[Note: What follows is a work-up of a Facebook post from a week ago today, which is to say June 21, 2019.]
After the November 11, 1918, armistice, the German High Seas Fleet was interned in the Royal Navy’s northern fleet anchorage of Scapa Flow, off the northern coast of Scotland. It steamed through a double line of British battleships, all of which were at general quarters, with main batteries loaded and trained on the Germans (just in case they had not, in fact, off-loaded their own ammunition).
That evening, the commander of the Grand… Fleet ordered that the German ensign would be lowered at sunset, and would not be raised again except by permission.
in the late spring and early summer of 1919, as the peace conference in Paris dragged on, the mood aboard the German ships got ugly. The sailors were most not happy about having meekly surrendered themselves (the German Army, in contrast, had marched back home under arms), and they really weren’t pleased with the thought that their ships, which were after all their homes as well, were going to be passelled out among the victorious allies to become their playthings.
So on that June morning, 100 years ago today, after the British had left harbor for training exercises, the German admiral, Ludwig von Reuter, hoisted an innocent-looking flag signal. Whereupon the German ships all raised their ensigns (which is to say, without permission), opened their seacocks (they’d already thoroughly compromised their ships’ honeycombed watertight construction to ensure that once the flooding started it couldn’t be stopped), and headed for the lifeboats.
Ashore an American senior officer was sitting with a British counterpart. He looked out and saw an entire harbor of ships gently listing over and settling below the waves. “My God; they’re sinking!” he exclaimed. The Brit looked up briefly, observed, “Aren’t they now,” and returned to his paperwrooork.
A few of the ships got raised, but none in usable condition. Most got chopped up where they sank and sold for scrap over the years. A few are still there, in water too deep for salvage. You can dive them, with a permit.
One week later the Treaty of Versailles was signed, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife got whacked in Sarajevo, starting the whole sorry mess.
By way of interesting sidebar: Those ships still on the bottom are among the very few sources of steel that is not contaminated by post-1945 nuclear fall-out. It’s used in the manufacture of highly sensitive radiation detection equipment, apparently.
By way of even further interesting sidebar: Those four remaining battleships are privately owned, and are for sale . . . on eBay. Seriously. I think the buy-it-now price is about £880,000 or something like that, I think. Be the first kid on your block to own your own battle squadron.
From the Dept. of We Thought it Was a Good Idea at the Time (Div. of Unintended Consequences):
One Hundred years ago today the Treaty of Versailles was signed. It formally ended the Great War, at least against Germany (there wasn’t an Austria-Hungary left by that time; in any event a separate treaty was signed to end its war). By one of history’s gentler ironies, it was signed five years to the day after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were shot to death in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip.
A recent thorough treatment of the circus that came of the Paris Peace Conference is Paris 1919.
The general terms of the treaty were fairly onerous, but in truth, not more than any country ought to expect which intentionally precipitated a general war in Europe and then so far forgot itself as to lose. Huge loss of territory? Yup, that happens. [N.b. The world seems to have forgot that point in connection with the efforts of Islam to extinguish the state of Israel. The land belongs to Israel by right of conquest. Full stop; end of inquiry.] Have to confess yourself a bad boy? That too. Pay up for all the destruction you caused in other folks’ back yards? Folks are funny that way, y’know. Give up your implements of destruction? Do you think we’re suckers or what?
[To get an idea of what Germany was up to behind the lines, the two books to read are The Englishman’s Daughterand The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I; the Germans even stole the doorknobs for the brass. All the way down to the doorknobs, fer cryin’ out loud. And they wondered they were expected to buy new.]
So yeah, Germany took it in the shorts. But they had it coming.
The problem turned out to be that they didn’t understand they had it coming, because they were never forced to confess themselves beaten. They signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, not a surrender. Their army marched home under arms. But Germany was well and truly beaten. The Allies kept up the blockade of Germany all the way up until the treaty was signed. Several tens of thousands of German civilians died during those months, of starvation. Countries which are not beaten don’t get done that way.
But on the surface, there was a fundamental mismatch between the end of the war and the terms of the peace.
Looking below the surface, in a very real sense Germany had no choice but to sign the treaty. But the German people didn’t see it that way. Their leaders told them that they didn’t lose the war but were “stabbed in the back,” and the Treaty of Versailles wasn’t what they had coming to them, but rather a sell-out. Lies, all of it, peddled by mountebanks after no more than power. The German people enthusiastically embraced the cynics who sold them that bill of goods, and marched off to do it all over again.
Needless to say, a generation later the Allies didn’t repeat the same mistakes. We saw to it that in large areas there wasn’t much more left than would throw a shadow. We so thoroughly cured Germany of militaristic aggression that today their air force is more or less grounded and their navy rusted to its moorings.
Of course the big alt-historical question is, had the Allies pursued the Kaiser’s disintegrating army all the way back into Germany, had we insisted on a surrender, would German society have responded more along the lines that it did in 1945?
I’m not so sure it would have, in truth. I don’t think one may doubt that, had German cities and towns been overrun with the detritus of a destroyed army, had German civilians seen with their own eyes the ragged, half-starved, terrified survivors of units which had abandoned their weapons in the mad scramble to do something, anything to get as far from the killing zones as possible; had they seen the endless columns of well-fed, warmly clothed Americans marching across their squares and their farms, the National Socialists and the various nationalistic right-wing parties would have had a much tougher sell than was the actual case. But as they say in the military: The enemy gets a vote.
How would German society have responded to crushing defeat in 1918/19? I don’t think we can ignore the reality that a good part of why German inner resistance crumbled so completely in 1945 was precisely the fact that it was the second lost war in a generation. After the first one there would be a more-or-less natural human tendency to think in terms of, “Well, next time we’ll know what to do; next time we’ll get it right.”
What I very much do not think is that the Treaty of Versailles, imposed after a genuine, unmistakable German defeat, would have somehow prevented the birth of National Socialism in Germany. That movement flourished in the manure of the Dolchstoßlegende, it is true. But the seed sprouted independently. Let us not forget that fascism first came to prominence and power in Italy, which was on the winning side in the war after all, and which benefitted enormously at Austria-Hungary’s expense at the peace table. It wasn’t a loser’s movement, in other words.
The nationalistic strain had been present for generations, ever since (at least) the Napoleonic invasions (see, e.g., “Frühlingsgruß an das Vaterland,” by Max von Schenkendorf in 1814, and later set to pretty dramatically rousing music). And by 1914 the socialists had long been the largest single party represented in the Imperial Reichstag. There is exactly zero reason to suppose that, looking south over the Alps, it would have occurred to no one to combine those two strains.
