In search of the real Germany

I have always loved Germany and Germans, or at least what little I know of it and the few Germans I have met. I love the language, love the sound of it, its particular quirks, and its "forthrightness" I guess you could say. It was my first language and I spoke it up until my fourth year, after we moved back to America. I have always been fond of it, even though I had never studied it formally or heard it spoken much. It is, of the six languages I now study as a middle-aged adult, by far the easiest for me. I suppose my brain must've retained a significant memory of it since childhood. To think, all these years I have been carrying around with me in my head a buried treasure.

How do I like and respect Deutschland, let me count the ways.

I love the traditional architecture of the Germans -- it is strong and beautiful and comforting. They have sadly abandoned the old styles but even in the modern age Germans have a flair for color and a way of simplifying their designs that strongly attracts me.

I love German folk and classical music. It is simple, fun, and generally happy. Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss (Jr.) are my favorite composers -- there is no more beautiful or moving music on the face of the planet.

My entire family loves the old folk stories, and we read them all over again every couple of years.

Everybody the world over has always respected German engineering.

A large percentage of the American population is of direct German descent, and they seem like nice, smart people to me. America loved Germany right up until the time we declared war on each other.

But how many times had I seen on TV and in the movies that Germans were nothing but evil? Must be a 100,000 by now, maybe a million. How long had Hollywood told me to hate them and their evil leader, Hitler? Some in the media have asked (rhetorically, of course), "How could the German people ever elected and followed such an evil government?," the real implication always being that the German people, as a race, were themselves responsible and will do it again if given half a chance, so we must keep them down forever or at least until we breed the Whiteness out of them.

So here in America, we have two opposing views of Germans, one of them as evil incarnate and one older, pre-Hollywood version of them as a noble, hardworking, laudable people.



I decided to investigate these contradictory views without the aid and comfort of Hollywood and the MSM. It will be difficult because all of the ready information is mostly anti-German propaganda left over from the World Wars. So, where to begin? From my travels around the Interwebs, I think the best place is with Friedrich Braun, the most patriotic German I know of. He had helped me once before on this question but I haven't had time to read the long list of books he recommended; I really wanted to start with some shorter articles. So yesterday I returned to TheCivicPlatform where he posts frequently and found the following. What I have posted below are the paragraphs that were the most interesting to me, and that represent a partial summary of the discussion.

It starts off with an introduction for truth seekers from a wandering sage who goes by the handle of Wintermute. The intro and the four linked articles were posted in response to an ongoing dispute between Braun and GuessedWorker, an Englishman who runs MajorityRights.com. Here is a bit from the intro, warning those who insist on following the path of truth, wherever it leads:

Some of you here have begun to suspect, and others to fear, that the path blazed by Geoff is also going to have to be walked by you. Having drunk this cup of gall to the dregs myself, I will also affirm that it is dangerous to your emotional equilibrium, your religious faith, your relationships, and your personal health. If you follow the bread crumbs of fact, re: the “Holocaust”, Barbarossa, Katyn, Dunkirk, Danzig, and of course, the trail of inquiry whose daunting entrace is KMac’s incomparable trilogy or the book “When Victims Rule”, to be found over at the Jewish Tribal Review, your personal integrity is going to be tested to the limits and beyond. In addition to that, you will be subject to certain psycho-physiological states that you won’t find pleasant at all. Deprogramming is not for sissies. I have seen people, learning the truth about the “Holocaust” for the first time, shudder, experience chills, weep uncontrollably, vomit, etc.

I’m about as close to an expert in this “field” as anyone [ed: true; a better amateur historian I have not found] and I state without reservation: after you “get it”, it takes about three years before the shock - and I use the term in its medical sense - begins to wear off. Though in all honesty, it never really goes away completely - only some of the more extreme manifestations subside.

