Well thats all of our existance really.
Just that sometimes there are more players and more damage.
Lifes a bitch but there to be lived
Survival of the fittest or as Darwin said
Not the fittest
Not the cleverest
But the one most adaptable to change.

I am no historian but I am German scholar (or I was once).

The Germanic peoples longed to be a nation, an empire, more or less ever since they were a loose collection of petty fiefdoms and city states under the loose and fragile federation that was the Holy Roman Empire and that desire was never really realised even in the 1848 union. It aspired to a nation which extended, in the words of its then anthem, "von dem Maas bis an die Memel / von dem Ettrich bis zum Belt" (from the Mosel to Kaliningrad and from the Adige [in northern Italy] to the Baltic), but still didn't achieve that. Always there were people perceived as "German" who were outwith anything officially calked "Germany": places like Alsace and Lorraine, Poland, the Sudetenland, the South Tirol. Germany itself still had lots of internal divisions and politics going on and was only unified in a sense.

The 1919 Versailles settlement of course had the effect of galvanising support for a response not only to its punitive terms but also to its curtailment of Germany's nationalistic ambitions whose focus was the National Socialist movement. But that was a continuation not only of what the nation was trying to do in 1914 but actually goes a long way back into the Middle Ages.

Of course in 1945 the nation was again broken up and bits of it were cut off. The bits that were France, Poland and Czechoslovakia were returned to those countries. Austria was again made independent. German-speaking peoples remained the wrong side of the Brenner Pass.

The funny thing is that even post-Unification Germanic peoples remain outside the Bund, but in an economic sense the EU is more or less run, de facto if not de jure, from the very city that Kaiser Willhelm and Adolf Hitler tried, and failed, to make into the greatest capitol since Rome. Whom is it that the mickey mouse nations go cap in hand to when they run out of money? It isn't the Prime Minister.

There is a strong national character around organisation, efficiency and overbearing behaviour that seems to stem from all this. Next time the German occupies your sun lounger in Lanzarote and says "Ve vere here firrst", this history perhaps explains some of his attitude - and the speed at which he will deflate if you answer him in German.

Edited by chateauferret (19 Oct 2018 9.54pm)

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The Ferret
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Chateauferret I just finished reading "The Short History of Germany" by James Hawes it's in the bestseller list. An interesting and easy read he confirms a lot of what you said.

He is not very complimentary about Prussia / East Germany and puts a lot of Germany's issues at their doorstep. Nazism was the culmination of many generations of Prussian outsider hatred. Hitler it turned our was not very original in his thinking but he did what the Prussian had failed to do (dominate Germany) which is why they backed him.

Also for those he were involved in the Left are the same as the Nazis discussion the author goes into that. It seems that the extremist Prussian right wing had a lot in common with the Russian Communists.

Anyway I good read I picked it up in TheWorks for £3.

I forgot to add that guess where the current far right parties are the strongest? Yup Old Prussia seems like they are still singing the same song.

Edited by Badger11 (19 Oct 2018 10.15pm)

Edited by Badger11 (19 Oct 2018 10.17pm)

One more point

looking at 2 world wars, the notion of the Germans being 'the baddies' and the allies being the goodies is very simplistic.

there were evil, genocidal, Imperial monsters on all sides.

Kayla did Anfield & Old Trafford

While this has truth to it...the reality of these things is more....who is the bigger monster.....However, it can't be ignored that in WW2 the Axis contained the far far larger monster..... Only Germany had a plan of genocide for an actual group and slavery for others. They also executed civilians deliberately when they encountered resistance in their occupied countries.....Only Germany murdered ten million Russians, women and children and raping at will as they went......they had good reason to fear the Russians once they had the upper hand....in retaliation or perhaps just because....the Russians raped they way through Germany onto Berlin and one million babies were registered with mostly unknown Russian fathers...and lets not forget that these were the women who were allowed to live or decided not to kill themselves.

None of those charges can be leveled at GB.....the worst we did in WW2 was the carpet bombing of German cities....something we never truly celebrated and which was done in response to German carpet bombing of ours.

'You kill our children, we will yours'.....the race to the bottom that is the one guarantee of total war.

However, the use of atomic bombs by Truman against Japan to achieve unconditional surrender......that still remains the hardest pill for me to swallow.

I just don't want to think about whether I could have done it or not....whether it should have been done or not.

Edited by Stirlingsays (20 Oct 2018 4.54pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

It's a good point to make that we actually had our own monster.....one that happily shook hands after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

The differences between Hitler and Stalin are purely cosmetic.......as meaningless as Trump saying that using chemical weapons to murder people is unacceptable which implies that dying via barrel bombs are ok....as if there is a level of dying horribly that just tips a level of acceptability....When we know that the real reasons for the chemical weapons objection is national self interest.

Churchill's plan to attack the Soviets directly after WW2 made sense....but war exhaustion made it a non starter.

Edited by Stirlingsays (20 Oct 2018 7.47pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)