I watched a documentary about this Hilter fellow's book, "My Snuggle," and I'm hoping to stay out of Facebook jail by being coy.

Another brief and informative Deutsche Welle documentary film about a book that reads like one man's account of his untreated nervous breakdown -- and yes, I did read it while studying history at IU Southeast.

It's gibberish, and that's also why it's a genius product under capitalism, because there'll always be a market for unadulterated lunacy. 

You can still buy Adolf Hitler’s credo all over the world, under the counter in some places, on the Internet or simply at the bookshop in others. But did Hitler actually write it himself? And was it really a blueprint for war and the Holocaust?

Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" was first published in 1925. The 700-page work has been translated into 18 languages, sold over 12 million copies and been revised numerous times since Hitler's death. Almost everyone knows of it, yet hardly anyone has actually read it. "Mein Kampf" is a book of paradoxes, famous yet unfamiliar - fascinating and repellant at the same time.

New Albany city council, this Thursday: "Resolution Expressing Solidarity with the People of Charlottesville, Virginia, and a Public Condemnation of Racism, White Supremacy, and Neo-Nazi Ideology in Our Community, the Nation and the World."

Thursday evening, 7:00 p.m., 3rd floor meeting room. Let's see a big turnout for this.

So, you think you've heard it all about Nazi Germany? Welcome to the "untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs."

More placid Sunday reading.

High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history, by Rachel Cooke (The Guardian)

.. The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940. Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.

No conscience for football players? As Colin Kaepernick is savaged, let's not forget August Landmesser.

"If you can't stand for the national anthem, get your sorry ass out of this country."
-- Courageous Facebook Lodger

Conscience is a tough concept, isn't it? We're for it, until we aren't. It's absolutely vital to safeguard OUR right to the exercise of conscience, but yours?

Of course -- so long as we agree with each other.

I've seen the photo above many times, and back in 2014, I finally decided to see if there's a story.

There is. The significance to me is that while the circumstances in this instance are ones about which we've long since reached general agreement (Nazism, Hitler, the Holocaust), it is not banal to suggest that non-conformists of many sorts in our own purportedly "free" country can imagine themselves in Landmesser's shoes.

As an atheist, permit me to inform you that it happens all the time. In my reckoning, any time it's the occasion for all of us to perform the same rote act (pray publicly, declare allegiance to the flag) at once, it's time to consider dissenting.

Speaking for myself, I'll always stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance in honor of my father, a World War II veteran of the Marines. But I will not recite the pledge of allegiance aloud, because "under God" has no place in it.

August Landmesser, The Man Behind The Crossed Arms (All That Is Interesting)

 ... There is no telling how many men in that crowd were acting out of fear, fully aware that failing to salute the Fuhrer was akin to signing his own death certificate. Knowing that it was, in fact, Hitler standing before the crowd makes the disobedience all the more admirable, but what may seem like an act of justified transgression was at its core a gesture of love. August Landmesser, the man with his arms crossed, was married to a Jewish woman.

Trump this ... because it isn't funny.

My friend Gregg Seidl wrote some very wise words on Facebook.

So Trump is going to rid the country of approximately 14 million people, and, according to him, the move will be quick, "and it won't be pretty."

The only difference between his commentary and that of the past is the last time those plans were spoken in German.

Actually, Joe Stalin uttered similar words in Russian, as pertaining to the Kulaks ... and it was not pretty.

When you reduce people to labels, they're dehumanized. When they're dehumanized, then "ridding" the country of them becomes nothing more than sweeping a floor, or spraying poison on insects.

But that first step remains dehumanizing them.

I realize that some other friends, and readers of this blog, are riding Trump's bandwagon. I believe most of you will dismount of your own accord, absent the need for me to hector you with inconvenient facts. But as an aficionado of history, Gregg sees something very important: When you start bandying phrases like "make us great again," the devil's truly in the details.

Who are we?

And: Who must be made to suffer in order to make "us" great again? Read the history books, folks. Trump is unleashing malevolent genies. The sooner it ends, the better.

Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny: Win or lose, Trump's campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

So two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that "Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported."

When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn't yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, "That would be a shame." But right after, he went on:

"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that."

This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.

The man behind the crossed arms.

I've seen this photo for a very long time, and finally decided to see if there's a story. There is. The significance to me is that while the circumstances in this instance are ones about which we've long since reached agreement (Nazism, Hitler, the Holocaust), it is not banal to suggest that non-conformists of many sorts in our own purportedly "free" country can imagine themselves in Landmesser's shoes. Any time it's the occasion for all of us to perform the same act (pray publicly, declare allegiance to the flag) at once, it's time to consider dissenting.

August Landmesser, The Man Behind The Crossed Arms, (All That Is Interesting)

The photo above has floated around the internet for a few years now, popular for one of its subjects’ subtle yet profound acts of nonconformity. There is no telling how many men in that crowd were acting out of fear, fully aware that failing to salute the Fuhrer was akin to signing his own death certificate. Knowing that it was, in fact, Hitler standing before the crowd makes the disobedience all the more admirable, but what may seem like an act of justified transgression was at its core a gesture of love. August Landmesser, the man with his arms crossed, was married to a Jewish woman.

The Nazi Anatomists: "The difficulty is, you see, that our imaginations cannot count".

It's somber and long reading for a pre-Armistice Day Sunday, but brilliantly written and utterly necessary.

The Nazi Anatomists: How the corpses of Hitler's victims are still haunting modern science—and American abortion politics, by Emily Bazelon (Slate)

In 1941, Charlotte Pommer graduated from medical school at the University of Berlin and went to work for Hermann Stieve, head of the school’s Institute of Anatomy. The daughter of a bookseller, Pommer had grown up in Germany’s capital city as Hitler rose to power. But she didn’t appreciate what the Nazis meant for her chosen field until Dec. 22, 1942. What she saw in Stieve’s laboratory that day changed the course of her life—and led her to a singular act of protest.

Stieve got his “material,” as he called the bodies he used for research, from nearby Plötzensee Prison, where the courts sent defendants for execution after sentencing them to die. In the years following the war, Stieve would claim that he dissected the corpses of only “dangerous criminals.” But on that day, Pommer saw in his laboratory the bodies of political dissidents. She recognized these people. She knew them.

"Hitler built the autobahn."

I consider myself to be reasonably informed, and yet if there might be time for any one course of study, I'd love to learn more about architecture -- not from a purely engineering standpoint, but historical and aesthetic perspectives.

Hitler's Classical Architect: Why is Léon Krier defending anew the work of the Third Reich’s master builder?, by Michael Sorkin

 ... Although (Albert) Speer’s redemptive dissembling has now been stripped away by Gitta Sereny and other historians, the Speerian narrative—like that of rocket man Wernher von Braun—still abides as a central ethical conundrum of the Nazi era: how could people who seemed to be like us become mass-murdering criminals? The impossibly illusory answer defines evil itself. Both Speer and von Braun managed their respective rehabilitations by claiming they were nonparticipants, merely present at the scene of the crime, and thus deserved to be credited for their special technical or artistic competences, which might well have been applied in other circumstances without opprobrium. Von Braun, after all, took us to the moon, and Speer outshone Hollywood with that fabulous searchlight colonnade at the Nuremberg rallies. For his part, Hitler built the autobahn.

There's another Albert Speer, as yet working as an architect in Germany: Speer's son, of the same name. The photos are instructive, especially the first one from Halle; readers might recall the book about Czechoslovak housing reviewed here.

Interview with Architect Albert Speer: 'Calamity of Postwar Construction Came from Rejecting History' (Der Spiegel)

City planner Albert Speer, son of the notorious Third Reich architect of the same name, says that reconstruction in Germany has been problematic because of the complete rejection of history after World War II. He spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about why even new buildings must be rooted in the past.

ON THE AVENUES: The war, daddy.

