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I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are ve

• jebarker 1y ago
  > an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable. Yes! I recently read this book and was pretty shocked by how much was chalked up to the German character. I came away feeling neither comfort nor increased panic relating to the current US situation. I read the book because I was hand-wringing about how complicit I am just by getting on with my privileged and comfortable life right now. I didn’t really come away with any resolution to that question or clear ideas about how I should change my behavior.
  • simpaticoder 1y ago
    Anecdotally, having lived in Germany for a couple of years recently, there is a perceptible national character. The best way to understand it is to ponder the difference between a drag race and a rally race - in one, success means going as fast as possible; in the other success means getting to navigation points within a window of error. Or, with beer: in America success is discovering a new beer with a different flavor profile. In Germany, success is figuring out a way to even more precisely and consistently conforming to a centuries-old brewing standard. This, along with a kind of blunt speech that presupposes the listener to have little in the way of vanity or ego (or challenges them to not express it), is the "German character" as far as I can tell. I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.
    • MrJohz 1y ago
      Eh, I think that's a bit overblown. In theory, Germans are famously methodical and precise, in practice the rail network is falling apart, a major bridge in my city recently collapsed due to lack of proper maintenance, and "made in Germany" is mainly an encouragement to buy local, rather than buying for quality. My experience of Germans, having lived among them for almost a decade, and having married one of them, is that you can usually find a counterexample to any supposed German characteristic just by looking around the room. If there is any overarching theme to the German psyche, it might be a tendency to conservatism (in the sense of preferring to do things as they've always been done), but at the same time you've also got radical groups on the left and the right that are a fundamental part of the democratic fabric of Germany. I think there are some cultural touchstones that are very German, and those have an influence on how Germans think and act, but I think this can be very contradictory and it's difficult to draw a single picture here. For example, people are very conscious of antisemitism here because of how much it's talked about in schools and the media, and that informs national foreign policy. But at the same time, Germans, like most Western Europeans, have grown up in a time of peace and see war and aggression as a cardinal sin. Both of these inform the German response to something like the situation in Gaza, but the result averages out to a policy that's broadly in line with many other liberal European states. All in all, I think you'll get more insight from phrenology than from trying to figure out the German character in too much depth.
      • moomin 1y ago
        Funnily enough, the book goes into the anti-war thing a bit. The idea put forward in the book is that straight after the war there wasn’t a great deal of anti-war sentiment, just anti-losing sentiment. But after the Cold War started, and the major powers wanted Germany militarised again, to be on the front line of a battle against checks notes other Germans on the other side’s front lines, they developed an anti-war culture pretty quickly.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • pas 1y ago
        why things are falling apart? isn't it mostly good old Baumol's cost disease (relative productivity decreasing) coupled with the lack of economies of scale (even more productivity backsliding) coupled with spending priorities (services, aging population, "green" and climate change stuff) coupled with NIMBY issues (which again put a downward pressure on scale, and thus productivity)? our built environment suffers from the fact that there's no Apple Autobahn, manufactured in China at Foxconn, using competitive cutting-edge tech shit in the most cost-efficient way?
  • noobermin 1y ago
    While reading about history can always be enlightening, I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong and what your behaviour should be.
    • jrmg 1y ago
      Who or what should we be discussing or consulting ethics with? Is the line drawn at the written word? It’s easy to read your comment as meaning ‘never let others influence your opinions on right or wrong’ which is (I hope!) obviously ludicrous.
    • schiffern 1y ago
      >I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong While it's not my cup of tea, from what I've heard there are a few major world religions that might disagree on that point.
    • jebarker 1y ago
      Yes, I do read books to give me different perspectives on life that help me form my beliefs about what is right, wrong and ethical. The suggestion that’s a bad idea is pretty incredible to me. Where do you think I should go for such things?
