I'm no longer capable of complex thoughts.

I was thinking about what we were discussing in class the other day about political cartoons in Germany. While we were talking about it I heard a lot of different opinions shooting back and forth about how some people believed that they were more a representation of the cartoonist’s feelings than they were of the society as a whole. I find this point of view somewhat difficult to side with though. Typically, if a political cartoon is put in a paper or a magazine there is always going to be someone who had something to say about it. Whether that comment is positive or negative, someone is going to hear about. If a paper’s sales begin to drop and the owner of that paper hears negative things about his or her paper then their probably going to do their best to find the source of the problem and get rid of it.
This isn’t to say that a cartoonist’s opinion is left by the wayside, but the cartoonist will usually belong to a group that has a good amount of followers with it won’t they? A paper or magazine reflects the readers that purchase it. I also feel like many people that are dissatisfied with the way things are going will usually find a way to express it. Many people do find freedom by using cartoons or press freedom so why wouldn’t people push the bounds at the time of some of the cartoons we were discussing in class?
I just feel like in a lot of situations, political cartoons are a way for people to express what they’re actually feeling about a situation regardless of if the powers that be would like it very much or not. On top of everything, political cartoons are a great way for people to look back and get an idea of how people may have seen politicians or situations that occurred during their time. In our class alone we’ve had several articles that contain political cartoons. Most of them have helped shape our opinions of a lot of the people that we’ve studied in class, especially if we have no other from of reference. I realize I’m rambling at this point, but I’ve been writing papers all week and my mind is shot so please bear with me.
I can’t help but think about some of the political cartoons and propaganda that were put out during the time of the Nazi Party. I’m not saying that I think these cartoons necessarily represented everyone’s feelings about Jews, or any other subject matter that was being represented at the time, but things like that did have an enormous amount of power and sway over the people that read those cartoons. It would have been incredibly difficult for people not to observe these cartoons and wonder if there was any kind of truth in what they were reading. Cartoons and propaganda probably stuck in people’s minds.

East vs. West Berlin

One thing that struck me as particularly interesting in class this week was what we learned about the division of East and West Berlin after World War II. The fact that a city of the same people could be so completely different due to the governmental influences placed over them was an odd aspect of the history. With West Germany under Adenauer things were improving greatly. Both their economic situation and their foreign policies were advancing as to fix relationships with the countries they had gone to war with so recently.
In contrast, the Eastern side of the Germany was in so much disarray that the people were having much more trouble under the Soviet control. There isn’t anything inherently evil with the concept of Communism; it’s how the people under its banner deal with its tenets. The utopian ideal just doesn’t work, especially when there is always someone who can benefit from communism in some way or another. While both sides had their problems, it just seems that the Soviets would have seen that the Western side of the city was better off than theirs and attempted to improve Eastern Berlin; if not for the people than at least for their own interests. I try to understand the German mindset at this point but it is difficult to imagine how this change could have seemed them. At one point they feel as they are going to conquer the world and they will be the most prosperous nation on the earth, next they are being occupied by the Americans, the British, and the Soviets (I’d personally rather have to deal with anyone but the Soviets).
As far as the Soviet- run side of Berlin went, anyone who wasn’t a full on communist was gotten rid of in the worker’s state. Even though the Germans weren’t in the best position to rebel against the kind of rule that was being imposed on them, the fact that they attempted some kind of uprising is impressive. The fact that on June 17, 1953, Germans stood up to the Soviets in such large number (300,000-400,000 people) is astounding and shows that the will of the German people wasn’t completely broken. The unfortunate thing is that even at this point I think the Soviets in Germany saw this as an excuse to impose stricter laws on the citizens. With the Russians, the idea of more payback must have been looming over them for years to come, and the worker’s uprising was quickly put down. I suppose that when the wall finally went up the Soviets no longer cared if the German people saw the communist system as bankrupt. They only needed the system in Berlin to be productive, I’ve never thought that the communist system cared for the happiness of its people.

