Documentary: "Germany and the Cold War" (two parts).

  

It's another exemplary two-part Deutsche Welle documentary, focusing on the Cold War as experienced in the two German states that arose from the post-WWII settlement. 

For more than four decades, divided Germany was the epicenter of the Cold War. The border severing East and West embodied the animosity between the US and USSR. The smoldering conflict threatened to escalate and destroy both German states. The Cold War was persistently present in the two Germanys - both on the political and military level, but also in everyday life. On the one hand, there was the race for technical progress, the fear of bombs and rockets, the struggle for moral superiority over the other side: and on the other, doubt about each state’s policies, and those of their allies. 

How did Germans experience this Cold War? How did it shape attitudes to life on both sides of the Iron Curtain? 

This two-part documentary asks political actors and decision-makers in East and West, but above all contemporary witnesses from divided Germany, what experiences they had in the period between 1945 and 1991. Who were the winners and losers in this brutal stand-off between communism and capitalism? The demonstrations on June 17, 1953, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the major demonstrations in Bonn against Pershing missiles, nuclear strike drills, employment bans in West Germany on members of the German Communist Party, the opening of the Wall, the collapse of the Eastern bloc - all were events that shaped people’s lives. This is their story and the story of Germany in the Cold War.

BOOKS OF MY LIFE: "If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you."

I'll be purchasing this one.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if my entire motivation for traveling in Europe has been to track down the legacy of the Habsburgs, particularly in their final iteration as overlords of the Austrian (and later, Austro-Hungarian) empire: from Sarajevo to Konopiště, and Rudolf's Mayerling to Madeira (Karl's island of exile).

In 2003 during the Danube River bicycle ride my friend Bob and I bicycled up the hillside to Artstetten, the heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that I'd visited Vienna for the first time in 1985 and learned that Franz Ferdinand's grave wasn't there because he could not be buried with his beloved wife in the "official" imperial crypt owing to their morganatic marriage.

Their final resting places were at Artsetten, hence my visit, albeit 18 years later. I very much wanted to view the crypt at Artstetten.

Franz Ferdinand's marriage is relevant to the book review below, because here was an instance of a Habsburg marrying for love, quite apart from the wishes of the realm. That's why family protocol denied their children rights to the throne, and cruelly withheld from the couple many of the ceremonial perks of royal existence.

The attendant regretted there was no public access to the final resting place of this Habsburg. I understood and didn’t ask for favors. When I started to leave the facility she called to to me; I walked back to the desk and she silently pushed a key across and winked.

That was very nice of her. I was respectful of my time with the victims of Princip at Sarajevo, and took a photo (above). This is the first time it has been seen on the internet.

A breed apart: The Habsburgs’ marriages consolidated lands as well as faulty genes (at The Economist)

European history is unimaginable without the once-imperious family

The Habsburgs. By Martyn Rady. Allen Lane; 416 pages; £30. To be published in America by Basic Books in August; $32.

Martyn Rady’s new book is billed as “the definitive history” of the clan. Not, it must be said, a hotly contested title. Once the names of Europe’s most powerful families—the Bourbons and Battenbergs and Garibaldis—were known across the world. Today, beyond the biscuit tin, they are largely forgotten.

Except, that is, for their eccentric matchmaking. If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you. For centuries they experimented with marriages between first cousins, second cousins and cousins so multiply intertwined that the traditional familial vocabulary breaks down. A mother might double as a cousin; the wife of Leopold I referred to him throughout their marriage as “Uncle”.

The result was less a family tree, branching and widening, than a convoluted web. At one point the mortality rate of Habsburg children reached 80%, four times the average of the time. Of those who lived, many were hideously misshapen, with the infamous drooping lip and jutting Habsburg jaw. It is one of the abiding puzzles of European history that its aristocrats, so good at breeding horses, should have been so bad at breeding themselves.

12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 12): A free state of Trieste?

Photo credit: "The Free Territory of Trieste."

We look at all these lines on a map and forget how ephemeral they can be. The border of independent Slovenia lies a few miles outside Trieste; 30 years ago it was a component of Yugoslavia. In this part of Europe, much of the geographical flux owes to the Austro-Hungarian empire's death in 1918.

Perhaps my most recent period of sheer Habsburg obsession came in 2012.

