To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
I'm still reading “The R*pe of Europa”, a book about nazi plunder of European art.
The R*pe of Europa delves a lot into Göring and Hitler schemes to collect art. Hitler's collection was organized for his future “Führermuseum” in Linz, but in practice it was basically his own private collection. Göring had his own agents and dealers working to acquire art across occupied Europe (mostly through confiscated property, museum looting or forced acquisitions where the owner couldn't simply turn down the nazi's offers too many times) and they did what they could to get the best pieces before Hans Posse who reported directly to Hitler, as once Posse determined a certain piece was destined to Linz it was completely out of reach.
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!historychads next on my reading list is Niall Ferguson's “The Pity of War”.
Ferguson is one of the very few conservative historians who are considered “respectable” (though many in /r/askhistorians dislike him for his British Empire apologia).
In The Pity War he presents his thesis that WW1 was Britain's fault, he believes the Bongs should have allowed the Germans to crush France and Russia, that France would have fallen rather quickly without the Bongs therefore not prolonging the conflict and that an German dominated Europe would have been a better outcome as it would have meant no Hitler, no National-Socialism, no Communist Russia (that's doubtful, if the Germans beat the Russians the Revolution still happens, but I guess the Provisional Government could have survived in this scenario and avoided a Bolshevik takeover !anticommunists thoughts on that?), and most important for Ferguson, the British Empire would have lasted for much longer.
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That means he's good!
I really don't like all that alternative history ad hoc nonsense. No one would've predicted all that Hitler shit happening from 1914, and then something else entirely batshit could have happened 30 years later. It can be entertaining, but it shouldn't be called history or non-fiction.
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um Love Niall Ferguson 🥰🥰🥰I have his book Doom but havent read it yet
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Have you ever read "the sleepwalkers"? Book that explores ww1's origins. While the author is a germanophile he is IMO even handed in explaining how everyone contributed to the blaze. In particular for the UK he argues how a tiny clique of liberal politicians went to war with Germany primarily as a way to contain Russia, which is surprising.
Tbh I'm not sure how much longer the German empire might have lasted in its peaceful state, its constitution was very bad and it left a politicized army hostile to the rise of the SDP outside of civilian control. The other country with a similar constitution, Imperial Japan, saw its democracy implode for similar reasons.
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Not yet, but I've heard about that book, looks very interesting.
Absolutely, besides their militarism the Prussian nobility despised democracy and you can see that during the Weimar Republic, the comparison with Imperial Japan is interesting, Germany was basically a Military dictatorship from 1916 onwards, I can see them adopting the same Japanese flavor of fascism later on.
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It's not often discussed but the destruction by a coup of the Prussian state's sdp government was done by Papen and his prussian boomers, a year or two before hitler.
Clark (sleepwalker author) wrote a history of Prussia that I read and he elegantly says of the 1932 prussian coup that "it was the betrayal of new prussia by old prussia", where social democratic new prussia was rooted in prussian traditions of service to the state and a powerful bureaucracy.
This history of prussia ( Iron Kingdom) had its up and downs but I enjoyed it overall
Edit: also, imperial japan's constitution was explicitly based on the imperial german one!
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What an r-slur. The problem wasn't Hitler, the problem was Germany. Ludendorff was literally a Nazi.
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The Prussian junkers were all antisemites, but I think the point Ferguson is trying to make is that it wouldn't be so extreme, and maybe he's right. Hitler was obsessed with eliminating the jews since the beginning of his political career, in the early 1920s he spoke on an interview that if he ever gained power he would hang every single jewish man, woman and child and let their corpses rot in public (VERY NORMAL AND STABLE PERSON!) and the Holocaust happened because of him and his SS goons getting progressively more and more radicalized and willing of pleasing him to get promotions. Ludendorff would have been a warmongering dictator and would likely have enacted antisemite laws, but he wasn't as consumed as Hitler with ideas of racial purity (the core tenet of National Socialism was Aryan supremacy, lebensraum and the extermination of jews and other “inferior races”).
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They weren't quite as antisemitic but the bosches were already genocide enthusiasts and it's only a matter of time before they'd find some other group to exterminate like the Khoisan.
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Agree on that, the Kaiserreich was a militaristic authoritarian state, even with the Social Democrats winning most of the Reichstag seats there was a lot electoral fraud and undemocratic mechanisms to avoid them to get power in Prussia, plus the Kaiser had absolute power over the military and could appoint whoever he liked as Chancellor. A victorious Germany would probably have ended up like 1940s Japan, a fascist military dictatorship with a figurehead emperor.
Ferguson argues that German militarism is exaggerated, so let's see if that's convincing
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