Would National Socialism have grown as powerful as it did, though? I think not. The German officer corps retained so much of its influence in German society largely as a result of its pretense that the Army had not lost the war. And it was the Nazis’ successfully winning over the officer corps that ensured them the backing of the conservative element in society. In this connection it is very much apropos to remind Gentle Reader that National Socialism began and remained very much a left-wing, radical political movement. The conservative elements in German society, and especially the officers, originally wanted nothing to do with the Nazis; but when the Army came over, it became sortable–hoffähig in German.
William Shirer tells the story very well of Hitler’s testimony at the court-martial of three or four junior officers who were being tried on charges of having disseminated, contrary to regulations, Nazi Party propaganda among their troops. Hitler testified for the prosecution, and it was his assurance to the senior command that his movement posed no threat to their position in society that won them over. The liquidation of the SA as an independent power center on June 30, 1934, was another step in that process; Ernst Röhm very much intended for the SA to be a fully-functional army beside (and of course, eventually supplanting) the Reichswehr. [Side note: Hitler had no intention of keeping his end of that bargain, and didn’t. Just like a parasitic wasp eventually sucks dry its host, Hitler progressively emasculated the officer corps, to the extent that they watched supinely as one of their own was baselessly smeared as a sexual pervert and cashiered in 1938.]
Now consider what if everybody and his cousin knew jolly good and well that the generals had lost the last war? What if they were as discredited in 1918-19 as they were in 1945? Who would have brought over the wide swathe of German society that wanted nothing more than a return to the stabilities and certainties of the Kaiser’s empire? The National Socialists would not have enjoyed the mis-branding which support by the Army permitted them to indulge.
So no, I don’t think the National Socialists would have come to power had Germany been physically and undeniably confronted with the fact of its defeat in 1918.
In terms of what it accomplished, the Treaty of Versailles must be said to have turned out to be one of history’s larger misconceptions. The Allies weren’t willing to fight a total war to a total war’s finish, but they wanted to, and did, impose a peace that could only last if built upon the foundation of that degree of victory.
But it seemed like a good idea at the time.
By way of pettifogging detail . . . Germany’s final payment on its (by then heavily discounted) World War I reparations was made on . . . October 3, 2010. And to close the circle with another irony: October 3 is Reunification Day in Germany, celebrating the final liquidation, in 1990, of the 45 years’ separation that they got to enjoy in consequence of their having believed themselves unbeaten in 1918.
I refer, of course, to the rash of highjackings and terroristic attacks which have been, in the dark years since September 11, 2001, perpetrated with . . . crab salad. Mozzarella cheese also, and stuffed herring.
Back in 2013, a ticketed passenger was denied clearance in Berlin because he had 272 grams of mozzarella cheese made from buffalo milk, 155 grams of North Sea crab salad, and 140 grams of a stuffed herring product identified as “Flensburger Fördetopf” (never heard tell of that last, apparently it’s a stuffed product). So he sued. Isn’t it heart-warming, by the way, how the Germans have taken so readily to the habits of their American conquerors?
The top German administrative court has now ruled that he loses. Yep. Because such food products are “made with” liquids — you know: dangerous stuff like sour cream and milk — they are subject to the same regulations governing your shampoo or other substances that you really can’t tell what they are. But hey: It’s just hard to tell, sometimes, whether that’s really crab meat there of very artfully concealed C4. You can’t hand the would be passenger a forkful of it and tell him to eat it and show you it can be done. For that matter, you can’t take a damned toothpick and shove it to the bottom of the container to show that there’s not a miniature land-mine stowed under the
Max practiced masterfully the art of the dynastic marriage both for himself and his descendants, significantly sweeping under either direct Habsburg sovereignty or collateral affiliation large swathes of Europe, most notably direct kingship over Hungary after the disaster of Mohacs in 1526. It was Hungary which provided the “and royal” tag in the Habsburg “imperial and royal” descriptor after the Compromise of 1867. On the other hand, it was in large measure Hungarian intransigence which forever derailed what feeble attempts Franz Joseph and his advisors made to drag the empire forward as a viable geopolitical force. I forget now which German senior commander (or was it a chancellor? I’ve slept since then) observed during the Great War that Germany was “shackled to a corpse.” Magyar refusal to entertain any measure which might impair their oppression of the crazy-quilt of ethnicities within Hungary has to bear a good portion of the responsibility for the truth of that statement.
Gentle Reader will perceive how easily that for which we strive mightily, and sacrifice nearly all to defend once in our possession, can turn out to be a poison chalice in the end, after all. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.
Max also is a pretty good example of the Habsburg penchant for eccentricity. He spent a large amount of effort on a couple of lengthy epic poems as well as a novel. The purpose, in addition to patting himself on the back for being An All-Round Swell Guy, was to glorify what he presented as the traditions of chivalry and more to the point, the Habsburgs’ role as principal exponents of ditto. There is a fascinating history of the family which takes for its focus the means and media in which the successive Habsburg rulers used their representation in visual and written arts to establish, explicate, and fix in permanence their role and claims in the European power system.
History has been less impressed with Max as author than he might have desired.
What Maximilian did do, and what to this day remains as an enduring legacy, perhaps his only enduring legacy, is the direction he gave to one of his court flunkies in 1498 to go hire, as a permanent fixture at court, some musicians and young male singers. Just over 500 years later the Wiener Sängerknaben — better known in English as the Vienna Boys Choir — is still going. Roughly 100 strong, they of course perform concerts in and around Vienna; they also split into four separate touring groups and travel all over the world performing. A couple of years ago, one of them visited the city near where I live and as a bucket-list item I took my mother to see them. They put on a pretty good show.
In addition to concerts at home and abroad, they also play a significant part in the cultural life of what has as good a claim as any to the title “Music City”. Here’s a video including them performing at the 1989 funeral of Zita, the last Empress of Austria-Hungary.
[Here I will confess to a bit of a personal preference. I understand that musicians must perform what their audiences want to hear. Thus I do not take it ill of the Sängerknaben that so much of the program they presented that evening we saw them was newer settings of newer things. But I prefer a greater homage to the towering music of the past. I mean, let’s face it: Just about anyone who can carry a tune in a dump truck — and I own that I am not among them, not at all, even a bit, by any standard — can sling together a passable setting of “contemporary” music, showtunes, and so forth. It’s just not all that challenging. The great music of the past, however? That takes a bit more in the way of chops. I prefer the focus of the Thomanerchor, which is even older than the Sängerknaben (they trace their roots back to 1212, I think) and which concentrates above all on the music of their one-time Kantor, one J. S. Bach. Not to take anything away from their colleagues in Vienna; it’s just that I sort of wish they’d devote their undoubted talents to challenges more worthy of them. Purely personal taste.]