• The European Union, the Habsburg Monarchy and my nightstand.
• ON THE AVENUES: The sound of Musil.
• European Journal. Well, sort of.

Arguably any of us who succumbs to fascination with the Austro-Hungarian empire's latter decades almost by definition must be equally gripped by the story of the grouping and regroupings that followed its demise.

And Trieste is a big part of this tale. Might it become something different yet again? This seems unlikely, although hardly anyone at the time foresaw the Berlin Wall coming down, either.

The Free State of Trieste, by Tara Isabella Burton (Slate)

Activists have a plan to make the Italian port city something much bigger.

Somewhere on the Adriatic between the Miramare and Duino castles just north of the city of Trieste, on a sailboat called the Punt e Mes, owned by an amateur historian of the Habsburgs, the filmmaker Luca Wieser said he had an “aforisma” (aphorism) to share with me. It featured prominently in the film he’s working on, an as-yet-unreleased documentary about Trieste during World War II, portions of which he screened for me on his laptop as the Punt e Mes lurched over the waves.

It was a quote from Milan Kundera:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. … The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

That, Wieser said, was what was happening to Trieste.

“Even in universities,” he insisted, professors taught a skewed version of history, claiming that Trieste was an Italian city. A lie, he said, designed to serve the interests of the powerful.

Wieser and his companions, all members of the fringe Free Territory of Trieste movement, have a dream for their city. They dream that one day, Trieste—a former Austro-Hungarian port city of 250,000, technically within Italy’s current borders but historically culturally amorphous—will be recognized for what it is: a free territory, neither Italian nor Slovene, neither Austrian nor Balkan, but its own distinct maritime capital, a sovereign and cosmopolitan nation ...

Intellectual history: A Twitter passage by George Monbiot, two good books by Tony Judt, and you can hear a pin drop in New Gahania.

George Monbiot "is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism."

The following thoughts by Monbiot as expressed at Twitter this week seem almost certain to fall on deaf ears in New Albany.

"We are born in total ignorance of everything, and we die in total ignorance of almost everything. Acquiring useful knowledge requires determined study. Yet we no longer have a culture of public learning. This makes us vulnerable to every charlatan who stands for election.

"The charlatans seek to keep us in ignorance. When they deride "elites", they don't mean people like themselves - the rich and powerful. They mean teachers and intellectuals. They are creating an anti-intellectual culture, to make people easier to manipulate.

"Bring back the workers' education movements. Bring back a rich public culture of learning and intellectual self-improvement, open to everyone. Knowledge is the most powerful tool in politics."

Earlier tonight at Pints&union a few of us were talking about European post-war history. I recommended the late historian Tony Judt's masterful Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, but not to neglect Judt and co-writer Timothy Snyder's 2012 book, Thinking the Twentieth Century.

Here's the closing passage from my column of October 30, 2014.

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ON THE AVENUES: Does New Albany even have an intellectual history?

Judt’s and Snyder’s book takes the form of several loosely themed conversations, as transcribed by Snyder. At the time of the book’s preparation, Judt was immobilized by ALS, the disease that subsequently killed him. As with Stephen Hawking, Judt’s mind was mightily sharp, and the two historians tackle topics beneath an umbrella term many New Albanians might find frightening, pretentious or both: The “intellectual history” of the past century.

In short, how did ideas and systems of thought play a role in European society, art, politics and history during this era? I’ve already mentioned some ‘isms,” as in capitalism, communism and fascism. What about socialism? How is it that I persist in identifying my core political persuasion as resembling European-style Social Democracy rather than conforming to an American version of Democrat or Republican?

There are numerous other examples, as in the case of Zionism. What is the pathway of a Jewish separatist movement rooted in fin de siècle Vienna, as it leads toward a post-Holocaust consolidation of the modern Israeli state? How did rural and urban Jewish societies in Europe differ in the first place? And so on.

Reading and thinking about this wonderful overview of intellectual history have been tremendously exciting for me. I needed a stimulating “break” after so many months of concentration on specific matters of local, personal and business interest – from lane widths to commercial kitchens, from the death of a house cat to Silvercrest, and from 800-lb gorillas to shrubbery.