Thoughts of Hitler

One thing about Hitler coming to power that amazes me is that he didn’t come to power through some coup de-etat or some national revolution of blood and battle, he won it through the same conventional types of politics as any other person put into political power. While it’s true that the Nazi Party did do some things that were less than ethical, they still put Hitler in power by popularity. The people couldn’t have known what Hitler would eventually do, and he took advantage of this. Another thing that blew me away this week was that the first concentration camp was made only a few months after Hitler’s election.
The power that was given to Hitler by the German people and the German government is unbelievable. While it’s very improbable that the people of Germany had any idea what was going to happen with the election of Hitler, it is strange for me to imagine any country willingly giving over THAT much power to anyone in politics. I realize that this was another time and our country’s view of politicians is probably drastically different than those of others, especially in the 1930s and 40s. As charismatic as Hitler was, I can’t imagine giving over that much power to him. President Obama is charismatic (let’s just be clear: I’m not comparing him to Hitler!), but I still don’t think that we would give him so much power that he could virtually do anything he desired without having to answer to people below him. Given, the background of Germany was a lot less table than ours at the time and all of the various details are different; it’s just beyond imagining to me.
Another thing that we discussed in class is the theory that Goebbels and Goering may have been the power beyond the throne, so to speak. While I do think that that kind of thing is possible, I don’t think that it’s the case here. I can’t really explain why I feel that this is the case definitively, but it seems to me that with an ego like the one that Hitler likely had, he would not allow anyone to behave as though they could control him. I do think that it’s obvious that not ALL Germans wanted Hitler out of the picture. There were attempts to kill him by his fellow Germans in the double digits. The mention in class the other day that a British sniper team also had the chance to kill Hitler seems possible, even though it might be harder to imagine people closer to him would have a better chance than some random sniper team sneaking into the Wolf’s Den. If any of these assassination attempts had actually been successful, Hitler would have surely been seen as a martyr to the Nazis and possibly many other Germans. As much as we might hate to think that more people died in the Holocaust than had to, it may be that Hitler’s eventual fall was the only thing that kept more and more people from dying.

Another game of "what if" and my unoriginal blog titles

As we've learned more and more about the German people's reactions to World War I, my perceptions of events during that time period have changed a great deal. The more that we learn about this, the more I begin to see that after World War I the German people still couldn't see that they had done anything wrong (most German citizens at least). All of the political turmoil going on throughout Germany based on the outcome of the war makes it seem as though many of them look at the ending of the first war to be one of the most insulting things that could have happened to their world. In my opinion, if I had been around at that time the results of Germany’s actions would have been obvious. Where I understand that the German’s saw things like Article 231 as an insult designed to humiliate them (which in many ways it was), the fact that they reacted to it in such a way is beyond me.
For a military society, the loss of territory, no navy, and limiting the army to 100,000 soldiers would have been a devastating blow. However, the sheer number of deaths brought on by their actions seems to have meant nothing to them. I guess it’s just beyond my comprehension that people could not understand how the actions of their government hurt people all over the world in such a way that made their personal honor meaningless. While Article 231 was probably a little bit overboard, I think the fact that many Germans refused to even negotiate made the Article that much more necessary. The concept of Fulfillment should have been something the Germans attached to as the best option available to them for what they had done. I understand that they fought the Article because they saw it as an attack solely to hurt their pride, but couldn’t they see that it wasn’t the responsibility of the rest of the world to clean up the mess they had made? I guess not.
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is Gustav Stresemann. If he hadn’t died young (or more likely if he had lived in another time in German history) could the things he did be more widely appreciated. He seems to have been another voice of reason and good for the German people if they had only listened to him. From the Dawes Plan, to the Treaty in Locarno, to the Berlin Treaty, it seems as though Stresemann had been setting Germany back on a path that was getting it back onto the world stage without the negativity that went along with the name Germany. I realize that I am constantly thinking of history as the “what of” of my last blog, but if Stresemann had had more time to make changes and attempt to fix some of the fissures within German society, would people have begun to see things his way over the course of time? In all likelihood probably not. If given more time, the people would have probably ousted him and gone about with the things the way they turned out. The German people were just too bitter and angry about how things had turned out for them after the War to end all Wars. Things could have gone along the exact same time line that progressed into WWII even if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't been as heavy handed or Stresemann had never attempted to fix things with German relations throughout the world.