An excerpt from Part I:

Although you don’t like to hear it, the Third Reich was a fantastic time. It was a time when Germany was happy, healthy, prosperous, clean, homogeneous, orderly, beautiful, and a powerhouse. A time when Germany’s government had real Germans at its helm who had Germany’s best interests at heart. Simply by far the best years in German history! A magical time for Germans. [ed: how different from today, when all Western leaders are hell-bent on destroying us]

As someone commented on my blog:

Yes, indeed. My mother, who was a young girl at the time, often pities us (her children), that we did not and probably never will experience anything like it. She says it is nowadays just inconceivable and for us unimaginable. She is naturally not talking about material wealth (even so everyone finally got around after the lean years before), but about the spirit and sense of freedom and optimism regarding the furure. She always tell us, what a good time (schöne Zeit) it had been. According to her the contrast to the filth and decadence of Germany today (of which she is thorougly disgusted) could not be any bigger.

From the comments in Part II (some of the commenters here are excellent historians as well):

If those brit soldiers in their graves from WWII could see the “modern” world we have now, they would have gladly made peace with Germany. Its amazing that after the horrifying useless slaughter of WWI, that it took only 25 years to convince the British people to cut off their other leg and lay prostrate for the 3rd world to swarm over them. That is the power of the media, that it can convince individuals that committing suicide is healthy and noble. These myths die hard, even as Britain sinks further into oblivion, these noble “lions” sit back, pat themselves on the back and tell themselves what a wonderful world they have made and how horrible any alternative would have been. How many more books and movies promoting these myths must we endure?

Any war that requires the government to send its troops to dark movie theaters to explain why they should hate and kill their enemy, is a fraud.

From Part III comments:

The whole Nazi notion of “Germans as the master race” really wasn’t a very important concept or idea during the reign of the Nazis and was only discussed by the Nazi intellectual, professorial, and social elite.

The whole concept certainly wasn’t widely known or propagated amongst the German masses, though it may have been mentioned here and there by teachers who held strong Nazi sympathies.

Right. The Third Reich was surrounded by enemies while trying to overcome serious economic problems and an important communist/terrorist minority at home. The idea that they spent their days dreaming up theories regarding their superiority is for the birds, or the Guessedworkers of the world.

From Part IV:

This dark image of a sinister, aggressive, predatory, and militarily regimented Germany only became prevalent in the present century. The English historian, Frederic William Maitland, has described the once characteristic attitude toward the Germans:

… it was usual and plausible to paint the German as an unpractical, dreamy, sentimental being, looking out with mild blue eyes into a cloud of music and metaphysics and tobacco smoke.1

The French writer, Madame de Stael, romantically portrayed for the Napoleonic world of the early nineteenth century a Germany utterly unlike the grotesque image later drawn by the Allied propagandists of two World Wars. Madame de Stael’s Germans were a nation of “Poets and Thinkers,” a race of kindly, impractical, other-worldly dreamers without national prejudices and, strangely, in the light of later propaganda, “disinclined to war.”2

In America too, a similarly warm view of things German predominated. It is difficult to exaggerate the constructive impact of German institutions upon American life and the cordiality of the reception accorded them in the century or so from Frederick the Great to Bismarck. The story of this golden age of German-American relations has been magnificently chronicled by a very thorough and gifted American scholar, Henry M. Adams, in his recently published Prussian-American Relations, 1775-1871.3 In the cultural and intellectual spheres as in the political sphere the relationship was one of immense mutual profit.
...
One cannot imagine a more vivid contrast than that between de Stael’s Germans and the stereotyped image of monocled, burr-headed, heel-clicking, mindless robots which Hollywood did so much to popularize in the thirties and forties.

This is only an introduction, of course, but plenty of new ideas present themselves already, more than enough for the average student to busy himself in several years of investigation. I highly recommend the links found on TheCivicPlatform, they are a virtual Library of Congress of samizdat on Germany and European war history. Of course you won't hear any of this on CNN nor on the History Channel, and you are not likely to find these books on display at your local B&N, either, even though many are written by well-known and respected historians and political figures.