History Books are written to inform, educate, document, and if necessary, forewarn. The saying "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is proven true time and again throughout history. Mankind has the gift of hindsight when working toward improving the ways and means of living together and sharing in the gifts this planet Earth provides us all. It only seems natural to me that Earth was meant for "Inclusive Inhabitants" as opposed to exclusive ones. And if man is an intelligent, enlightened species, he has a responsibility to maintain an environment conducive to life on Earth for all species of plants and animals living here. He should not feel obligated but honored to be "his brother's keeper."
Civilization, through centuries of trials and errors, today stands closer than ever to attaining harmonious balance amongst its various peoples as well as with Earth's natural environment (land, water, air and living things). And yet the very things that have threatened humankind's existence throughout history are still coming out of the depths to grasp civilization by the throat, strangling the peace and progress humankind has struggled so long toward achieving.
War, famine, pestilence and disease have not been annihilated from Earth's surface. Mankind's greed and selfishness still overwhelms his empathy and philanthropy toward others. He can still become "beastly" in his treatment toward his fellow man and woman, in the name of survival. He has yet to learn from hindsight how not only the strongest, but the wisest and most communal survive to live life to the fullest (see Ant and Bee colonies.) He must be fit in mind, body, and spirit if he wants to avoid the pitfalls that have befallen past civilizations. As of this posting, "Rome is Burning!"
Below I have listed a review on the book "Before The Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920's." The review, written in 2009 by Bob Kitchin and posted on his blog "The View From The Blue House," highlights what he found the book made very clear about the rise of Nazism and the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Review of Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich, published by HarperPerennial (1995, originally 1972)
I got interested in Berlin before the war through reading Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels (I’ve also recently read the excellent The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina by Uki Goni after reading book five in the series set in Argentina). It’s taken a while to read as its been my breakfast book and I’ve read a fair few novels whilst this has been on the go.Before the Deluge is a social history of Berlin during the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933, covering traditional politics, economics, social conditions, cultural politics, the arts, and the lives of ordinary Berliners and the movers and shakers. It’s rich, dense, insightful, and full of interesting commentary and anecdotes based on the author’s experiences, documentary research, and interviews with key actors still alive in the late 1960s.
Rapidly expanding in population size, Berlin during the 1920s was a city of turbulent and vibrant change – governments coming and going; unions and the army vying for power; communists, socialists and fascists fighting running battles, assassinating rivals, and waging propaganda wars; the currency crashing to worthlessness followed by an economic boom and then another crash; cabaret, theatre, movies and music flourishing; social order becoming liberalized with widespread naturism and promiscuity at the same time that antisemitism grows steadily; crime, prostitution and drug taking becoming rife; and the intellectual elite in psychoanalysis, physics, architecture and other disciplines flocking to the city.
What Friedrich’s book makes very clear is that there was nothing predestined about the rise of Nazism and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. It was the culmination of a complex set of contingent, relational process, not some teleological inevitability, and in Berlin the National Socialists never received more than 25 percent of the vote despite Goebbels best efforts (nor more than 44 percent nationally). Criminals have always found a route to political power. Usually, it is through some kind of coup. Hitler tried this in the earlier 1920s and failed. Where he succeeded was through the democratic process. Ultimately ordinary, innocent people voted criminal minds into office thus ensuring the end of democracy and the descent into megalomaniacal nationalism. What that has tended to do is blind us to the fact that Germany was a cauldron of competing ideologies through the whole period of the Third Reich – we fall into the trap of seeing Germans at that time as a monolithic nation of fanatical fascists. And that’s what is so refreshing about Philip Kerr’s novels - Gunther is an anti-Nazi cop trying to get by in a corrupt regime.
If you want to get a sense of Germany in the 1920s and the path to fascist power, then Friedrich’s book is a great place to start.
Great review and assessment. I like the the phrase "Ultimately ordinary, innocent people voted criminal minds into office....".
People get desperate in an economic depression and follow politicians offering easy solutions and vulnerable scapegoats.
Amazon Review: Before The Deluge
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment