A.J.P. Taylor on The Origins of the Second World War (1961)

Slaying History's Golden Calves continues--with considerations of IR on a more rational basis than in our strangely-addled present

At the end of yesterday’s posting about Germany’s—and NATO’s—push to re-arm™ (since most working hardware was ceded to Ukraine), I wrote the following:

I suppose we must next speak about how, exactly, the ramping up of military spending prior to WW2 was achieved.

And any kind of enquiry into these matters would have to set-up a kind of chronology first to ensure we all talk about the same facts and events prior to doing so.

Hence, today we’ll talk a bit about British historian A.J.P Taylor (Wikipedia):

Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was an English historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age".^[1] In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the fourth most important historian of the previous 60 years.^[2]

We shall, further, note the following paragraph (this is from Taylor’s de facto official Wikipedia entry still):

Taylor's mother, Constance, was a member of the Comintern while one of his uncles was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Constance was a suffragette, feminist and advocate of free love who practised her teachings via a string of extramarital affairs, most notably with Henry Sara, a communist who in many ways became Taylor's surrogate father. Taylor has mentioned in his reminiscences that his mother was domineering, but his father enjoyed exasperating her by following his own ways. Taylor had a close relationship with his father and enjoyed his quirkiness. Taylor himself was recruited into the Communist Party of Great Britain by a friend of the family, the military historian Tom Wintringham, while at Oriel; a member from 1924 to 1926. Taylor broke with that party over what he considered to be its ineffective stand during the 1926 General Strike. After leaving, he was an ardent supporter of the Labour Party for the rest of his life, remaining a member for over sixty years.^[8] After leaving the Communist Party he visited the Soviet Union in 1925 and in 1934.

In short: given Prof. Taylor’s status and reputation, he is perhaps best considered the predecessor of arch-communist and un-apologetic Stalinist Eric J. Hobsbawm (Wikipedia), another famous (public) historian.

With the stage thus set, here are a few paragraphs to consider from Prof. Taylor’s, we may now consider what Wikipedia dubs his ‘most controversial book’:

In 1961, he published his most controversial book, The Origins of the Second World War, which earned him a reputation as a revisionist [same as, say, David Irving].^[18] Gordon Martel notes that "it made a profound impact. The book became a classic and a central point of reference in all discussion on the Second World War."^[18]

I would encourage you to check out the Wikipedia write-up of the book, which is actually pretty accurate.

We note, in passing, that Taylor at the same time held strong Germanophobic sentiments, which nearly resulted in him banned from the airwaves:

In 1944, he was temporarily banned from the BBC following complaints about a series of lectures he gave on air in which he gave full vent to his anti-German feelings. In his 1945 book, The Course of German History, he argued that National Socialism was the inevitable product of the entire history of the Germans going back to the days of the Germanic tribes. He was an early champion of what has since been called the Sonderweg (Special Way [sic; it’s Special Path]) interpretation of German history, that German culture and society developed over the centuries in such a way as to make Nazi Germany inevitable. Moreover, he argued that there was a symbiotic relationship between Hitler and the German people, with Adolf Hitler needing the Germans to fulfil his dreams of conquest and the German people needing Hitler to fulfil their dreams of subjugation of their neighbours. In particular, he accused the Germans of waging an endless Drang nach Osten against their Slavic neighbours since the days of Charlemagne.

With the stage thus set, we’ll now examine a few paragraphs of Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War (1961), with emphases [and snark] added. Do note that this volume appeared sixteen years after his Course of German History and thus shows a quite considerable shift in his thinking.