Perhaps Maximilian did achieve his earthly immortality, and through the medium of art. It just wasn’t his own, or even about him. Irony will out.
Go make a joyful noise, in memory of H.I.M. Maximilian.
A couple of weeks ago a buddy forwarded to me a photo that a friend of his had taken, of House Doorn in the Netherlands. This is it:
As Gentle Reader might surmise from the bust in the foreground, this was the house in which Kaiser Wilhelm II spent the last two decades or thereabouts of his life. He is buried on the grounds there, and is likely to remain there forever. His express wish was not to be returned to Germany until it became a monarchy again, and the likelihood of that occurring is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.0.
Being the considerate, courteous feller that I am I thanked my buddy. I passed along that I have the two-volume biography of Wilhelm by Lamar Cecil, which I found to be very well done, and remarkably fair given the subject. Cecil doesn’t pull punches, but refrains from gratuitous character-blackening. But it’s his final comment on Wilhelm that sticks in the mind. Of the last kaiser it could equally be said, so Cecil, what Wellington pronounced upon George IV: He lived and died without being able to assert so much as a single claim upon the gratitude of posterity.
My buddy then e-mailed me back to allow that Cecil’s judgment echoed what he had read about ol’ Kaiser Bill in both Paris 1919 and The War That Ended Peace, both by Margaret MacMillan. I have both and recommend them both, but the exchange with my buddy got me to thinking back to the war’s beginnings.
As I think I’ve mentioned before, the Great War has been a fetish of mine for right at 30 years. I can’t say I have any friends I know to give a tinker’s damn about it, but for me it is a source of endless fascination and continuing reflection. [N.b. By an odd coincidence, a very dear friend of mine had one grandfather who was a machine-gunner for the kaiser; the other grandfather had been a machine-gunner in the A.E.F.]
I have on loan from a mutual friend the BBC mini-series 37 Days, the story of the interval between the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination on June 28 and the August 3, 1914, British declaration of war. As you might expect from the Beeb, the story is told primarily from the viewpoint of the Anglo-German dyad. There are two brief scenes each of Franz Joseph and Nicholas II; the balance of the action takes place in London and Berlin. The central character around whom the narrative is framed is Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign minister. Ian McDiarmid plays Grey marvelously.
There are a couple of historical inaccuracies in the plot.
Franz Joseph is implied to be the motive force behind the famous ultimatum to Serbia, when in fact it was his cabinet, and above all his military Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who seized upon the assassination (which Franz Joseph greeted with, above all, a sense of relief, remarking as much in so many words) to crush Serbia once and for all, both to remove a source of agitation for the empire’s Serb minority and to re-assert Austria-Hungary’s place as a Great Power in Europe.
In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm’s initial reaction is presented as being bellicose, when it was nothing of the kind. At least at first. For obvious reasons the Austrians wanted to know whether they had Germany’s backing in doing anything to Serbia as such in response to the assassination. So they sent Alexander, Count von Hoyos a foreign service official, with a memorandum in hand to see the Austrian ambassador to Germany, who was then to meet with Kaiser Wilhelm and the German Reichskanzler, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Bethmann-Hollweg’s initial reaction during that meeting — and more importantly, the kaiser’s as well — was cautionary. But during the Austrian ambassador’s meeting with kaiser and chancellor, Hoyos was meeting with his own German counterpart to “explain” the memorandum’s actual meaning. Hoyos had long been, it seems, a proponent of violent reckoning with Serbia, and the gloss he put on the memorandum was that Austria wanted a short, victorious war against Serbia and it expected Germany to live up to its alliance obligations. That “interpretation” was then communicated up to Wilhelm, and by the time dinner came around that evening, Wilhelm was wearing his war paint and declared that whatever Austria wanted to do, Germany would back it to the hilt. Thus was the famous “blank check” given.
The final point of inaccuracy in the BBC miniseries is that it presents Bethmann-Hollweg as being much more belligerent, and much more energetic about provoking warlike measures by the Austrians, than he actually was. He’d never served in the army and had no illusions about its out-sized role in Germany policy-making. He had long been an unsuccessful opponent of Admiral Tirpitz’s quixotic naval construction programs.
But that’s not what this post is about. The BBC miniseries very accurately presents the role played by the German General Staff, the Generalstab. The generals very very much wanted a war, but not a war between Austria and Serbia. They were looking for war with Russia, a preventive war.
What follows below is the (slightly edited) e-mail I sent to my buddy:
If you back up a half-step from the historical narrative and look at the meta-story of it, what you realize is that what was going on was that the responsible organs of government – the kaiser and the reichskanzler — abdicated a central decision-making function – how to address the continent-wide instabilities created by two decrepit, ancient political systems (Austria-Hungary and Russia) as they desperately fought for continued relevance in a notoriously volatile part of Europe — to supposed “experts” viz. the Army Generalstab.
Everyone and his cousin knew the issue – What to Do About the Balkans, Dear – to be fiendishly complicated.
But hist! the Generalstab more or less hijacked the decisional process. For them the issue wasn’t the Balkans as such, it was the supposed settling of accounts (“Which accounts, exactly?” the innocent bystander might have asked) with Russia. For decades – ever since Caprivi had let the Secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse in 1890 (I think it was), the Generalstab had assumed a war with Russia as part of Germany’s treaty obligations to Austria-Hungary. To be true, they’d at first discounted the possibility that despotic Russia and republican France could ever find their way to the same bed, but in 1894 it had happened. But they were “experts,” after all, and what good is an “expert” if he can’t “solve” any problem you set him, right?
In 1914, the “experts” of the Generalstab offered several assurances to the responsible decision-makers: (i) There was a rapidly approaching, apocalyptic event – the overtaking of Germany by Russia in military and economic power – the result of which, if not stopped, was the utter destruction of Germany as a flourishing polity and puissant European power. (ii) Only the Army had the power to stop it. (iii) The only method of addressing this on-coming apocalypse was to cede authority and command over events to the experts, who were to be given free hand in crafting a salvation from it, and that salvation was a specifically military solution. (v) There were no unknown developments to fearfrom the experts’ be-all-and-end-all solution of provoking a general war against Russia in the east (oh, for example, the American industrial economy being effectively thrown into the scales on the other side, or Italy getting bought by the Allies with promises of Austrian territory). (vi) Any known risks of side-effects had been fully accounted for and contained (the Schlieffen Plan and knocking France out of the war in six weeks, thereby reducing the British and more critically the Royal Navy to impotence . . . assuming Britain even bothered to come in at all).
