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Germany approves nearly $1bn in arms exports to Israel (thecradle.co)
submitted 4 days ago by supersquirrel@lemmy.ca to c/europe@feddit.org
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[–] blackshirt@lemmy.world 41 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Germany always manages to be on the wrong side of history

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

I think Germany has a special relationship with "whiteness" that makes it especially vulnerable to fascism, especially in how Germany is perceived and treated by other groups of white people.

Also though, Germany is a culture bursting with contradictions, within a year of Mein Kempf being published another novel was published The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann by an originally German author who moved to the US.

The Magic Mountain is firmly cemented in German culture... and is indisputably one of the best novels ever written in German or English and is certainly one of the most humanist and openly accepting of humanity in all its "failures" of any great novel of the 20th century. The Magic Mountain is the most supremely antifascist novel imaginable and it is equally allergic to racism and discrimination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann

With the start of the Cold War, he was increasingly frustrated by rising McCarthyism. As a "suspected communist", he was required to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was termed "one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company".[19] He was listed by HUAC as being "affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts".

Being in his own words a non-communist, rather than an anti-communist, Mann openly opposed the allegations: "As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged 'state of emergency'. ... That is how it started in Germany."

As Mann joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found "the media had been closed to him".[20] Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress,[21] and in 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland. Here he initially lived in a rented house and bought his last house there in 1954 (which later his widow and then their son Golo lived in until their deaths).

He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly traveled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main (then West Germany) and Weimar (then East Germany), as a statement that German culture extended beyond the new political borders.[22] He also visited Lübeck, where he saw his parents' house, which was partially destroyed by the bombing of Lübeck in World War II (and only later rebuilt).

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think Germany has a special relationship with “whiteness”

No that's the US. Racism in Germany and Europe as a whole, has always been about cultural and ethnic differences more than skin color. The persecuted slavs or jews were just as pasty as any German, unlike the "honorary Aryans" in Japan.

Germany is a culture bursting with contradictions, within a year of Mein Kempf being published another novel was published The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Two different authors with different backgrounds writing different books? What a uniquely contradictory culture Germany is.
Disregard that one of them is lauded for its literary and cultural significance while the other is basically as important as the art of the deal.

And of course the explanation for contemporary German culture and its problematic relation to Israel can be found in the literature of 1924.
Nothing significant happened since then, right? Everyone was on vacation in the 30s and 40s. Occupation, the Cold War, the literal formation of the country of Israel? Surely none of the could have any relevance.

I do agree that the Magic Mountain is a great book.
But although some of its themes do go against aspects of fascism, calling it "the most supremely antifascist novel imaginable " seems a bit of a stretch.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

No that’s the US. Racism in Germany and Europe as a whole, has always been about cultural and ethnic differences more than skin color. The persecuted slavs or jews were just as pasty as any German, unlike the “honorary Aryans” in Japan.

ahahahaha

Read The Color Purple or Their Eyes Were Watching God, the idea that racism actually cares about skin tone in any consistent way anywhere is impossible, contradictory and absurd, it is always mixed up with ethnicity, context and imposed categories. Germany is just the same as any other racist society in that respect. Check your ignorance.

You added nothing to this conversation other than a sense of condescencion.

The Magic Mountain is one of the most supremely antifascist novels ever written and its perspective from the eve of WW1 mirrors our current position with eerie and foreboding syncronicity. The Magic Mountain is easily one of the most important novels of the 20th century, if not all time.

In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Mann moved his own family to Switzerland, and then, after his German citizenship was revoked, to the USA, where he recorded monthly anti-fascist dispatches which were broadcast to Germany by the BBC.

He is ‘one of the great German writers’, wrote Malcolm Bradbury, ‘the spokesman for a modern humanism’.

https://henryeliot.substack.com/p/the-magic-mountain

Come up with a better argument if you want to cut me down.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Read The Color Purple or Their Eyes Were Watching God

Do they contain sociological studies that support your claim that

Germany has a special relationship with "whiteness”

Otherwise I don't see what you think this is adding to the conversation.

