I'm not sure how much I buy into this idea of the Hitler Myth. While it does make sense that he was a very charismatic individual who managed to convince the German public that the Nazi party and its ideals, I'm still not sure how much of that actually had to do with this idea of him as a person who was destined for "greatness". I feel like a lot of this has to do with his reputation after his death. I remember in class, we talked about how many politicians (including American presidents) have this mythical ideal attached to their time in history, but in part due to the fact that the discussion ended up naming pretty much every major president of the last 100 years (and could've easily gone beyond that) I'm left wondering how much of the myth is created after they've left their office. Hitler definitely needed, and achieved, massive amounts of popular support among the German people. That said, I feel like Hitler is in a lot of ways an example of someone who managed to be in the right spot at the right time. He was definitely somewhat of a revolutionary before his rise to power and WW2, but was essentially passed off as being yet another person in a society that was crying out for some sort of leadership, and his radical beliefs were just viewed as that. Still, when I read everything I do about the period under Nazi Germany, I'm left feeling like his mythical persona is being blown up for the sake of explaining why someone was able to lead a country to pursue genocide.

Post 10/5 -10/11

Reading the chapter in Germans into Nazis dealing with the events of November of 1918, I find the role of the Freikorps to be especially fascinating. With the sheer influx of military personel returning after the War, it seems obvious that they would eventually band together, but I never would have thought that they would be placed into anti-leftist groups. Still, it does make sense considering the fact that the German government had always used the Communists as one of the bigger scapegoats, and with the worker's revolt and other social groups rising to prominance it's easy to see how the government would have looked for some way to combat that. It does seem like this spelled the end for yet another German revolution, as the revolutionaries had to shift their positions now that they were facing some sort of armed resistance. At the end, it seems like the Freikorps helped to keep the German public fractured after the failings of Weimar.

Post 9/28 - 10/4

During the discussions and lectures about World War I, there was one thing I couldn't stop thinking was "How could the Germans be so stupid?" From the beginning it seems like they were destined to lose the war, mostly due to their inability to plan correctly. The Schlieffen Plan in particular is kind of stunning in how shortsighted it was, requiring a speedy defeat of the French and a lack of participation by the British. That said, I do feel like the overconfidence has a very logical explanation, the Germans increase in industrial and economic power made them feel like they were above the rest of Europe. It seems that military and industrial technology had grown faster than anyone expected, and they were left to fight a war using what was then high-tech equipment, but without a strategy that could take advantage of these advances. Then, you've got the German navy, which was probably an even bigger failure than the Schileffen plan due to its inability to do much of anything. While I'd already known that there was still a Prussian influence in Germany during this time, due to the lands that had been Prussia making up the majority of the Germanic Empire, Germany's failures in WW1 seem to be directly due to this influence. Still, I'm left wondering how anyone involved thought this could be a good idea, unless they were so blinded by Germanic pride that they couldn't imagine anything less than a total victory.

9/21 - 9/27 Blog Post

I found the discussions on mass politics to be pretty fascinating, while I think it's pretty apparent that governments are willing to do whatever it takes to keep their power, seeing a specific example of it in practice and what it (possibily) led to is eye opening. In the article "Populists and Patricians", the author gives yet another explanation for the difference in Germany's historical development as compared to the other countries of Europe, mentioning that agriculture was still very much a way of life for many Germans, moreso than the English. Factor in the lack of education that most of these workers and peasants, and you've got an opportunity to shape their political beliefs in whatever manner you want, which they were given an opportunity when the rail became the dominate form of travel. That said, despite the article's attempt to explain the peasants of Germany as being a more powerful group of people, I still feel like he gives them a little bit too much credit. Reading the article, I definitely felt that it seemed more like the German government was just trying to find another group of people to use, and this time they had the dissatisfied peasants still reliant on farming to provide for themselves and their families. While the German government did integrate a lot of the policies that these activist groups were looking for, I feel like the only reason they gave as much as they did was because they knew they had an angry, rebellious group on their hands that if they lit the fuse at the right time, would have something very powerful under their control. Later in "Populists and Patricians" the author mentions how this rise in mass politics essentially destroyed whatever remaining power the liberals had, and even seemed to do some damage to the more centrist groups, which seems like the goal that Bismarck was trying to achieve during his entire reign. While the liberals had been neutered for a long time, it seems to me like the government was concerned with them having any presence on the political stage, as though that would cause irreparable damage to whatever plans they had. I do feel like I'm reading into things a bit too much, so any comments would be welcome.

Week of 14 - 20 September Post

Most of the lectures and discussions this week seemed to center around the failings of the liberals in Germany, and their inability to keep the conservatives from pushing their radical viewpoints, leading to the creation of the so called "Second Reich". That said, I feel like it's almost too easy to just blame everything on the liberals, mostly because their failings were most noticeable. First of all, it assumes that if the liberals had the power, that they would've essentially done a perfect job in governing the country, something that I think wouldn't have happened. Later on in the Germany Empire of 1871 essay, the author seems to imply that the liberals did have a decent amount of power in the government, though they refused to work against Bismarck due to the amount of profit they were making through his trade policies. The desire for a unified Germany also seems to have worked against the liberals, it's easy to see that they might have thought that any attempt at going against Bismarck would have a negative effect on the unification. I do agree with the idea that if Germany showed any signs of trying to re-organize their government, some other European country would have probably attacked and succeded, and maybe even caused the rest of Europe feeling the need to take up arms, and starting a World War 1 conflict earlier on (I feel like we talked about this during the discussion, but it is something I think worth re-examining). Though I'm also left to wonder if a massive war in Europe centered around Germany was inevitable, and maybe starting it earlier would have been hypothetically "better". Tying in with the "Macht in der Mitte" theory, I think Germany's strategic location meant that it would be involved in any European conflict, I'm not sure how much trouble Russia and Asia were expected to cause, but I can easily see the various governments thinking that Germany would offer a strategic location. At the end, I feel like it's impossible to section out any one period of German (or European) history and claim that that particular period was where it all went wrong.

Week of 8/24 - 8/28

Coming from a background of American and Latin American history, the first week of this class has been very informative. Personally, I have always thought of Germany as having its own unique identity, and while I'd always know it was essentially a collection of different countries some of the material still came as a surprise. I do agree that this is one of the main reasons why the French were able to invade Germany as well as the lack of any true form of rebellion, despite the oppressive conditions the people were facing. The Frankfurt Parliament in particular seemed to suffer from the different regions of Germany having their own specific interests to look out for, in addition to any political divides between the peoples. I found the discussion on the German middle class to be particularly fascinating, it reminded me a lot of Nixon's "silent majority" and it seems like in almost every society there's this large group of the population that is not part of the more extreme and radical groups, both right and left. For me the failures of the 1848 rebellions is still a little bit difficult to get my head around, as it seems like everything that could have gone wrong for Germany did. I guess if you want to have a successful rebellion, the conditions need to be absolutely perfect, or you just have to have enough luck.