What if?

I was trying to figure out what I was going to write about this week and couldn’t think of anything until I started reading the book “Germans into Nazis.” I haven’t gotten through every last word of it yet but every time I pick it up I tend to fly through a dozen pages or so in a matter of minutes so I’m not too worried. As I read through the introduction I was amazed at the part describing a conversation between the photographer and the Nazi Party leader, Adolf Hitler.
What got me so interested in this was the fact that the photographer had taken a picture of Hitler at a rally in 1914 before the beginning of World War I. Whenever I read history, the thought that rushes through my mind more frequently than any other is the question: “What if?” In the huge mass of people gathered in the picture, where Hitler is seen at such a young age, what would have happened in the twentieth century if things had changed that day? All it would have taken is one person that thought the mindset of Germany was going to a bad place; one mugger in the crowd that would have happened to walk up to a young Adolf Hitler and try to take his wallet. I’ve never seen history as a series of random events, but what if the slightest change had occurred THAT day that killed the man named Adolf Hitler. No one would have known his name and other than maybe the slightest mention in the paper the following morning, there is a good chance that very few people would have even known about some seemingly tiny event that got some stranger killed.
I can’t help but think about those things. The thought that if one person in the crowd that day, one person with a good heart and a good head on their shoulders could have known what the guy next to him would do one day. What would have changed? How different would the world be today? If one person happened to look over, see this young man who probably blended in with every other person in the crowd, and knew what he was going to do in the future. In the fervor of a national pride and the shift in the ideals of Germany in the early 1900’s a man started a course that would change the passage of time.
I know that this thought probably has an effect on all of my blogs, but it’s what makes me like history as much as I do. Looking back on the series of events and seeing times when the slightest event could have changed the world.
As I said earlier on, what if that day in 1914, on his way back to his home or his apartment or wherever, the young man whose name would soon be known by virtually everyone else on the planet ran into an accident: a car crash or a mugging. One simple event that could have prevented all of the things that occurred in the Holocaust and in World War II would have only taken a moment. If you do stop to think about the small details of that day, the possibilities and the way the people were reacting to the changes taking place. Even IF Hitler had met some unfortunate end before he committed all of the deeds that he is famous for today; would someone else have come along to take his place? If not Hitler, would there have been someone else that came along to commit the same kinds of atrocities? Would we have known the same of some other nationalist that came along and changed the course of the Twentieth Century?