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Foreword: Second Thoughts (pp. 7-27)

…historians often dislike what happened or wish that it had happened differently. There is nothing they can do about it. They have to state the truth as they see it without worrying whether this shocks or confirms existing prejudices. Maybe I assumed this too innocently. I ought perhaps to have warned the reader that I do not come to history as a judge; and that when I speak of morality I refer to the moral feelings at the time I am writing about. I make no moral judgement of my own…

For years past the best-informed and most conscientious students of international affairs had argued that there would be no peace in Europe until the Germans received the self-determination which had been granted to others. Munich was in part the outcome of their writings, however unwelcome its form; and its making would have been much more difficult if it had not been felt that there was some justice in Hitler’s claim. Even during the second World war a Fellow of All Souls asked President Benes whether he did not think that Czechoslovakia would have been stronger if it had included, say, a million and a half Germans fewer. So long did the spirit of ‘appeasement’ linger. As a matter of fact, there was no half-way house: either three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia or none [as a thought-experiment, replace Hitler, Germans, Czechs, and Czechoslovakia with Putin, Russians, Ukraines, and Ukraine—and do consider the last sentence of this paragraph, too, before you condemn me roundly]. The Czechs themselves recognized this by expelling the Germans after the second World war. It was not for me to endorse, or to condemn, Hitler’s claim; only to explain why it was so widely endorsed.

I am sorry if this disappoints simple-minded Germans who imagined that my book had somehow ‘vindicated’ Hitler. I have however no sympathy with those in this country who complained that my book had been welcomed, mistakenly or not, by former supporters of Hitler. This seems to me a disgraceful argument to be used against a work of history. A historian must not hesitate even if his books lend aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies (though mine did not), or even to the common enemies of mankind. For my part, I would even record facts which told in favour of the British government if I found any to record (goak again). It is not my fault that, according to the record, the Austrian crisis was launched by Schuschnigg, not by Hitler; not my fault that the British government, according to the record, not Hitler, took the lead in dismembering Czechoslovakia; not my fault that the British government in 1939 gave Hitler the impression that they were more concerned to impose concessions on the Poles than to resist Germany. If these things tell in favour of Hitler, it is the fault of previous legends which have been repeated by historians without examination. These legends have a long life. I suspect I have repeated some. For instance I went on believing until the last moment that Hitler summoned Hacha to Berlin; only when the book was in proof, did I look at the records again and discover that Hacha asked to come to Berlin, not the other way round. No doubt other legends have slipped through.

Destroying these legends is not a vindication of Hitler. It is a service to historical truth, and my book should be challenged only on this basis, not for the political morals which people choose to draw from it. This book is not a contribution to ‘revisionism’ [note that Wikipedia, however, labels Taylor thus] except in the lesser sense of suggesting that Hitler used different methods from those usually attributed to him. I have never seen any sense in the question of war guilt or war innocence. In a world of sovereign states, each does the best it can for its own interests; and can be criticized at most for mistakes, not for crimes [that’s a noteworthy condemnation of the moralising we see everywhere, but esp. after the end of the Cold War from ‘the Collective West’]. Bismarck, as usual, was right when he said of the Austro-Prussian war in 1866: ‘Austria was no more in the wrong in opposing our claims than we were in making them.’ [same thought-experiment as before: replace ‘Austria’ with Russia]. As a private citizen, I think that all this striving after greatness and domination is idiotic [I share that sentiment]; and I would like my country not to take part in it. As a historian, I recognise that Powers will be Powers. My book has really little to do with Hitler. The vital question, it seems to me, concerns Great Britain and France. They were the victors of the first World war. They had the decision in their hands. It was perfectly obvious that Germany would seek to become a Great Power again; obvious after 1933 that her domination would be of a peculiarly barbaric sort [we note, in passing, that the entire German establishment for the past century (at the very least) had been rabidly Russophobic, i.e., sentiments¹ that were quite readily shared with their counterparts in Britain and France, by the way (but not in the US)]. Why did the victors not resist her? There are various answers: timidity; blindness; moral doubts; desire perhaps to turn German strength against Soviet Russia. But whatever the answers, this seems to me the important question, and my book revolves round it, though also of course round the other question: why did they resist in the end?

