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Weimar Germany- D,E,F

Interesting article, particularly about the Führerprinzip being much discussed about before the emergence of the Nazis, but some typos are rather glaring. Keiser instead of Kaiser, Keiserriach instead of Kaiserreich, sighing the treaty instead of signing it.
 
Interesting article, particularly about the Führerprinzip being much discussed about before the emergence of the Nazis, but some typos are rather glaring. Keiser instead of Kaiser, Keiserriach instead of Kaiserreich, sighing the treaty instead of signing it.

Yeah, English isn't Sarah's first language and she relies heavily on spellcheck.

That's on me to correct and I thank you for pointing out where I've missed stuff so I can fix it.
 
Incidentally, Babylon Berlin, which is set in the last years of the Weimar Republic, has been on my to-watch list for a while now. I'd like to know if someone here has seen it and what they think of it.
 
Incidentally, Babylon Berlin, which is set in the last years of the Weimar Republic, has been on my to-watch list for a while now. I'd like to know if someone here has seen it and what they think of it.
I've seen all three seasons and it is absolutely brilliant. It captures everything so well, and while there are a few anachronistic gaffes here and there, the showrunners really put in the effort for it to be as period-accurate as possible. It's a gorgeous show with genuinely gut-wrenching scenes, fully-fleshed out characters, and a rollercoaster ride of emotions from start to finish. The decadence and splendor of Weimar Berlin is put on full display, and it makes for an amazing watch. It is hands-down one of my favorite shows to come out in the last decade.
 
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Incidentally, Babylon Berlin, which is set in the last years of the Weimar Republic, has been on my to-watch list for a while now. I'd like to know if someone here has seen it and what they think of it.

I didn't find it that good to be honest.

The Fassbinder adaptation of Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz is still the gold standard for late Weimar Berlin to me and it doesn't get more gut-wrenching than parts of Eine Handvoll Menschen in der Tiefe der Stille.
 
Interesting to be reminded of how the German Socialists failed to form a 'broad front' to back up the first potentially reformist non-monarchic govt of a united Germany when they had the chance and get some of their policies passed into law by a trade-off with a weak centrist govt that needed their votes after 1920/1. Instead they continued obsessing about who had taken what attitude to the near-revolution in 1919 and boycotting anyone who had 'deserted the cause' and/or had been prepared to ally to the Right and to a military putsch,even if they had done the latter in what seemed like good faith (ie to stop 'anarchy' or a 'Bolshevik takeover') at the time. This obsessive factionalism and insistence on doctrinal purity and avoiding any association with a 'reactionary' govt and its - temporary and not long-term - military allies was arguably more of an avoidable and 'doctrinally purist' deliberate miscalculation than the failure to notice the extent of the Nazi threat until the late 1920s . But even after the failed Munich revolt in 1923 had seemingly shown up the Nazis as a 'minor and lunatic fringe' of the Far Right there was evidently still a major long-term threat of the disgruntled anti-democratic Prussian military / noble conservatives plus the military veterans linking up to attack a failing democratic govt again, whether by a coup or by mobilising voters. The new regime was fragile and was not even at the traditional capital , but shoring it up as 'better than the alternative'' seems to have been the last thing on most Left-wing politicians' minds though they could have give the centrist govts a more secure majority and so avoided a 'panic' rush to vote for 'law and order and national pride' parties however dodgy the latter turned out to be.

There are interesting parallels with the failure of the then political 'Left' (though the term was not used then) in the English/ British 'Commonwealth' republic to unite after the death of 'Lord Protector' Oliver Cromwell and the military overthrow of his son Richard in 1658-9. This doomed the first British republican experiment, by a series of inter-'Left' feuds and boycotts, at a time when the republican cause was militarily victorious and the Royalists forcibly excluded from power and unable to return to it by domestic revolt or foreign-aided invasion. Within two years of OC's death the republic had collapsed and the unthinkable had happened, ie the Royalists returning to power - as the various republican factions, civilian and military, and rival 'Puritan' religious sects were too busy fighting each other (verbally and in some cases literally) to unite and save what they had achieved in 1642-8 by the Civil War and in 1648-9 by abolishing the monarchy. A republic that had a powerful, civil-war-winning army (and navy) that had defeated the Royalists (twice, in 1646 and 1648) and had conquered the Scots and Irish and seen off threats of foreign intervention could not hold together as its factions and its assorted charismatic leaders, civilian MPs and military generals, hated each other too much and were too unable to compromise on what sort of govt they wanted to stop complete constitutional deadlock - and a series of military coups worthy of the later C20th in Africa or Asia in London in 1659.