You will readily recognize in the above the fundamental paradigm of the modern state. The organs pursue their own agendas, which they form internally and without reference, by and large, to the determinations of the responsible political organs. Those agendas grow from the agencies’ own objectives, the ultimate outcomes of which, whatever other attributes they might enjoy, invariably display one common feature: the increase in the control exerted by that agency, and the protection of its insiders. The agencies invariably present their programs never as a trade-off among competing priorities, but rather as the sole chance of staving off catastrophe. The agencies explicitly take the position that no one from outside them can possibly understand their pet issue(s) or be morally entitled to take a position on them which must be respected and is entitled to be accounted for in any ultimate resolution. The agencies strenuously maintain, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that they possess full knowledge of every possible consequence of their actions, have accounted for those consequences, and have so arranged everything – Everything, I tell you!! – that no meaningful harm can come from just turning the keys over to them, and if we’ll all just shut up and do as they say, the lion will lie down with the lamb and all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Hold that template up to nearly every single agency of modern government, and you will see it fits like pigskin on a pig. The legal system? Check. The EPA? Check. The Fed? Spot-on. The educational industry? Oh boy yes; try making a suggestion about how classroom education might be improved to someone carrying an NEA card in her purse and see how much an Outsider gets listened to. Pretty much any of the alphabet-soup agencies? Like it was tailor-fit to them. The military? Pretty much yes, although the cultural memory of Vietnam has done a great deal to pop a lot of seams in the cloth (kind of ironic that the one aspect of modern America which doesn’t fit perfectly the paradigm of summer, 1914 is precisely the American military in its relationship with the responsible organs of government).
And now remind me how the Kaiser’s decision to put the generals in the saddle in July, 1914 worked out.
We are glibly informed by our president that, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” and so he’ll jolly well do as he pleases and Congress be damned.
We have the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which actually isn’t a “board” at all, but rather a non-firable single administrator whose budget comes from the Fed’s surplus income and who answers to no one (mercifully, that structure was just the other day ruled to be unconstitutional by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit).
We have the EPA just more or less deciding to destroy the American power system through regulating carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”. The courts, indulging the lunacy, agreed that what comes out of your chest as you exhale is subject to regulation by the EPA. Think about that one, Gentle Reader. The product of one of your basic life processes is subject to regulation in Washington, D.C. You are a discharge point. The EPA runs the National Point Discharge Elimination System (at least for wastewater; I can’t say off the top of my head whether it applies to airborne pollutants — like your breath — as well). Can you say “residency permit” and “internal passport,” Gentle Reader? Don’t think it can’t happen; the Army Corps of Engineers famously tried to regulate wet-weather pools on private land as being “navigable waters”.
It is an unfortunate fact of Life that it is far, far easier to do harm than good. It took the better part of 600 years to build the cathedral at Cologne (or Köln, as we Germanophones would say it); one truck bomb lit off by an ISIS sleeper cell (and the German security services have admitted that such are already there) could bring it down with a few hours’ work. The German Generalstab managed, with a few weeks manipulation of processes and personalities, to provoke a war which just about destroyed European civilization; in fact, it did destroy it. If in 1895 you’d asked anyone but a raving lunatic whether it was OK to shoot and gas 6,000,000 people because of where — not just they, but their ancestors going back six generations — went to church, they’d have tried to calm you down while they quietly fetched the gentlemen bearing the straitjackets. If you’d suggested that it was OK to kick hundreds of thousands of people off land they and their ancestors had inhabited for centuries (as happened in Poland, and eastern Germany, and the Sudetenland), they’d have very carefully put a table between you and them. If you’d proposed that it would be a very good thing to starve to death your entire independent agricultural class, they’d have run for the hills shouting there was a madman on their tails. And yet by mid-century all this and much, much more had happened, and had been blessed not just by the perpetrators but by “serious” third-party observers, such as The New York Times whitewashing the Holodomor.
What might an uncontrolled administrative state work by way of mischief? I am afraid that I will live long enough to find out. I am terrified that my sons almost certainly will.
[Ed. — Wow. I haven’t put anything up on this humble little blog since spring. What have I been doing? I couldn’t tell you, for the life of me. The time just sort of heaves and sighs, and poof! there are another few months gone under the bridge. Is this what we have to look forward to, as we age?]
You can see it in the slightest things, sometimes. Someone in whom a particular mind-set, a philosophy, a Weltanschauung is so stamped that it has become a part of who he unthinkingly is will sometimes do or say something and not realize that he has laid bare, to some degree, the most fundamental mechanisms of his soul. Reporters, the overwhelming majority of whom in Western societies are hard-core leftists, are especially prone to do such things. They’re so far to the left that they don’t even realize that they are leftists; that’s just how the world looks to them. And so they’re forever turning cards face-up on the table so that the rest of us can see what’s going on behind their eyes. They’re no more self-conscious about it than a dog licking his balls.
I recently ran across a splendid example of it, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the newspaper I’ve used as my internet start page ever since CNN took to shilling for al Qaeda back in 2006. [Remember the snuff film they produced, of U.S. soldiers getting killed by snipers in Iraq? They made and released that film in an explicit, self-proclaimed effort to influence the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections. CNN took that film, which its own makers had announced as an intention to subvert the American political process, and ran it, again and again and again. What would we have thought if the Germans had made a similar film in 1944 and then Movietone had run it with the newsreels before every showing of every film in the U.S?]
The article deals with a statute with a wonderfully German name: the Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz, or the Federal Education Improvement Law. With typical glee in abbreviation and acronym (the Gestapo’s nickname was also one: in truth its full name was the Geheime Staatspolizei) it’s universally known as Bafög. In round numbers it provides for federal level financial aid to German students who are attending university (and presumably the technische Hochschulen as well). The process starts with filling out a standard form, much like the FAFSA form here in the U.S.
At least, the Bafög provides that financial aid to students whose families aren’t well-off above a certain threshold.
The article’s title — “Unity and Justice and Bafög” is a play on the first words of the German national anthem: Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit, unity and justice and freedom. The point of the article is that our newly-minted Abiturient — the holder of the coveted Abitur, which allows you to attend college in Germany — looking forward to the freedom and Selbstbestimmung (self-determination) of adulthood, with the university years as joyful, stimulating, liberating, challenging, endlessly intriguing opening chapter, is in for a let-down when he sits down to fill out the Bafög application. You see, on page 3 of the form the student is required to state his parent’s income and resources. Too much and you don’t get any Bafög assistance.