Still, some critics made a great fuss about Hitler, attributing to him sole responsibility for the war or something near it. I will therefore discuss Hitler’s part a little more, though not in a polemical spirit. I have no desire to win, only to get things right. The current versions of Hitler are, I think, two. In one view, he wanted a great war for its own sake. No doubt he also thought vaguely of the results: Germany the greatest Power in the world, and himself a world conqueror on the pattern of Alexander the Great or Napoleon. But mainly he wanted war for the general destruction of men and societies which it would cause. He was a maniac, a nihilist, a second Attila. The other view makes him more rational and, in a sense, more constructive. In this view, Hitler had a coherent, long-term plan of an original nature which he pursued with unwavering persistence. For the sake of this plan he sought power; and it shaped all his foreign policy. He intended to give Germany a great colonial empire in eastern Europe by defeating Soviet Russia, exterminating all the inhabitants, and then planting the vacant territory with Germans. This Reich of a hundred or two hundred million Germans would last a thousand years. I am surprised, incidentally, that the advocates of this view did not applaud my book. For surely, if Hitler were planning a great war against Soviet Russia, his war against the western Powers was a mistake. There is evidently some point here which I have not understood.

…Maybe the world would have been saved a lot of trouble if Hitler could have been given a job in some German equivalent of Chatham House, where he could have speculated harmlessly for the rest of his life. As it was, he became involved in the world of action; and here, I think, he exploited events far more than he followed precise coherent plans. The story of how he came to power in Germany seems to me relevant to his later behaviour in international affairs. He announced persistently that he intended to seize power and would then do great things…There was no long-term plot; there was no seizure of power. Hitler had no idea how he would come to power; only a conviction that he would get there. Papen and a few other conservatives put Hitler into power by intrigue, in the belief that they had taken him prisoner. He exploited their intrigue, again with no idea how he would escape from their control, only with the conviction that somehow he would. This ‘revision’ does not ‘vindicate’ Hitler, though it discredits Papen and his associates.

[here follows the example of the Reichstag fire of 1933, which enabled Hitler to assume dictatorial powers, with Taylor pointing to the Enabling Acts as having been ‘prepared by Goering’s predecessor: the Social Democrat Severing’; I’ll skip these passages to move to the latent question]

Here, it seems to me, is the key to the problem whether Hitler deliberately aimed at war. He did not so much aim at war as expect it to happen…Hitler certainly directed his generals to prepare for war. But so did the British, and for that matter every other, government. It is the job of general staffs to prepare for war [we note that, since 1945, (West) Germany did not have such a general staff]…All the British directives from 1935 onwards were pointed solely against Germany; Hitler's were concerned only with making Germany stronger. If therefore we were (wrongly) to judge political intentions from military plans, the British government would appear set on war with Germany, not the other way round. But of course we apply to the behaviour of our own governments a generosity of interpretation which we do not extend to others. People regard Hitler as wicked; and then find proofs of his wickedness in evidence which they do not use against others. Why do they apply this double standard? Only because they assume Hitler’s wickedness in the first place.

It is dangerous to deduce political intentions from military plans. Some historians, for instance, have deduced from the Anglo-French military conversations before 1914 that the British government were set on war with Germany. Other, and in my opinion wiser, historians have denied that this deduction can [sic] be drawn. The plans, they argue, were precautions, not ‘blueprints for aggression’. Yet Hitler’s directives are often interpreted in this latter way…

Of course, in British eyes, their government only wanted to keep things quiet, while Hitler wanted to stir them up. To the Germans, the status quo was not peace, but a slave treaty. It all depends on the point of view. The victor Powers wanted to keep the fruits of victory with some modifications, though they did it ineffectively. The vanquished Power wanted to undo its defeat. This latter ambition, whether ‘aggressive’ or not, was not peculiar to Hitler. It was shared by all [this argument was vindicated by Klaus Thörner’s research (see the footnote)] German politicians, by the Social Democrats who ended the war in 1918 as much as by Stresemann. No one defined precisely what undoing the defeat of the first World war meant; and this applies also to Hitler. It involved recovering the territory lost then; restoring the German predominance over central Europe which had previously been given by the alliance with Austria-Hungary; ending of course all restrictions on German armaments. The concrete terms did not matter. All Germans, including Hitler, assumed that Germany would become the dominant Power in Europe once she had undone her defeat, whether this happened by war or otherwise; and this assumption was generally shared in other countries. The two ideas of ‘liberation’ and ‘domination’ merged into one. There was no separating them. They were merely two different words for the same thing; and only use of the particular word decides whether Hitler was a champion of national justice or a potential conqueror of Europe…