    • ProllyInfamous 1y ago
      The entire purpose / point of this book is that the overly-oppressed majority is easily susceptible to becoming "NAZIS," and why National Socialist mentality ought to be actively DISCOURAGED. But you're just going to see the swastika on the cover (which is used appropriately as the symbol of hate it represents) and you'll not even attempt discussions at preventing future Nazi-creating societies. Good work /s If you search my username, I have provided the couple-dozen quotes from this book that alarmed me most, in regards to society in 2020 (when I first read the book). I am not a supremicist in any capacity — I am a blue collar union electrician (so: I hate everybody equally smile_face.GIF). But I've heard it all on jobsites, and not all hate is "misdirected"...
  • computerthings 1y ago
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• kangs 1y ago
  a lot of the western world learns only speaks about ww2 (let alone ww1, americans civil war, etc.). there has been countless western and non western wars with slightly different patterns and a taste of "winner writes history". one i find interesting is the french revolution. its also fairly recent, but not as tampered with as ww2 history. for example, there still are records of how terrible and cruel the revolutionaries were, how everyone was a royalist that needed to die and how the populace started to be ready to revolt - again - right after the change of power. thankfully, things eventually calmed down - as they were cruel, but not dumb. either way I'd basically recommend expending the reading curriculum a bit.
  • permo-w 1y ago
    what elements of WW2 history are you suggesting are most tampered with?
    • qcnguy 1y ago
      [flagged]
• permo-w 1y ago
  what made the stuff about national character questionable?
  • tbrownaw 1y ago
    It requires there to be meaningful systematic differences between the people who happen to live in different countries.
    • permo-w 1y ago
      so what are you suggesting causes, for example, the French to strike more often than other Western countries? or Japan to typically have particularly low inflation? or Argentina to typically have particularly high inflation?
      • noobermin 1y ago
        Waiting for the country of people who fly out of their mother's wombs or whom are born in a sack on their father's backs and further those who mentally convince themselves to pass through walls.
        • permo-w 1y ago
          so there not being the difference between a human and a kangaroo or a frog and a bat means that the difference between an Argentine and a Japanese person isn't real either? literally meaningless analogy
      • rixed 1y ago
        Unless we disagree on the meaning of "national character", isn't that easy to come up with 100 other reasons to explain those economic/political differences?
        • permo-w 1y ago
          what is your definition of "national character"?
• mcfunley 1y ago
  To your point, the thing that jumped out at me reading this book is how familiar the German characters are. People have loved to imagine that the Nazi era in Germany was so anomalous it could never happen again. But no, the Germans were just like us.
  • dghlsakjg 1y ago
    This is my problem with a lot of literature and movies. The Nazis are always unfathomably evil, when in reality, most of them were just people doing their jobs. I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.
    • southernplaces7 1y ago
      >Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions Which by the way was largely false, for both low and high-ranking Nazis. It was usually possible to slowly or even quickly distance yourself from directly committing atrocities (or coordinating them) and get fobbed off into some low-key administrative position without fearing anything like serious punishment. The Nazi machinery was harsh towards openly voiced disobedience and discontent, but surprisingly tolerant of a "weak stomach" or a lack of what their fanatics called moral fiber (being able to protect the race by butchering innocent others). Christopher Browning in his book about Reserve Battalion 101, mentioned in the comment right above yours, emphasizes this point about a lack of severe punishment for not participating, repeatedly about the members of that death squad. The ugly black magic of the Nazi system was specifically that it often made previously, otherwise ordinary people internally normalize mass murder into something they could do. The above aside, image too the kind of empty shell of fundamental human morality you'd need to be to continue sending innocent people, including women and children to their deaths in gas chambers, just so you can avoid looking bad on the social scene around you.
• heresie-dabord 1y ago
  > interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. The observations about the ineffectiveness of US propaganda in post-war Germany are interesting. But for all the flaws of Meyer's work, the book is about how people thought they were free during the sordid, infamous Nazi period. Above all, the people who saw themselves as the honest folks supporting the good principles of the dictatorship. It is also interesting to read how people — the very same who were supporters of the dictatorship and who helped persecute the target groups — are comfortable in all their justifications. "Sure, we knew these people who were taken away. But what could we do?" "I didn't do anything terrible. If something terrible happened, it happened later, elsewhere." "The Great Leader failed only because he had some bad people in his circle."