Oopsies! Turns out the blossoming student isn’t viewed as being quite liberated from his parents, after all. More to the point, his ability to be a care-free student —
is materially affected by attributes of his family. Wait. Isn’t one of the Big Points of university exactly the separation of the student’s identity from that of his background?
The article correctly states the issue implicated: We are called upon to take a position in the “eternal conflict between freedom, equality, and justice”. You see, the problem with Bafög is that it is taxpayer funded. By all taxpayers. Including the baker whose son is doing an apprenticeship at the local machine shop, whose daughter is a waitress at the restaurant down the street, and whose wife is a nurse’s assistant at the hospital. His and their money is being taken from them to fund the heightened life prospects of our new student. Remind us again how this is just and equitable, if the student’s ability to launch himself in life with recourse to the resources of those who — at this point in life at least, before spouse and children appear — have the No. 1 Biggest Stake in his future prospects, is not to be taken into account. [Note that just making university “free” to everyone doesn’t address our baker’s objections. He’s still having to fork out to give someone else’s child a leg up in life, irrespective of the ability to help of that child’s parents.]
The article suggests that from our hypothetical tradesman’s perspective, it would be much fairer to require the student and his family to borrow the money and then pay it back from his presumably greater earnings. As they do it in America, the author points out. But what has been the result of that system in America, the author asks. “Mountains of debt” just at the outset of one’s career.
The other way to go is the Scandinavian model, in which everyone — including the children of millionaires — has a right to support from the state. To treat the children of the wealthy differently would be “not to take them in earnest.” Whatever.
And now, the tell. “The liberation from the oppressing bonds of background, which it [the money-for-everyone system] promises the student, has another hook. It only come as a package. In other aspects of life as well the state prefers to work directly, without disruptive intermediaries such as the family, with people.” It is a “großangelegtes Vereinzelungsprojekt” — a comprehensive atomization project — with “grave side effects.”
There you have it. The socialist system rests upon what is in substance an unlimited claim upon the individual humans who make up society. It cannot and will not tolerate any other locus of power or independence.
First and foremost is the nuclear family. It is no accident that among the earliest “reforms” of every socialist dictatorship (and they all are, even the Scandinavian ones with the smiley face) is a programmatic subversion of the nuclear family. Divorce laws are loosened, the legal privileges of married status are withdrawn. Children are removed, sometimes by force (membership in the Hitlerjugend or the Young Pioneers was not optional), and often by enticement (universal “free” day-care, anyone?) from their parents’ supervision. The adults from whom they receive their daily, drip-drip-drip of influence are no longer the parents (or grandparents, or older siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, and so forth) but rather government functionaries, teaching lessons, values, and self-understanding chosen by the state. Children are encouraged to spy and report on their parents. Those who do (or who are said to have) are celebrated, publicly.
Churches come into the cross-hairs for the same reasons. From the liquidation of the hierarchy under the Bolsheviks to Hitler’s co-opting the German churches — kudos to Bonhoeffer and the other organizers of the Confessing Church movement in Germany; they weren’t going along to get along — there is a remarkably consistent pattern in the subversion of religious organization by socialist government.
The Cultural Revolution was more of the same. A couple of years ago I read a fascinating biography of Chairman Mao, and of course that period comes in for some close examination. Traditional Chinese society is, of course, exactly that: deeply and abidingly traditional. Although the Reds had completed their formal conquest of the country by 1949, and even though they had starved — very intentionally, by the way — somewhere between 45 and 60 million people — mostly peasants — to death during the Great Leap Forward (the link is to the Wikipedia article, which give a high of 42 million and a low of 18 million; on the other hand, this history gives the 45-60 range), Chinese society still remained in many of its core organizing principles the same traditional society it had been. Mao realized that he had to smash, irretrievably, that hold which tradition had, because in traditional Chinese society the state, as such, played so small a part in everyday life. Hence the Cultural Revolution’s targeting of everything which traditional China revered, first and foremost the teachers.
It was Mussolini who made famous the formulation: Everything within the state; nothing outside the state; nothing against the state. This is the first and basic credo of the socialist. You can pretty it up and say, “Government is just the name for the things we all do together,” but it’s the same thing. You can stick a label on it — Gleichschaltung — so you can speak in catch-phrases. You can even attempt to replicate it, to some degree, in the context of a free association, in such things as labor unions, with their ladies’ auxiliaries, athletic teams, children’s groups, and so forth. But that doesn’t really work, does it, without coercion. Witness what happened in places like New Harmony: Without the coercive power of the state, the experiment in an all-encompassing socialism flew apart under the stresses of its own centrifugal forces.
Which is why, at bottom, if the premise of socialism is this unlimited claim upon the individual lives of the people, its essence is violence, physical coercion.
But how does this fascism-with-a-smiley-face play out in wonderful Scandinavia? Let’s go back to that FAZ article for a reference to just one of those “grave side effects”: “There are for example few lands in which so many people as in Sweden die completely alone, without any connection with their family.” Or we can look at the WHO data on alcohol-related disorders: For males, the rate in the U.S. is 5.48%. In Sweden it’s 6.32%; in Finland 6.39%; in Norway (you know, that place we’re all supposed to be like) it’s a whacking 9.05%. Here’s a link to an article in The Washington Postabout the prevalence of diagnosed depression. In the U.S., according to the map at the link, the rate appears to be in the 4-4.5% range. It’s hard to tell from the map (there’s a further link to the underlying study, if Gentle Reader wants to read that far), but it looks like Sweden comes in at 4.5-5%, and Finland and Norway at 5.5-6%. Those don’t sound like terribly bad numbers, until you consider that the jump from 4% (the U.S. low-end) to 5.5% (the low-end in wonderful Norway) is a 37.5% leap.
It looks, in other words, as though whatever else the intrusion of the state into every nook and cranny of its citizens’ lives is working for the better, it still seems not to do a very good job of avoiding your dying drunk, depressed, and alone.
[N.b. Hanson, whom I’m mostly familiar with via the internet, is a very accomplished classical historian, with a heavy sideline in military history. I recently read — it was borrowed, so I had to return it, much to my chagrin — his The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, a comparative history of Epimanondas’s conquest of Sparta, Sherman’s march through Georgia, and Patton’s march through France in 1944. Fascinating stuff.]