The first World war shattered all the Great Powers involved, with the exception of the United States, who took virtually no part in it; may they were all foolish to go on trying to be Great Powers afterwards. Total war is probably beyond the strength of any Great Power. Now even preparations for such a war threaten to ruin the Great Powers who attempt them. Nor is this new…Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a great war, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one, or to fight it on a limited scale. This was the secret of Great Britain’ s greatness so long as she stuck to naval warfare and did not try to become a military power on the continental pattern. Hitler did not need instruction from a historian in order to appreciate this. The inability of Germany to fight a long war was a constant theme of his; and so was the danger which threatened Germany if the other Great Powers combined against her. In talking like this, Hitler was more sensible than the German generals who imagined that all would be well if they got Germany back to the position she occupied before Ludendorff’s offensive in March 1918. Hitler did not however draw the moral that it was silly for Germany to be a Great Power…Far from wanting war, a general war was the last thing he wanted. He wanted the fruits of total victory without total war; and thanks to the stupidity of others he nearly got them. Other Powers thought that they were faced with the choice between total war and surrender. At first they chose surrender; then they chose total war, to Hitler’s ultimate ruin.

This is not guesswork. It is demonstrated beyond peradventure by the record of German armament before the second World war or even during it. It would have been obvious long ago if men had not been blinded by two mistakes. Before the war they listened to what Hitler said instead of looking at what he did. After the war they wanted to pin on him the guilt for everything which happened, regardless of the evidence…the record is there for anyone who wishes to use it, dispassionately analysed by Mr Burton Klein. I have already quoted his conclusion for Hitler’s first three years: until the spring of 1936 German rearmament was largely a myth. This does not mean merely that the preliminary stages of rearmament were not producing increased strength, as always happens. Even the preliminary stages were not being undertaken at all seriously. Hitler cheated foreign powers and the German people in exactly the opposite sense from that which is usually supposed. He, or rather Goering, announced: ‘Guns before butter.’ In fact, he put butter before guns. I take some figures at random from Mr Klein’s book. In 1936, according to Churchill, two independent estimates placed German rearmament expenditure at an annual rate of twelve thousand million marks.' The actual figure was under five thousand million…

Pretending to prepare for a great war and not in fact doing it was an essential part of Hitler’s political strategy; and those who sounded the alarm against him, such as Churchill, unwittingly did his work for him…There is a very good illustration. On 28 November 1934 Baldwin denied Churchill's statement that German air strength was equal to that of Great Britain’s. Baldwin’s figures were right; Churchill’s, supplied by Professor Lindemann, were wrong. On 24 March 1935 Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden visited Hitler. He told them that the German air force was already equal to that of Great Britain, if not indeed superior. He was at once believed and has been believed ever since. Baldwin was discredited. Panic was created. How was it possible that a statesman could exaggerate his armaments instead of concealing them? Yet this was what Hitler had done…

German rearmament was largely a myth until the spring of 1936. Then Hitler put some reality into it. His motive was principally fear of the Red Army; and of course Great Britain and France had begun to rearm also. Hitler in fact raced along with others, and not much faster…In 1938-39, the last peacetime year, Germany spent on armaments about 15 per cent of her gross national product. The British proportion was almost exactly the same. German expenditure on armaments was actually cut down after Munich and remained at this lower level, so that British production of aeroplanes, for example, was way ahead of German by 1940…

It may be objected that these figures are irrelevant. Whatever the deficiencies of German armament on paper, Hitler won a war against two European Great Powers when the test came…Though Hitler won, he won by mistake—a mistake which he shared. Of course the Germans were confident that they could defeat Poland if they were left undisturbed in the west. Here Hitler’s political judgement that the French would do nothing proved more accurate than the apprehensions of the German generals. But he had no idea that he would knock France out of the war when he invaded Belgium and Holland on 10 May 1940. This was a defensive move: to secure the Ruhr from Allied invasion. The conquest of France was an unforeseen bonus. Even after this Hitler did not prepare for a great war. He imagined that he could defeat Soviet Russia without serious effort as he had defeated France. German production of armaments was not reduced merely during the winter of 1940-41; it was reduced still more in the autumn of 1941 when the war against Russia had already begun…Germany remained with ‘a peacelike war economy’. Only the British bombing attacks on German cities stimulated Hitler and the Germans to take war seriously. German war production reached its height just when Allied bombing did: in July 1944. Even in March 1945 Germany was producing substantially more military material than when she attacked Russia in 1941…

