Paulus. He was the Commanding Officer of the German 6th Army (I think) that surrendered at Stalingrad.
His story explains your question.

I have a piece of the wall. That's all I have to offer.