As for The Magic Mountain:

its perspective from the eve of WW1 mirrors our current position

We currently don't have European empires in a mutual standoff waiting for the powder-keg to be lit. By all accounts most people are more reminded of the inter-war period with the rising fascism.

The Magic Mountain is easily one of the most important novels of the 20th century

I never disagreed but being important does not automatically make it anti-fascist.

In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Mann moved his own family to Switzerland

And just like his cold war experiences that you quoted before, this happened after he published Zauberberg in 1924.
At the time, Mussolini's regime had barely begun and Hitler was a failed putschist in jail.

Come up with a better argument if you want to cut me down.

Dude, your only "arguments" are wikipedia quotes about Mann's life after he published the book, completely unrelated literature recommendations and an unexplained association of fascism with the eve of WWI.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I honestly find it hilarious you don't think The Magic Mountain is one of the most antifascist novels ever written, and one of the most effective and wholistic takedowns of fascism ever created in any form ever... your understanding of history must be so mutilated into discrete bloody boxes one preceding after another with no connection between one and another...

Six months later, Mann resumed work on the novel he had begun before the war: The Magic Mountain. His development and completion of the manuscript occurred in tandem with a dramatic political reorientation: deeply shaken by the assassination of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, Mann took a decisive stand in defense of the fragile, embattled Weimar Republic. In his essays and speeches of the second half of the 1920s, he continued to warn Germans of the threat posed by the National Socialist Party. Had he not left Germany when he did, it is very likely that he would have been arrested and interned in the Dachau concentration camp.

https://yalereview.org/article/morten-jensen-thomas-mann

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

your understanding of history must be so mutilated

I beg you to open a history book and look up when the rise of fascism happened.
In 1924 the NSDAP was a bunch of violent thugs pretending to be socialists. Their rise to power happened a decade later. The only fascist was Mussolini and he had not yet fully implemented all that we nowadays call fascism.

You have not made one single argument that actually ties anything in the book to fascism.
You keep quoting articles about Mann's later life but the only reference you made to the book itself was mentioning the eve of WWI which at least time-wise sets the action before the rise of fascism.

You have not identified one anti-fascist theme in the book nor quoted any literary analysis that does so.

If you desperately want to make this argument, then you have to ask yourself:
What is fascism? What are its defining characteristics? Where does the book address them?
And which themes are specific to fascism? Contemplating mortality as such is not.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You have not made one single argument that actually ties anything in the book to fascism.

So you did not bother to read the article I linked before responding?

Yes I have.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes I read it.
It has not a single reference to fascism in the 1920s.

The Weimar Republic was embattled primarily by monarchists and socialists/ communists; the NSDAP had not yet risen to power and not established fascism in Germany.
The Dachau concentration camp was opened in 1933, a decade after the book was published.

Again, you have not talked about anything actually in the book that relates to fascism.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So is Mein Kampf not fascist because it predates 1933 too?

Get out of here with this lazy shit, Naptha is clearly a fascist in all but name in The Magic Mountain.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are you claiming The Magic Mountain is a reaction to Mein Kampf, a book that had not been published by then?

Naptha is clearly a fascist in all but name

Now, this is actually an argument engaging with the material.
It’s been ages since I read the book, can you remind me what Naphtha says and does and how the book critically engages with that.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are you claiming The Magic Mountain is a reaction to Mein Kampf, a book that had not been published by then?

....no?

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So, did Mann know what Adolf would write in his book or what the Nazis would do in the 30s and 40s?
Did he know what Mussolini would get up to in the next decades?

No? Then he couldn’t have reacted to that. So none of that can be relevant to what he had written in 1924.

Now, it’s not unheard of that authors can see the proverbial writing on the wall and anticipate future events to some degree. But to argue that you would also have to actually point to his writing and draw parallels. You can’t just point at later events as proof for what is in the book.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Now, it’s not unheard of that authors can see the proverbial writing on the wall and anticipate future events to some degree. But to argue that you would also have to actually point to his writing and draw parallels. You can’t just point at later events as proof for what is in the book.

Have you actually read any literary analysis of The Magic Mountain... or like... just read the damn book? Were you not paying attention to the conversations with Naptha and how Hans Castorp changes in his disposition towards them over the course of the novel as WW1 ripens on the limb...? Go read the book again, I will not waste my time handing you things just so you can throw them at the wall like a baby.

