Feelings of guilt among the real Nazis
Michael Klonovsky just claimed they had none. I guess I should recount what I've seen when I was young, while I can still do that.
The real Nazis I knew were not idealistic, they were swayed, hooked by promises of a great future. The common man doesn't separate the causes of his opportunities: if a government lets him partake in technical advances, he'll perceive it as a progressive force.
The war, the defeat, the reckoning, they follow the same pattern as getting inebriated and such is the guilt.
While no-one ever defended the virtues of the binge, understanding that those caused it, the whole story was, from their perspective, nothing more than a folly of youth and an error in judgment, for which they had paid by fighting the war and shouldering the defeat.
The beginning of the Cold War meant that they got off the hook easily, the Brits thought too easily, as is very apparent when you watch The Mouse That Roared, but all that would naturally inspire is a desire to reciprocate the magnanimity. Of course, the rather not so warm welcome whenever they were abroad muffled that.
The specific guilt that Klonovsky deals with is a political guilt: to have allowed that the institutions of the state would serve the dreams of one man. However, Germany didn't really have any group that could have defended the institutions of the state after aristocracy was abolished after World War I. So the political guilt is non-existent, 14 years are not enough to develop a functioning bourgeois system. The forces of order did seize an opportunity to launch a short lived revival, the rather sad joke being that the forces of order were organising themselves chaotically, putting Hitler on top.
The real Nazis I knew were not idealistic, they were swayed, hooked by promises of a great future. The common man doesn't separate the causes of his opportunities: if a government lets him partake in technical advances, he'll perceive it as a progressive force.
The war, the defeat, the reckoning, they follow the same pattern as getting inebriated and such is the guilt.
While no-one ever defended the virtues of the binge, understanding that those caused it, the whole story was, from their perspective, nothing more than a folly of youth and an error in judgment, for which they had paid by fighting the war and shouldering the defeat.
The beginning of the Cold War meant that they got off the hook easily, the Brits thought too easily, as is very apparent when you watch The Mouse That Roared, but all that would naturally inspire is a desire to reciprocate the magnanimity. Of course, the rather not so warm welcome whenever they were abroad muffled that.
The specific guilt that Klonovsky deals with is a political guilt: to have allowed that the institutions of the state would serve the dreams of one man. However, Germany didn't really have any group that could have defended the institutions of the state after aristocracy was abolished after World War I. So the political guilt is non-existent, 14 years are not enough to develop a functioning bourgeois system. The forces of order did seize an opportunity to launch a short lived revival, the rather sad joke being that the forces of order were organising themselves chaotically, putting Hitler on top.
Labels: 22, geschichte, gesellschaftskritik, gesetze, institutionen, persönliches, psychologie, wahrnehmungen, zeitgeschichte, ἰδέα, φιλοσοφία
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