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Intermission

At that juncture (pp. 20-26), Taylor discusses the Nuremberg Trials and how they perverted the course of int’l justice and law ever since, a tangent that I consider very important but whose discussion here merely distracts; we’ll keep this for another day.

Taylor marshals the infamous Hossbach memo of 1937 to discuss how pervasive the German aspirations of conquest (and, incidentally, touches upon the Holocaust, which we’ll leave out here) really were, to which we now return.

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Obviously there was nothing secret about these blueprints [of the conquest of Lebensraum] either in Mein Kampf which sold by the million after Hitler came to power, or in speeches delivered to large audiences. No one therefore need pride himself on his perspicacity in divining [sic] Hitler’s intentions. It is equally obvious that Lebensraum always appeared as one element in these blueprints. This was not an original idea of Hitler’s. It was a commonplace of the time. Volk ohne Raum, for instance, by Hans Grimm sold much better than Mein Kampf when it was published in 1928. For that matter, plans for acquiring new territory were much aired in Germany during the first World war. It used to be thought that these were the plans of a few crack-pot theorisers or of extremist organisations. Now we know better [here, Taylor points to Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961), which should be read in conjunction with Thörner’s book (see the footnote); for emphasis, I’ve added a line break here].

In 1961, a German professor reported the result of his investigations into German war aims. These were indeed ‘a blueprint for aggression’ or, as the professor called them, ‘a grasp at world power’: Belgium under German control; the French iron-fields annexed to Germany; the Ukraine to become German; and, what is more, Poland and the Ukraine to be cleared of their inhabitants and resettled with Germans. These plans were not merely the work of the German general staff. They were endorsed by the German foreign ministry and by ‘the good German’, Bethmann Hollweg [chancellor 1909-17; for emphasis, I’ve added another line break].

Hitler, far from transcending his respectable predecessors, was actually being more moderate than they when he sought only Lebensraum in the east and repudiated, in Mein Kampf, gains in the west. Hitler merely repeated the ordinary chatter of rightwing circles. Like all demagogues, Hitler appealed to the masses. Unlike other demagogues, who sought power to carry out Left policies, Hitler dominated the masses by Leftwing methods in order to deliver them to the Right. This is why the Right let him in [if this irks you because of what you’re observing in the present, it it because this is an uncanny realisation, isn’t it? (hi there, Elon Musk and Alice Weidel calling Hitler ‘a communist’)].

But was Lebensraum Hitler’s sole idea or indeed the one which dominated his mind? To judge from Mein Kampf, he was obsessed by anti-semitism, which occupies most of the book. Lebensraum gets only seven of the seven hundred pages. Then and thereafter it was thrown in as a final rationalisation, a sort of ‘pie in the sky’ to justify what Hitler was supposed to be up to. Perhaps the difference between me and the believers in Hitler's constant plan for Lebensraum is nd Thoughts. over words. By ‘plan’ I understand something which is prepared and worked out in detail. They seem to take ‘plan’ as a pious, or in this case impious, wish. In my sense Hitler never had a plan for Lebensraum. There was no study of the resources in the territories that were to be conquered; no definition even of what these territories were to be. There was no recruitment of a staff to carry out these ‘plans’, no survey of Germans who could be moved, let alone any enrolment [how very un-German, eh?]…

