#interwar years

[demons]

Photojournalist Gerda Taro photographed by partner Robert Capa while on the Cordoba front, Spain 1936.

[warsofasoiaf]

If a time vortex plopped you down in 1939 and you wanted to help beat the Axis faster/with less loss of life than OTL, what would you do? Or was wearing down the Germans/Japanese always going to take half a decade?

Pointing out the invasion force in the Ardennes is the best thing I can do to fight the Germans if I'm being dropped in at 1939; ideally I'd want to do it earlier and strengthen the French domestic political scene by defanging the PCF and the Liga so that the French are in a strong enough position to underwrite their eastern commitments to Czechoslovakia and stop Hitler at Munich long enough for German domestic support to dry up - possibly that means the Oster conspiracy, possibly it means Hitler falls later.

The Japanese, well, by that point the war is already underway, and the only ones who would be large enough to challenge the Japanese in the Pacific are the United States, and they have a strong isolationist commitment to undertake, one that I couldn't beat out by 1939.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[walkingthroughthisworld]

Tank Training at Gettysburg

[demons]

Civilians taking shelter in a subway station during a bombing in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

[demons]

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

The Origins of Totalitaianism, Hannah Arendt

[demons]

There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

[saccharinesoulstice]

Aqa american inequality and opportunity and interwar years paper 1 AUUUUU . the Hitler Goose was SO easy to write about AND WE DID IT IN INTERVENTION THE PREVIOUS DAY AUGHHHH 🙏🙏

[redshift-13]

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300236002/the-third-walpurgis-night/

Karl Kraus, one of my favorite writers, and also, I’d like to think, a kindred spirit, has renewed relevance for this American moment.

Today’s right boils with violent anger.  Conservative paranoia, scapegoating, bigotry, its mind numbing rhetorical simplifications, the incessant lies of its political figures and media barkers, its feckless and routine embrace of misinformation - it speaks in voices redolent of what I see in readings of the Weimar era.

I haven’t read this Kraus work yet and I can hardly wait to get it.  I’m thinking it would pair richly with Victor Klemperer’s Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii.  I’ve read the first volume of his I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941, which I’d recommend.  

The first complete English translation of a far-seeing polemic, written in 1933 by the preeminent German-language satirist, unmasking the Nazi seizure of power

Austrian satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus’s Third Walpurgis Night was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but was withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Kösel Verlag in 1952, it is a devastatingly prescient exposure, giving special attention to the regime’s corruption of language as masterminded by Joseph Goebbels. Bertolt Brecht wrote to Kraus that, in his indictment of Nazism, “you have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language.” This masterful translation, by the prizewinning translators of Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, aims for clarity where Kraus had good reason to be cautious and obscure. The Austrian Jewish author Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was the foremost German-language satirist of the twentieth century. As editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch) he single-handedly after 1912 conducted a sustained critique of propaganda and the press, expressed through polemical essays, satirical plays, witty aphorisms, and resonant poems.

Endorsements

“[A] savage dissection of the Nazi media . . . Kraus’s drop-dead analysis of the rhetorical barbarities of the Hitler cult stands as an inspiring model for what’s needed (steely courage, a strong stomach, prophetic verve) to excoriate the language of autocracy, early and often.”—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse “No one saw the rise of the demonic Adolf Hitler and Nazism with the clarity Austrian satirist Karl Kraus did . . . Now Bridgham and Timms provide a brilliant translation . . . Essential.”—S. Gittleman, Choice “The final testament of old-world European humanism in its fading luminescence . . . [by] Vienna’s keenest satirist, Karl Kraus, whose literary energies were devoted largely to the process of unmasking the pretensions of the Austrian bourgeoisie, but later, to the papered-over brutalities of National Socialism, as well.”—Ari Linden, Public Books CHOICE 2021 Outstanding Academic Title “[A] critical bombshell. . . . In the Age of Trump, Kraus’s book could hardly be more timely. . . . In its brilliant and cruel dissection of the Nazi media of 1933, The Third Walpurgisnacht is . . . a truly prophetic work.”—Marjorie Perloff, from the foreword "When I was a student of German Literature in Berlin in the 1960s, Karl Kraus was seen as a Viennese crank—a curmudgeon with a serious if all too local ax to grind. Too limited, too far away to be interesting. Suddenly, The Third Walpurgis Night reads as if ripped from the front pages of tomorrow’s newspapers. Too real, too frightening, too prescient. The brilliant translation by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms brings the collapse of Weimar democracy into focus in a way that demands attention. 'Never again' really is the proper response to reading this work."—Sander L. Gilman, co-editor, The Third Reich Sourcebook