Your desire to bifurcate periods of time and development of ideologies into artificial divisions is childish.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As I said it's been a long time, so let's see what we find for analysis on Naphta:

Naphta is termed a "revolutionary" and "socialist", but Settembrini sees Naphta's fantasies as emanating from an anti-humanitarian reactionary revolution [...]
The association here between Naphta's advocacy of terrorism and two extremely conservative movements – Prussian militarism and Jesuitism – is a huge political shift for the novel.

Yes, revolution and militarism, well known concepts at the time, unlike fascism.
Almost like references to the forces that embattled the Weimar Republic at the time, the socialists who wanted to join the world revolution and the military who wanted to re-start the war they claimed to have lost only because of the cowardly politicians.
Funny how that fits together when you consider the actual time it was written instead of the 30s or the cold war.

Ah, and here is a review that explicitly covers authoritarian nationalism:

he wrote and delivered his speech, On the German Republic.
In it, he publicly embraced the postwar Weimar Republic and the principles of its democracy, distancing himself from the types of authoritarian nationalism [...]
By the time he finished writing, the work had been transformed from a satirical novella into a sweeping Bildungsroman, focused on moral education and psychological development. It was now also an allegory of European civilisation teetering on the abyss – a “world festival of death”, as Mann puts it in the novel’s final sentence. [...]
Specifically, the phrase is a reference to World War I. More broadly – and just as powerfully – it reflects the sense of postwar disillusionment and social malaise that shaped the novel.

Authoritarian nationalism is certainly also an element of fascism but not exclusive to it.
It has been prominent in the German Empire before WWI and indeed this review draws the direct link to the war, which is something that Mann knows about and can react to unlike the rise of fascism which happens later.

Your desire to bifurcate periods of time and development of ideologies into artificial divisions is childish.

Sorry, I live in a world of linear time where later events and ideas cannot influence the past.

What i find more childish is your stubborn insistence on a point that you simultaneously refuse to prove.
It's funny how you claim to be handing me things when all you've done is quote unrelated third hand accounts of Mann's life and nothing from the book. Not even a literary analysis that supports your claim.
All while completely ignoring that I've repeatedly shown you ways how you could make your case.

I agree that this was big waste of time, lets agree to not do it again.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I agree that this was big waste of time, lets agree to not do it again.

lol ok, you don't grasp basic things about how art works, about how art is always in conversation with the context it arose from given the author's life experiences and yet you are committed to this futile argument.

The Magic Mountain is one of the world's great antifascist novels.

[–] geissi@feddit.org 0 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

and the author's experiences

You have to be joking.
I have constantly pointed out that Mann had not yet experienced fascism. That would happen later.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

You have to be joking the art can only be interpreted strictly in that linear fashion, by the same logic Mein Kampf is barely fascist.

Fascism brought nothing new to the table that The Magic Mountain hadn't already dismantled with fervor.

You have no conception of the relationships between simultaneous polarized reactions to the same perceived existential questions that dominate public discourse, what a morbid, lifeless view of history...

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain is a large modern epic-philosophical poem about the struggle between light and darkness, health and disease, life and death. Since the writer wants to depict this struggle in its ideologically pure, most abstract form, he chooses to a certain extent an abstract environment in which all the phenomena of the capitalist world appear in all their essence, not obscured by the petty events of bourgeois everyday life.

This environment is the “Magic Mountain” – a fashionable tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland. People from all strata of bourgeois society meet here; all of them are in a state of forced inaction, artificial isolation from everyday worries. Thus, their social position does not essentially change, according to circumstances they give the opportunity to the individual, the best of them to ponder over the meaning and direction of their life.

On this Wednesday, Thomas Mann introduces his hero – a decent, honest German youth from a wealthy family. Here, in contact with other patients, he gets acquainted with the spiritual trends of his time. The path of his inner development is the content of the novel. Thomas Mann shows what an almost magical attractive effect had the conditions of Germany at that time on the morally sensitive bourgeois: sickness, darkness, death. Dissatisfaction with one’s own, purely personal life, an existence aimed only at achieving material goals, a moral disgust for the rough, barbaric sides of this life and at the same time the inability to understand that they are generated by the lack of social freedom in Germany, made these people defenseless against dark forces.