Hitler certainly thought that Germany was most likely to make gains in eastern Europe when she became again a Great Power. This was partly because of his belief in Lebensraum. There were more practical considerations. For a long time he thought, whether mistakenly or not, that it would be easier to defeat Soviet Russia than the Western Powers. Indeed, he half believed that Bolshevism might break down without a war, a belief shared by many western statesmen. Then he could collect his gains with no effort at all. Moreover Lebensraum could easily be presented as an anti-Bolshevik crusade and thus helped to win the hearts of those in western countries who regarded Hitler as the champion of Western civilisation. However he was not dogmatic about this. He did not refuse other gains when they came along. After the defeat of France, he annexed Alsace and Lorraine, despite his previous declarations that he would not do so; and he carried off the industrial regions of Belgium and north-eastern France for good measure, just as Bethmann had intended to do before him. The rather vague terms which he projected for peace with Great Britain in the summer of 1940 included a guarantee for the British Empire, but he also intended to claim Irak, and perhaps Egypt, as a German sphere. Thus, whatever his theories, he did not adhere in practice to the logical pattern of status quo…

He got as far as he did because others did not know what to do with him. Here again I want to understand the ‘appeasers’, not to vindicate or to condemn them. Historians do a bad day's work when they write the appeasers off as stupid or as cowards. They were men confronted with real problems, doing their best in the circumstances of their time. They recognised that an independent and powerful Germany had somehow to be fitted into Europe. Later experience suggests that they were right. At any rate, we are still going round and round the German problem. Can any sane man suppose, for instance, that other countries could have intervened by armed force in 1933 to overthrow Hitler when he had come to power by constitutional means and was apparently supported by a large majority of the German people? Could anything have been designed to make him more popular in Germany, unless perhaps it was intervening to turn him out of the Rhineland in 1936? [once more, replace ‘Hitler’ with ‘Putin’ and ‘the Rhineland’ with ‘the Donbas’ to understand the conundrum of the present; this isn’t to pick either side then or now, but to point to the insanity so prevalent—then and now] The Germans put Hitler into power; they were the only ones who could turn him out. Again the ‘appeasers’ feared that the defeat of Germany would be followed by a Russian domination over much of Europe. Later experience suggests that they were right here also. Only those who wanted Soviet Russia to take the place of Germany are entitled to condemn the ‘appeasers’; and I cannot understand how most of those who condemn them are now equally indignant at the inevitable result of their failure.

…The British stand in September 1939 was no doubt heroic; but it was heroism mainly at the expense of others. The British people suffered comparatively little during six years of war. The Poles suffered catastrophe during the war, and did not regain their independence after it. In 1938 Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better—to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole? I am glad Germany was defeated and Hitler destroyed. I also appreciate that others paid the price for this, and I recognize the honesty of those who thought the price too high.

…Little can be discovered so long as we go on attributing everything that happened to Hitler. He supplied a powerful dynamic element, but it was fuel to an existing engine. He was in part the creation of Versailles, in part the creation of ideas that were common in contemporary Europe. Most of all, he was the creation of German history and of the German present. He would have counted for nothing without the support and cooperation of the German people. It seems to be believed nowadays that Hitler did everything himself, even driving the trains and filling the gas chambers unaided. This was not so. Hitler was a sounding-board for the German nation. Thousands, many hundred thousand, Germans carried out his evil orders without qualm or question. As supreme ruler of Germany, Hitler bears the greatest responsibility for acts of immeasurable evil: for the destruction of German democracy [I disagree here: the last three chancellors before him were governing by the same decrees, the difference being that they were far less ruthless and ‘fortunate’ relative to Hitler, which may also have been a function of elites throwing their full support behind Hitler, as opposed to Schleicher, Brüning, and von Papen]: for the concentration camps; and, worst of all, for the extermination of peoples during the second World war. He gave orders, which Germans executed, of a wickedness without parallel in civilized history [here, too, I suppose this is a tad harsh in light of Taylor’s words above and what transpired since 1961]. His foreign policy was a different matter. He aimed to make Germany the dominant Power in Europe and maybe, more remotely, in the world. Other Powers have pursued similar aims, and still do. Other Powers treat smaller countries as their satellites. Other Powers seek to defend their vital interests by force of arms. In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.