Be all that as it may, Hanson looks at two shootings: the first, in 2014 of the violent criminal Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and the second of Kathryn Steinle, in San Francisco. Brown was black; Steinle was white. Brown had just committed a robbery; Steinle was walking down a pier with her father. Brown had just attacked and attempted to seize the weapon of the police officer who had matched him to a minutes-old radio alert of the robbery, and was shot dead in his tracks , from the front, while charging the officer. Steinle was shot dead in the back while . . . well, while walking with her father, minding her own business. Brown was shot by a police officer; Steinle was shot by a multiple-convicted felon whose very presence in the United States constituted a crime. The police officer who shot Brown was white; the convicted felon who shot Steinle was Mexican, an illegal alien.
After Brown was killed in the midst of his attempted third felony of that day (first: robbery; second: attacking and attempting to steal weapon from law enforcement officer; third: second attempt to attack and steal weapon from same), Dear Leader’s administration and his political allies very carefully stoked the fires of racial hatred, and Ferguson burned. After Steinle was shot dead by the felon who was very intentionally released by the City of San Francisco in spite of a request by federal authorities that they hold him until he could be deported (this would have been his sixth deportation), there were . . . crickets.
Hanson has the temerity once more to point out the very different treatment of the two killings, one indisputably justified (Brown’s), and the other (Steinle’s) indisputably an abomination, all but engineered by the left-extremists in the San Francisco city government.
Maybe VDH didn’t want to violate Godwin’s Law, which holds that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the closer to 1.0 approaches the probability that someone will make an explicit comparison to the Nazi era. But since Hanson put up his post yesterday, and today is November 9, I’m going to do the belly-flop for him.
On November 9, 1938, Germany exploded. Well, to be more precise, a segment of Germany exploded. That segment was the segment represented by synagogues and Jewish businesses. They were torched, their owners and congregants beaten, in many cases beaten to death. There was so much broken glass in the streets from smashed windows that the Germans knew it as “Kristallnacht,” or “crystal night.” Here’s the Wikipedia entry, for those curious.
Why did Victor Davis Hanson’s post on the political reaction, and the carefully orchestrated violence, in response to Michael Brown’s death put me in mind of November 9, 1938? Because Kristallnacht too was a highly orchestrated orgy of violence in response to a single killing. Ernst vom Rath was a German diplomat stationed in Paris. On the morning of November 7, 1938, a Polish Jew then living in Paris a teenager, Herschel Grynszpan (he had fled Germany in 1936; after his arrest he stated that he acted to avenge the news that his parents were being deported from Germany back to Poland), shot him five times. Rath died on November 9, by which time the Nazi powers had had time to organize “spontaneous” demonstrations of outrage inside Germany.
The destruction of November 9, 1938, was no less “spontaneous” than the observances surrounding the announcement that officer Darren Wilson, the police officer who successfully defended himself from Michael Brown, would not be indicted for any criminal offense.
Carousels are circular. Stand in one place long enough and everything you’ve seen before you’ll see again. Sort of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what else from the 1930s and 40s we’re going to see again in the coming years? Holodomor? Molotov-Ribbentrop? Munich? (Dear Leader sure made a run at that last by handing the Iranian mullahs a green light for nuclear weaponry.) Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?
Sobering thinking, it is.
[N.b. I don’t know whether I’ve pointed it out before on this ‘umble blog, but November 9 is a date pregnant with significance in German history. In 1918, the German republic was proclaimed and the Kaiser abdicated; in 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch failed; in 1938, they put on Kristallnacht; in 1940, Neville Chamberlain, the man who more than any other enabled Hitler to become the continental-scale monster he did, finally died; and, in 1989, the Berlin Wall, the physical embodiment of the war’s outcome, came down. Can’t make this stuff up.]
The Frankfurt International Book Fair began recently. It’s among the largest of its kind in the world and is regularly the setting for important doings in the world of literature and books.
This year’s fair was opened with an address from Salman Rushdie. You’ll recall him; he was the author who found himself the subject of a fatwa in 1989 because some Islamic cleric didn’t like something he’d written. For years he’s had to live quasi-underground, well-guarded. Rushdie, by the way, is far from the only author who’s found himself the target of the Islamofascists; Ayan Hirsi Ali, born Muslim and the victim of genital mutilation, has written extensively about we may gently call Islam’s woman problem. There is now a price on her head. To show their understanding and support for her ordeal and her courage in speaking plainly and publicly, in 2014 Brandeis University first offered and then withdrew, at the request of an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator organization (which is to say, the Council on American-Islamic Relations), the offer of an honorary degree.
Be all that as it may, Rushdie seems to have spoken pretty plainly, and in favor of freedom of expression. The link above is to The New York Times write-up of his address. It contains only the most bland of his statements: “Limiting of freedom of expression is not just censorship; it is also an attack on human nature.” True enough. But it wouldn’t be the NYT we know and love so well if they didn’t suppress things that didn’t support The Narrative.
So let’s go to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’scoverage. Rushdie categorically denied that freedom of expression is a culturally-specific human value; it is, he says, “universal.” In fact Rushdie characterized as “the greatest attack” on freedom of expression exactly that conceit of Western thinkers that the freedom is somehow specific to Western culture. Ouch. He specifically called out the rising tide of bullshit “trigger warnings” on American campuses and the general intent and effect of political correctness, which he firmly placed among attacks on freedom of expression. And he apparently didn’t spare the examples, calling out the law students who don’t want to read case books and other materials that use the word “rape,” or the Columbia University (!!) undergraduates who object to reading classical poetry because it depicts the gods having their way with women. And so forth. Rushdie also called out the “remarkable alliance between parts of the European Left and radical Islamic thinkers.” When an ideology — Islam — labels itself a religion, its enmity towards women, Jews, “and others” (homosexuals? Christians? apostates?), for some magical reason, gets “swept under the rug.”
Rushdie pointed out that while authors who are truly persecuted seldom survive, their art lives on. He named the examples of Ovid in the Roman Empire, Osip Mandelstam’s death in GuLAG at the hands of Stalin, and one of Franco’s victims. I will point out that he names no Western author . . . could that be because in fact we don’t kill our authors? No matter how much they may bellyache about how awful it is to be black/Central American/homosexual/female, etc?
In the FAZ‘s gloss, linked above, the author asserts that Rushdie’s address confronts the “error” that at the center of human are well-being and “the good life,” in which each may do as much of what he pleases as he will. To demonstrate that this is an “error” the author cites us to the characters of slaves in Roman comedies. They run the household, they go shopping, they celebrate; yet, they remain slaves, because everything is subject to the master’s reservation of approval (or not). This demonstrates, so our newspaper article’s author, that freedom is not a hallmark of private action but rather of a political state of being. And thus freedom of expression is the “test case” for freedom, because with “the impression that politics is more important begins self-enslavement.” I do wish the editors had allowed the author to write at greater length, because I find those last sentences tantalizing. Would it not be more correct to say that private actions are a hallmark of freedom? In fact, the very notion of “private action” does not exist in the absence of freedom; Solzhenitsyn writes in his magnum opus of the politicization of sleep itself under Stalin. What is more private than one’s opinions, formed from the processes of one’s own mind? In other words, you cannot suppress opinion and expression without a receding, pro tanto, of freedom itself.