Judt and Snyder’s engaging scholarship has helped bring me back, full circle, to the time when I was advised to register for an Introduction to Philosophy class only because (a) it’s easy, and (b) I’d need humanities credits, anyway. But I was abruptly awakened by a vibrant world of thoughts and ideas, which high school simply didn’t prepare me to fathom or discover. The book reminds me of what changed my life so very long ago ... and continues to do so today.

Yes, I persist in a belief that certain of these ideas and doctrines, some more so than others, still preface daily living in a place like New Albany. Ideas and words matter, as in a comment recently passed along to me:

"Before we talk about transportation we have to ask what city we want and how we want to live."

I want to live thinking.

Without it, my quality of life suffers.

"Ultimately, right-wing populism is a tool that is used by cynical elites for their own political advantage. However, right-wing rage is not something that can be controlled."

History: An inconvenient record suggesting it regularly repeats itself.

The on-line radicalization of Pittsburgh synagogue shooter George Bowers is discussed, and as I embark on a new book ...

Ian Kershaw’s ‘To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949’

 ... Why did Europe go mad? The four horsemen of the apocalypse Kershaw identifies in his nightmare history are a dramatic rise of ethnic-racist nationalism; angry, conflicting demands for territorial revisionism; acute class conflict that took on sharper focus by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and a prolonged crisis of capitalism that many thought terminal.

 ... I can't help but observe that those prattling on about how a "good" economy alone is sufficient reason to ignore sheer lunacy is pretty far over the lunatic boundary line themselves.

The problem comes when the economy turns bad. Who'll be blamed? My advice is tear yourselves away from comic book movies and read a bit of history.

The Fascist Creep: How Conspiracy Theories and an Unhinged President Created an Anti-Semitic Terrorist, by Joseph Flatley (CounterPunch)

 ... “Much of Bowers’ online profile resembles those of countless other extremist users,” according to a Southern Poverty Law Center analysis of the shooter’s social media. “As with other alt-right killers, it’s likely that Bowers was radicalized entirely online.” His social media activity revolved around several common obsessions of the racist right. He feared “white genocide,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory which holds that everything from immigration and multiculturalism to low birth rates and abortion are being promoted by the “globalists” (that’s an antisemitic code word for “Jews”) to drive the white race to extinction. In Bowers’ virtual reality, the white men have no power—undoubtedly resonant to a white man who seemed to have little in his own life worth living for—while George Soros is personally overseeing the extinction of the white race.

“Lone wolf terror” (sometimes called “leaderless resistance”) describes terrorist attacks conducted by a single person, or perhaps a very small, unaffiliated group. As terrorism expert George Michael writes in his book Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance, it is commonly understood among right-wing populists that “they are part of a relatively small and marginalized movement,” and that to take up arms “would almost certainly lead to organizational suicide,” not to mention actual suicide. This has led to the strategy, favored by the more conservative members of the right-wing populist movement, to concentrate on winning the masses over through propaganda.

The more extreme elements of right-wing populism, not willing to abandon armed struggle, have encouraged “lone wolves” to pick up arms. The idea is that individuals like Bowers and MAGA mail bomber Cesar Sayoc are the vanguard of a new movement that’s paving the way for a right-wing takeover of the United States. Now, this might be the case—but probably not in the way that the extremists like to imagine.

“Under specific conditions,” writes journalist and activist Chip Berlet, “virulent demonization and scapegoating can—and does—create milieus in which the potential for violence is increased.” While you can’t predict which individual will turn to violence, it can pretty much guarantee that someone will, “upon hearing the rhetoric of clear or coded incitement,” strike out at the perceived enemy.

Right-wing populism is a continuum. The extreme right (which Berlet also refers to as “the ultra-right”) is the revolutionary arm of right-wing populism in America. This includes the Klan, neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations, and anyone willing to pick up a gun or a baseball bat or make a pipe bomb for the struggle. Among the more conservative elements of right-wing populism are “reformist political movements.” These include the Republican Party, FOX News, and conservative think tanks. In between these two poles—the revolutionaries and the reformers—are the dissidents. This includes patriot and militia groups, right-wing talk radio, tea partiers, and anti-semitic conspiracy theorists. There is a lot of movement along this continuum: people might be drawn into right-wing talk radio, for instance, which becomes a conduit to a more extreme right-wing ideology.

Quite possibly, this is what happened to Robert Bowers ...