These people are ready to accept fascist “socialism,” which is nothing more than a demagogic disguise of universal enslavement.

Thomas Mann understood even earlier this defenselessness of the German bourgeoisie in the face of the dark forces of reaction and showed it with tragic irony in his short stories.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1943/humanism-barbarism/ch05.htm

Robert Heynen’s article, “Cultures of Confinement: Health, Illness, and Madness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Magic Mountain” details the parallels of the theme of mental illness and the rise of authoritarianism in the real world, historical Weimar Germany, and the events within the film (Heynen 683). Heynen explains how mental asylums were a strategy for authority figures in Weimar Germany, in which they could place individuals who started leftist coalitions and organizations, as a way to squash such political opposition (Heynen 683–684). Through the lens of this theory, Dr. Caligari would represent an authoritarian fascist figure responsible for gaslighting his citizens, or patients, to commit murders through some sort of hypnotic mind control or brainwashing, as well as imprison revolutionary figures who pose a threat to his authoritative reign of his domain. Heynen also points to the writer Kracauer as an influential interpreter of the film as depicting the early breeding grounds of Nazism and authoritarianism in Germany at the time (Heynen 685).

https://dainealmaclean.medium.com/how-the-cabinet-of-dr-73660400e5e3

And yet how could Europe resist a novel that ends with the outbreak of a world war during which, to quote The Magic Mountain’s narrator, ‘so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased’.

As the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once wrote, ‘We’re still dealing with the heroes of The Magic Mountain.’ And, let’s add, Adrian Leverkühn and Serenus Zeitblom, the ‘heroes’ of Doctor Faustus. But Thomas Mann did more than simply write about the cultural and spiritual transformations of German society in the early 20th century. He lived them. The reason that he became such a forceful foe of Nazism is because he shared the same intellectual and cultural roots.

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/thomas-manns-cathedrals-in-prose/

[–] geissi@feddit.org 1 points 6 hours ago

You have read your own sources, right?

The first one, from marxists.org is an article about the Germans and why they let the Nazis seize power. The The author attests that

And the German people, intoxicated by demagoguery, driven by the scourges of terror, with barbarously perverted instincts, wandered towards death.

And uses The Magic Mountain and Heinrich Mann’s novel The Loyal Subject as examples for the then current condition of Germany. At no point does it mention anything anti-fascist about either book by the way.
It tells us that Mann identified mental conditions, the dissatisfaction, moral disgust, inability to understand why.
These are themes the reviewer identifies in the book.

That the people thus affected are ripe to accept fascism, later when it eventually comes about, is the reviewers conclusion.
It is not something expressed in the book.

Further down, other works are discussed and they are specifically called "anti-fascist" unlike The Magic Mountain.
About Farewell by Johannes Becher it says:

Although the action of this novel, like the action of The Magic Mountain, is played out before the first world imperialist war, it is inspired by the modern anti-fascist struggle.

It draws the parallel of both books being set before WWI and the distinction that only one of them is is inspired by the modern anti-fascist struggle. It is not Mann's.

Your second quote mentions The Magic Mountain in the first line and is then entirely about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

And the third one

he became such a forceful foe of Nazism

Yes, we've been over this. He didn't like them from the beginning. Certainly didn't improve his opinion when they set up their fascist regime, years after 1924.
All the same arguments about the passage of time and when things happen, that I've made before.

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

This comment is so true.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago

I stole it from Stephen Dedalus :P

[–] HieroProtagonist@feddit.org -4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's only the wrong side if you lose.

[–] Quantillion@mstdn.io 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

@HieroProtagonist @blackshirt
That has traditionally been the case because the historical account was the exclusive copyright of the "winner".
Now, however (as we can see e.g. with Israel's century of terrorism and crimes against humanity), the truth is harder to hide.
#Germany is on the wrong side of history, and that won't change, whoever "wins".

[–] HieroProtagonist@feddit.org -3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

And do you see any sign of a downfall of those who are on the - in your opinion - "wrong side"?