I was thinking about the article by David Blackburn that we read this week for class. Again, I’m going to preface all of this with the thought that it’s very difficult to connect how Germany’s past can be connected to its eventual turn into the Third Reich. I think that anyone claiming that a country could be predestined to make that kind of turn is kind of silly. Although I think that the predestination idea is laughable, I can of course see how various events and political situations could have led the country to turn into the Nazi Party.
From what I took from the Blackburn article, the peasants of the German countryside began to see the city as a place where the growth of the negative was becoming rampant. In class, we discussed how the cities began to have that feeling of “impersonality” where no one knew anyone due to the sheer mass in numbers that came from living in an urban area. Maybe because of this impersonality the peasantry felt that the city had less moral fiber than that of the countryside. Many of the views state that the peasant community was being manipulated by the political world and that even the market stood as a threatening symbol to them. If there really was such a divide between the city and the countryside, maybe the only thing that really divided them was the lack of understanding between the two. This wouldn’t be the first time in history that a lack of understanding led to something unnecessary. With the view of manipulation in mind, let’s think about what was said in class regarding the idea that maybe the other political parties were simply attempting to accommodate the peasants. Politicians still do this today. Everyone at the beginning of our presidential elections comes out with very strong ideas in mind, but as they begin getting down to the wire in the process, the candidates start to sound the same in some of the smaller things. They focus on a few key issues that will bring in the votes that they need.
Seeing this, the peasants (who I doubt were uninformed or stupid) starting using their votes as not only political weapons by going against what people expected them to do, but as a form of political protest. The more the people used this as an act of personal choice, the concept of deference began to vanish. They began to realize that power in numbers could mean power in politics. I can only imagine how it would have been to live at a time like that when the statues quo was so powerfully shaken as it was then. As we look at all of this progress being made, it is easier to see how these people began making their way into a Third Reich. The possibility was becoming ever more present, whether they knew it or not. The peasants were all anti-elitist, anti-Semitic, and anti-urban (not to mention that, as we learned in class, anti-urban sentiment could have been the same thing as anti-Weimar Republic thought). As you look back, it’s easier to see how the idea of the community (or, forgive me if I misspell this, “Gemeinschaft”) could have shifted to the Societal (or, again forgive me if I mess this up, “Gesellschaft”) view. I think that given the standing up to their current governmental arguments and anti-Semitic, anti-urban, and anti-elitist views were what helped set up a true unification of Germans. Think of what the Third Reich was built upon. The peasants hated the elitist view of things: that’s fine because we’re all Germans and we’re ALL elite compared to other people. We’re anti-urban and sick of the Weimar Republic. That’s good; the Third Reich will represent everyone in a new and more powerful way. The Third Reich is coming and if you’re angry with how things are going, have we got a scapegoat for you. In my opinion, the Germans allowed the Third Reich and the Nazi party to come to power because of a reckless confidence and a need to blame their faults on anyone but themselves. Calling that predestination is giving that kind of mindset too generous an out.

Road to the Third Reich

It’s been rather difficult for me to come up with a subject to write on this week. What with studying for the exam and all of my other classes, it’s been hard to focus on one subject for a long enough time period to put my sights on a particular event. I guess given the fact that I’ve been looking back on all of our older notes, it’s been easier for me to take a look at how the stage was being set for the Third Reich.
It’s always strange for me to imagine just how things could have been different if the slightest event was changed. I look at the timeline and wonder if the events that eventually set up the Third Reich and the rise of Nazism could have started as far back as the Holy Roman Empire trying to fend off the forces of Napoleon or if all of those things could have begun around the time that Bismarck came to prominence. The argument can obviously be made that all of these events came together to lay the groundwork for the Third Reich, but I’m wondering if it really started at a certain time for Germany. I’m thinking along the lines of what we’ve discussed in class: was there a specific point at which Germany turned down the path that would eventually lead them to war and holocaust?
If these things began with the invasion of Napoleon then I could certainly understand that. After the many years that the French maintained power over the area, it would be understandable to for the German people to desire a unified country. It would also make sense for them to feel a kind of camaraderie with other Germans simply because they were being antagonized by the same foe. I realize that this is basically what happened, but why did it take so long for these feelings to come to fruition in someone like Bismarck. This brings up my questioning of whether or not it could have been Bismarck and the politics of his time that set down the road that would lead to the Nazis. Even though Bismarck was called the “White Revolutionary” who seemed to have a desire to calm things down, maybe his actions are the ones to blame.
After everything Bismarck did that brought the people together and even united Germany; maybe it was just that that made the people of Germany feel they had a right to everything that they desired. It seems to me that one of the key factors that the Germans took into war was the feeling that they could do no wrong. The obvious term of “the superior race” shows what they must have been thinking. The surge of nationalism and political zeal was one of the things that Hitler used to mobilize Germany in such a way. Bismarck’s love of his country may have eventually brought it to its knees if the people’s nationalism and lust for more did indeed help push them into the arms of the Third Reich. As far as the country’s hatred of the Jewish during that time, the German people were no strangers to picking out those that they thought were hurting their goals and national strength. Just like Bismarck’s Reichsfeinde, the Jewish were made to be enemies of the state. If the time of Bismarck had any influence of the growth of the Third Reich (which it did), then wouldn’t this be the most solid groundwork for the Reich? I can’t help but correlate the two eras together. Then again, this is obvious. It’s just odd that Bismarck’s love for his country eventually turned into something that did a great job of destroying it.