And here let’s pause again to point out that none of Rushdie’s points above made it into the NYT write-up. Why not? Well, what legacy media institution is more invested in precisely the kinds of self-censorship in the name of a political superstructure condemned by Rushdie than the left-extremists at the Gray Lady? For them, the personal truly is political.
Well, so much for Salman Rushdie and his slap at the face of the apologists for Islamofascism. From Tuesday’s FAZ we have another article, on a Pegida demonstration in Dresden. The supra-headline is “Pegida radicalizes itself,” and for Exhibit A they trot out a photograph, at the linked article, of a toy gallows carried to the demonstration. On it are two miniature hangman’s nooses, with — what? an effigy? a photograph? — no, with two placards reading “Reserved for Siegmar Gabriel” (actually they even misspelled his name: it’s “Sigmar”) and “Reserved for Angela Merkel” printed on them. Take a real good look at the “gallows”: You couldn’t hang a slab of bacon from it. It’s a model, fer Chrissakes.
As Lutz Bachmann, the movement’s founder, correctly points out, every year during the Carnival parades around Germany there are many more explicit, and explicitly grisly depictions of currently-hated politicians. Geo. W. Bush was a favorite target.
But hist! we must not allow this expression to stand, must we? And sure enough, the prosecutor’s office is “investigating” the incident. As of press time no name had been announced of who made or who brought or who was carrying the gallows and its — O! the horror — two placards. And what is the alleged crime? Breach of the peace through threat of criminal action, and encouragement to criminal action. Really? This toy gallows was being carried in the middle of a hetzed-up public demonstration; if the peace had been disrupted then precisely in what increment did that toy increase the disturbance? And “encouragement”? Where, exactly, is the encouragement? Where exactly is there a statement that, “I’m going to hang Angela Merkel,” or “I want you to go fetch Siegmar Gabriel so I may hang him”? How in the name of illogic can you get any further than, “I think Merkel and Gabriel should hang”?
Remind me again how this pursed-lipped investigation by the prosecuting attorney’s office squares with the paean to freedom of expression so praised coming from Salman Rushdie’s mouth?
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, no less than for the NYT, the commitment of Europe to freedom of expression has to be written down in the “pious platitudes” column.
When I did my two junior years — high school and college — in Germany, I had to get used to the repeated observation by the locals on how lousy American beer was. Not that I viewed myself as carrying any brief for the American brewing industry, or that I entertained any chauvinistic opinions that nothing about Home could possibly be second-rate to anything, and in no event objectively bad, but it still rankled. It rankled because the observation was perfectly true, and because of the sheer repetitiousness of it. The favorite pejorative was “Spülwasser” — dishwater.
And they were right.
As Inspector Clouseau famously said, not any more.
From today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, we have a report on the American craft-brewing phenomenon. The report is that the number of breweries in the U.S. is now over 4,000; since 2007 the number of micro-breweries has tripled. All this since the 1970s, when fewer than a hundred enormous breweries shared the market. Germany has, in contrast, “only” 1,400 breweries. Poor dears; you could drink a different beer each day for almost four years and not have to repeat.
The report points out — truthfully — that American brewers are working with much more flexible rules than the Germans, bound as they are to the Reinheitsgebot (the purity law which dates to the early 16th Century; Brussels in recent years decreed it unenforceable for beer imported into Germany, because allegedly protectionist, but just try selling a beer in Germany that doesn’t comply with the Reinheitsgebot . . . and more power to them for it; the law still, it seems, applies to German domestic beer). One unnamed American craft beer advertises itself as having <sound of throwing up in mouth> raisin skins mixed in, to give it a fruitier taste.
On the other hand, and demonstrating commendable fairness, the article also points out that in many cases, the novel tastes don’t rely on adulterations like raisin skins, but rather on entirely new varieties of hops. Thus the craft beers produce a wondrous tapestry of new beer tastes (assuming that’s what you’re after) without violating even the letter of the Reinheitsgebot. The German firm which is the world market leader for hops — the Barth Gruppe — warns that this trend, which until recently simply wasn’t recognized or which was dismissed as a “bubble,” is now “irreversible.” Because the so-called “flavor hops” are predominantly grown in the U.S., if current trends continue the U.S. will soon surpass Germany as the world’s leading producer.
“In fact: American beers taste good.” That sentence would never have been even whispered 30 years ago, when I was last living there, let alone written in any reputable publication (because as of then it just wasn’t true). “The world is turning away from German beer,” the article observes. And the final sentence, more in sorrow than in anger: “A changing of the guard is underway.”
They may have signed the articles in May, 1945, but when one of the flagship German newspapers writes the above sentences, that’s what surrender looks like. You can bomb their cities into rubble; you can slaughter their soldiers and sink their sailors. That’s just a trial of raw force, after all. You can make cars that are bigger, faster, cheaper, cleaner <cough, cough!>, or safer; all those are just trade-offs among the physical constraints of motor vehicle design. But to beat them on quality? In beer? Do that and you jerk away one of the German’s central pillars of his self-image.
Here I must say that I do not particularly enjoy all this fruity-beer nonsense. I prefer the German taste; I also am something of a Guinness fanatic. Back in the day I drank an enormous (does the expression “enough to float a battleship” mean anything to you, Gentle Reader?) amount of Weizenbier — wheat beer — in both its Hefeweizen and Kristallklar variants. The only American wheat beer I’ve ever found that tastes even remotely like the Real Thing is Yuengling’s “summer wheat,” which is truly awesome, but which those lunkheads only brew, as the name implies, during summer. Ummm . . . . guys: Weizenbier is a year-round pleasure; just ask the folks from Donaueschingen. But de gustibus non disputandum est, I suppose; as long as you can produce that taste within the confines of the Reinheitsgebot, more power to you.
In September/October 1938, Hitler, with the active connivance of the cowards in Downing Street, dismembered a sovereign neighbor state, Czechoslovakia. This despite the very specific French treaty with Czechoslovakia which had been signed for the very express purpose of thwarting German aspirations against the Czechs’ territory. Had Chamberlain been willing to support the French by watching their backs on the Rhein, the French were willing to honor their treaty commitments to the Czechs. But Chamberlain was a coward, and his ruling Conservative Party had so neglected (under the circumstances, one might with some justice say “subverted”) the Empire’s defenses that Neville backed down, leaning on the French to do the same, and thereby selling out France’s treaty partner.