Complete failure to govern, administrative deadlock, and factional feuds exasperated both the moderate republican leaders and the national and provincial elites, with Parliament (ie the House of Commons, the Lords having been abolished in 1649) alternately shut down and invited back and assorted inter-military rivalries and mutinies. The Royalists, militarily defeated again in a revolt after Cromwell's death and unable to take power by force, were able to argue that a King (Charles II being an unknown quantity living in exile at this point) as the legitimate sovereign would bring stability, would promise reconciliation and a govt of national unity with no reprisals, and was the only way to end the chaos - and in the end this argument won, largely due to one of the most powerful generals (George Monck) backing this argument, leading his army of occupation in Scotland to London to drive out the feuding generals there and restore an elected Parlt, and nudging the latter to negotiate the King's return. The 'no monarchy at any price' civilian and military radicals were too busy feuding and accusing each other of assorted past misdeeds (shades of the Left in Germany in the 1920s obsessing about 1918-19?) to unite and stop them - and fears of their wilder talk of radical measures, which they did not rein in, alarmed the political 'centre' in both London and the provinces that the latter backed Monck and the King to stop them. A general reconciliation was promised by the King and by the new Parlt - but once the Royalists were back, and in a dominant political and legal position aided by a tide of anti-disorder provincial conservatism, they cynically betrayed this and went back on their promises. It wasn't quite Nazism, but it was viciously authoritarian and vengeful and was bolstered by an aggressive ideological tone of Royal autocracy and demanding obedience to the King and the Anglican Church - and the Cromwellian and army-backed 'Puritan' Protestant sects were driven out of the Church and persecuted through the 1660s by vengeful Anglican MPs and judges. A general purge of those radicals who had been in charge in executing the King in 1649 took place in violation of the promises of 1660, and all 'regicides' (ie those who had signed Charles I's death-warrant) who could be caught were either hung, drawn and quartered or were thrown in gaol. Some close Cromwell military allies famously fled to Massachusetts to seek local help and ended up hiding in a cave from Royalist pursuers (see the 'Angel of Hadley' incident, when an aged retired Cromwellian officer from the 1640s emerged from hiding to lead a town in fighting off a Native American attack). Three refugee regicides hiding in Holland were subject to 'extraordinary rendition' and were lured to a meeting by Royalist agents then kidnapped, bundled onto a yacht, and taken back to London to be executed as 'traitors to the King'. One 1649 regicide judge , John Lisle, was killed in exile in Switzerland by a Royalist assassin , who shot him outside a church in public view - Charles II, like the USSR in the 1930s or a modern autocrat , sent hit-men overseas to hunt down dissidents who had been sentenced to death by his courts and to scare off other exiles into going into hiding to save their lives instead of plotting a comeback : sounds familiar?

This all-too-often forgotten British political 'disaster' for the triumphant winners of the Civil War, which I will be covering in a history book which is due out in the next year or so, is arguably a similar story of a futile and obsessive inter-'Left' feud wrecking the chances of a strong political movement and letting in 'Reaction' to what happened in Germany. Arguably this applies to Spain in the mid-1930s too, with inter-Left feuds both before and after the 1936 revolt discrediting the Republic, and aiding the appeal of Franco (eg to Catholics) as the guarantor of stability and law and order no matter what the atrocities involved - and Communist mass-shootings and Stalinist vs Trotskyist battles made this worse. In the English case, notably, some of the victorious Cromwellian generals and junior officers of the 1650s never forgave civilians, whether part of Cromwell's govt with them in 1653-8 or anti-Cromwell, who they regarded as too moderate, anti-military, or religiously conservative and would not work with them to save the republic in 1659-60. Equally, powerful civilian MP leaders who never forgave Cromwell for closing Parlt down in 1653 (eg Sir Henry Vane, a forgotten major Parliamentarian and republican MP and 'war-winner' of 1642-6, opponent of keeping a monarchy in 1646-8, and leading civilian administrator in the republic in 1649-53) would not work with the Cromwellians as their govt in 1653-8 had been 'illegal', and some of them would not work with any officers in 1659-60 to save the republic unless the army explicitly submitted to civilian rule. The result was deadlock and the 'Right' managing a comeback as the only way to guarantee stability and law and order - and then betraying its promises.

It's an interesting insight into how personal and ideological feuding and obsession about past 'political crimes' and 'points of principle' seems to be worse on the Left than on the Right: due to (usually) less hard-headed pragmatism and concentration on grabbing power? Cf the modern Labour 'purist' wing's refusals in the 2010s to deal with or readmit to the inner circles of party power any Blair Cabinet figures who supported the Iraq War, even if they were arguably thinking at the time that the govt must have secret intelligence about the existence of WMDs to be that insistent on an invasion and so had a reasonable argument to take a risk and back it even if it meant ignoring the UN? But instead all 'US stooges' of 2003 had to be kept out of senior office, so the party was left without many experienced 'big beasts' , led by figures who had kept out of 'grubby compromises' in high politics for decades, and the Conservatives had a clearer run. Surely logic would have suggested to a leadership seeking to win an election (and stop Brexit) that voters at large (especially 'swing voters) would have prefer a 'broader church' shadow cabinet and 'moving on' from the Iraq issue - yet fighting old battles and not 'forgiving old mistakes' came first.

This arguably made the political cohesion and appeal of the British 'Left' far less than it could have been, and gave an own goal to alarmist right-wing media panics that influenced voters - as with Germany in the 1920s and Spain in the 1930s. There was too much division and 'navel-gazing' in the Left in other states where a republic failed and a coup followed too, eg Portugal pre-1926 - and to some degree this lack of fear of a feud-hit Parlt collapsing under the onslaught of autocracy hit Russia in the summer and autumn of 1917 too, though there it was a threat from a cohesive and determined small Leftist faction (ie the Bolsheviks) vs a larger but incoherent Social Revolutionary or Menshevik majority. Ditto the constant 'Gaitskellite vs Bevanite' internal Labour rows of the 1970s (symbolised by ex-Gaitskell supporters such as Roy Jenkins on the 'Right' and Nye Bevan's close ally/ biographer Michael Foot in the Left) harking back to the choices made by senior Labour figures in 1951 over NHS prescription charges? Ditto the major inter-Labour battles of 'Benn vs Healey' , the public feuding at party conferences in front of the TV cameras, and the SDP walkout in 1980-1 instead of uniting round a credible and moderate leader to oppose the divisive Thatcherite economic policies.

Fuel for thought about what goes wrong with a seemingly strong reformist position so often and why.. and for Alt Hist narratives of what could happen if the actors involved put solidarity not pride first. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, ''We must hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately' - which worked in 1776 but was ignored in 1660.
 
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