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Bottom Lines

And in this final sentence, we may discover what I consider the chief problem in our post-1945/89 world: history, as far as time-worn adages go, is written by the victors, and while the discussion of who was more important in the defeat of Hitler’s Germany is, kinda, besides the point (US vs. USSR/Russia), it is impossible to escape the notion that anti-German sentiment is apparently more widely-held among Western élites, be they in the US, Britain, or France, as opposed to, in principle, Russia.

After spring 1945, (West) Germany embarked on its Long Road West (Oxford UP, 2006-2007), as Heinrich August Winkler called it.

I consider this a fool’s errand, for since 1945, Germany is expendable; it was supposed to be the front-line during the Cold War and its presumed nuclear war against Soviet aggression (which never came), and Germany plays a huge role in today’s conflict between the US and Russia.

Given the sordid history of German élites in the century prior to the Second World War, however, I wish to point to a fact unmentioned by Taylor or Fischer:

As early as 1848 in the Paulskirche, German politicians were agitating for war against Russia:

‘In the East’, the Germans had always succeeded in the course of history in making ‘conquests with the sword [and the] ploughshare’. Germans could and should acknowledge this ‘right to conquer’ (Franz Wigard, ed., Reden für die deutsche Nation, 9 vols., Munich, 1848, here vol. 2, pp. 1145-6).

Another parliamentarian spoke of a ‘holy war’ that would have to be fought out at some point anyway ‘between the culture of the West and the barbarism of the East’ (Günther Wollstein, Das ‘Großdeutschland’ der Paulskirche: Nationale Ziele in der bürgerlichen Revolution 1848/49, Cologne, 1977, p. 303).

Another declared: ‘If war ever came, it would be between Germans and Slavs’ (Wigard, ed., Reden für die deutsche Nation, vol. 4, p. 2779). [line break added]

Heinrich von Gagern [whom Mr. Steinmeier explicitly repeatedly referenced, citing Gagern’s dictum that ‘we have the greatest task to fulfil’ (‘Wir haben die größte Aufgabe zu erfüllen’)] wrote in retrospect about the period of the bourgeois revolution:

‘The war with Russia—for the sake of the Baltic Sea and the Baltic provinces [i.e., dominion over present-day Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania]—for the sake of Poland—for the sake of the Danube and the Oriental conditions…was the most popular matter across all Germany’ (quoted in Veit Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848-1849, 2 vols., 1st ed. Berlin, 1930-1931, here repr. Berlin, 1977, vol. 1: p. 544).

For ‘more’ in terms of background and context, please see the below posting:

Commemorating 1848, German President Lies (by Omission), thus Reinforcing the Decadent Régime

My point being—once these notions are considered, it becomes obvious that German élites held roughly identical aims for the past 200 years, with perhaps the (partial) exceptions of Bismarck before Hitler, as well as Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schröder after 1945: Bismarck due to the reinsurance treaty with Russia and Brandt and Schröder due to their Ostpolitik, or partial turn/embrace of the eastern Power on roughly equal terms.

The policies of both Mr. Scholz and Mr. Merz are neither exceptional nor are they somehow un-German.

They come straight out of the same mould as nearly all German policy-élites did for 200 years.

The major differences then, may be summarised as follows:

• Germans desperately want to be part of ‘the West’, now led by the US

• Yes, a considerable part of their ideas (sic) have become commonplaces in Western think tanks, which have gradually replaced both the historical record and distorted Western élites’ perception of reality

• Russian élites appear to suffer from a comparable, if less absurd, distortions of both the past and reality, but they appear a tad more competent than their Western counterparts

Whence may that competence gap come from? I surmise it stems from the West not having to suffer massive consequences for policy-failures, such as the fall of communism in the USSR and the subsequent decade of collapse.

Be it as it may, but one thing is certain: those who fail to learn the proverbial lessons of history are condemned to repeat past mistakes.

For once, Marx appeared to be correct; in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (first edition 1852, 6th ed., 1972, p. 10), one can read the following:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second as farce.

We’re living that farce.

And it is virtually guaranteed that we’ll suffer a no less tragic fate as a consequence.

1. See Klaus Thörner, ‘Der ganze Südosten ist unser Hinterland’: Deutsche Südosteuropapläne von 1840 bis 1945 (Ça ira, 2008) [publisher information].