As only became known five years later, when the July 20 conspirators were in the process of being liquidated, had Chamberlain not chickened out in fall, 1938, there were armed groups of assassins literally gathered within blocks of the government district in Berlin, with detailed plans to kill or capture the entire Nazi senior leadership and liquidate the National Socialist state. They were standing by for orders which their leaders expected to be able to give them at any moment. Most of the senior military command was on board with the plot; Czechoslovakia had extremely formidable defenses and a very-highly-regarded self-defense capacity. But when Chamberlain caved and the military realized they were going to be handed the Czech defenses without a fight (I can’t recall which of the senior German commanders it was who, upon touring those defenses later, opined that there was no way they’d have taken them by assault), leaving the balance of the country indefensible, they were unwilling to move forward and the whole thing fizzled. The armed men stowed their weapons and went home. Many of the top players later were hanged for their parts in the July 20 conspiracy, or for their associations with those folks, or, in the case of Admiral Canaris and his assistant, Major General Hans Oster, when their parts in the 1938 conspiracy came to light in consequence of the post-1944 purges and investigations.
In March, 1939 Hitler completed his liquidation of the rump Czechoslovakian state. The Western powers looked on in fear. Britain’s response was to issue the unilateral guaranty of Polish territory which then was called on September 1, 1939, when Hitler sent his armored columns swarming into that country. With eventual results as known.
Hitler’s pretext for his initial assault on Czechoslovakia was the Sudeten Germans, who had settled in Bohemia centuries before, as early as the 12th Century, at the invitation of the then-kings of Bohemia (this was even before the Habsburgs acquired the franchise, so to speak). What is important to understand is that the areas in which they principally settled never were part of any of the lands which later went to make up the German Reich. The Germans who settled there occupied precisely the same relationship to their land of origin as the Chinese who settled in Manhattan.
All that notwithstanding, the Nazis cooked up this “heim ins Reich!” movement among the nationalistic elements of the Sudeten Germans (although they’d also settled elsewhere — Franz Kafka was a German Jew born and raised in Prague — they were concentrated in the Sudetenland). I’ve never read a specific history of that era in that place and among those specific actors, but what is pretty easy to glean is that Hitler was using the Sudeten Germans to de-stabilize the Czech government, both from within (via the usual 1930s-vintage political thuggery) and from without, as Dear Concerned Führer stepped forward to offer himself as their protector.
Suffice it to say Hitler got everything he could have dreamed of, and more. The Sudeten Germans went heim ins Reich, all right, and a fat lot of good it did them. And then of course Hitler loses the war and offs himself, leaving the Sudeten Germans to their fate. And what a fate it was. Gentle Reader must understand that Reinhard “Hangman” Heydrich earned his nickname as the deputy “Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia,” which is to say, a good chunk of what had been Czechoslovakia before the war. The Czechs took him out in mid-1942, using explosives dropped to them by the British.
When the war was over, Edvard Benes (sorry: can’t rig the diacritic over the final “s”; Churchill, by the way, pronounced his name “Beans”), the Czech president so viciously sold down the river in 1938, resumed his office, and promptly set about giving the Sudeten Germans their stated wish, insofar as that conformed to what they’d allowed to be done in their name seven years before. He expelled them en masse, back to the dear ol’ Reich.
Seventy years ago today, in a town then called Aussig (now called Usti nad Labem), there was an explosion in town, in a former sugar factory (must have processed sugar beets there). In the time-honored tradition — think principally of what happened to towns’ Jewish populations from the 14th Century onward every time the plague, or the cholera, or a swarm of locusts, or whatever passed through — the locals decided it must have been the work of the (newly declared) outsiders, viz. the Sudeten Germans. And the pogrom began. Their homes were ransacked, their businesses trashed, they were herded into the streets — men, women, and children indiscriminately — and beaten, or shot. Quite a number of German workers on their way home after shift were crossing a bridge over the Elbe on their way home. They were thrown into the river and shot as they swam. Total dead may have been over 200. No information about the total injured, or the extent of the property destruction.
The bridge the workers were thrown from was at the time, and to this day remains, named after Edvard Benes. It was Benes and his administration who crafted the expulsion statutes.
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain there has been some movement of reconciliation between the Czechs and the Germans. But from this write-up about the pogrom at Aussig in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it seems to be of extremely modest extent. In fact it seems that the Czechs have held, more or less, to a philosophy of good riddance. They certainly didn’t ask for the war. In truth, in 1945-48 as the new political and ethnic polarities of post-war Europe were taking shape, can you really blame someone who was born and grew up in a Wilsonian hell-hole of “self-determination” among the crazy-quilt patchwork of Eastern and Central Europe for deciding that he was going to lance, once and for all time, that particular ethnic boil?
The Sudeten Germans were a loose end in July, 1945. And they got tied up. The dead among them as well must be reckoned with the war’s casualties, as must the dead in Poland, where the killing also extended for months past the war’s nominal end.
As with so many other things, I confess myself ambivalent about what happened to the Sudeten Germans. It was unspeakably cruel, of course, forcibly and with no compensation at all, to uproot an entire people from what had been their homeland for up to 700 years. On the other hand, so long as they were there they were available for further exploitation by future unscrupulous madmen, uses which the Czechs had just watched play out on their own home soil. Gentle Reader might protest, “But the war was over. Everyone could tell that would never happen again. Those days were over and done with.” To which the only reply is that no one could tell anything of the kind. “It’ll never happen again,” is precisely what was said in 1918-19, exactly the promise that goofy megalomaniac Wilson made to the peoples of the old Habsburg Empire. Remind me how that worked out, again?
I’m paraphrasing here, but I recall running across a quotation from Winston Churchill, from when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. He presided, as Gentle Reader will recall, over one of the most portentous arms races in human history, the naval capital ship race between Imperial Germany and Great Britain. Someone tried to downplay the necessity of Britain’s engaging in and winning that race by pronouncing that of course Germany would never dream of attacking Britain and destroying its existence by intercepting its sea lines of communication. Churchill pointed out that at the Royal Navy it wasn’t their job to see that Germany wouldn’t do it, but rather that it couldn’t. I will submit that in the immediate post-war years, Edvard Benes was faced with similar considerations. Gazing out over his bleeding, war-torn land, his job was not to see that groups like the Sudeten Germans wouldn’t again be used to destroy the country he was sworn to defend, but that they couldn’t be so used.
And so the Sudeten German question got finally resolved.