ON THE AVENUES: The war, daddy.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(This column originally was published in the pre-merger New Albany Tribune on December 31, 2009, as dispatched from Germany)

Within a day of our arrival on December 20 in Bamberg, Germany, I noticed two items that had eluded my attention during previous trips.

First, there is a large marble plaque in the covered archway of the old town hall building astride the Regnitz River. It commemorates Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic Wehrmacht officer whose failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944 was fictionalized in the recent movie “Valkyrie.” Apparently Stauffenberg’s first military posting in the 1920s was to a cavalry regiment in Bamberg, and perhaps for this reason, his somewhat belated but ultimately heroic role in the resistance bears noting.

Second, there is a small, golden colored stone inserted between the gray concrete sections of a sidewalk running in front of an otherwise anonymous 19th-century building on Luitpoldstrasse. The carving on the inconspicuous stone provides biographical details about a woman, presumably Jewish, who lived in the adjacent building prior to her deportation to the Theresianstadt concentration camp, from whence she was taken to Treblinka, where she died in 1942. Had I not looked down at the right time, I’d have entirely missed seeing the stone.

Basil Fawlty famously admonished his Torquay hotel staff “not to mention the war.” Unlike Fawlty himself, I can easily avoid mentioning it while traveling in Germany, but thinking about it is a different matter.

Undoubtedly, younger generations are able to roam the German lands without saying or thinking much about what happened there in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It has been just shy of 65 years since Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and his Nazi regime collapsed amid the devastation it had so eagerly wrought.

Obviously, much time has passed, and slowly, inexorably, those people who were alive then have departed, taking with them their vital, eyewitness, living memories, and leaving future generations just the dry facts to be transmitted by textbooks and videos. Are these stories enough to ensure that the lessons are not forgotten?

By the time I made my first trip to Germany, a full 40 years had passed since the end of World War II. Now another quarter century has elapsed, and the basic questions that haunted me in 1985 are unanswered.

How did a relatively obscure group of wild-eyed fascistic, racist, radicals manage to seize control of an otherwise sane, civilized and cultured country, in due course intentionally unleashing a literal hell on earth against fellow Europeans (in general) and adherents to Judaism (in particular)?

There are as many ways to explain it as there are people to theorize, and yet the horror remains inexplicable. I have tried my best to let it rest, primarily by vowing to refrain from reading another book or watching another documentary about the era, but then the third volume of the historian Richard J. Evans’ trilogy on the history of the Third Reich was published in the spring of 2009.

I read the reviews, found my curiosity engaged yet again, and immediately trotted out to buy all three books, commencing to work my way through 2,000 pages of relentlessly depressing violence, destruction, murder, mayhem and depravity – and all of that occurs in the first volume, which ends in 1933, six years before the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and the Holocaust began.

By mid-summer we coincidentally had decided to spend the Christmas holiday in Bamberg, and my readings took on a bizarre, bi-polar feel. On the side of my professional interests, I undertook a refresher course as to the traditions prefacing the glorious beer culture of the Franconian region, of which Bamberg is the epicenter, and on the other, Evans in hand, I began imagining once again how the sad historical record recounted above affected life in the same geographical areas – sometimes in the very same taverns I’d be patronizing.

I finished the third and final volume just before our departure, and although Evans’ achievement in synthesizing information is considerable, and the resulting narrative compelling and triumphant, those nagging questions about cause and effect still cannot be conclusively answered, because human hearts and minds cannot fully be revealed even if the basic chronology can be written.

We’ve always known that the Nazis came to power during a postwar malaise followed by an economic downturn by persuading some people that other, “different” people could be blamed for their difficulties. Lacking persuasion, psychological intimidation and physical assault awaited those who wouldn’t take the bait. A sufficient number of Germans from all walks of life supported the Nazis, whether actively or in the breach, and for a multiplicity of reasons, many unconnected with the anti-Semitism that came to define the message over time. Although numerous, ordinary Germans were disenchanted during the Nazi period, full-throated resistance never materialized, primarily because Hitler was adept at a strategy of dividing and conquering.

I suppose, in the end, the incremental nature of life took affairs past the point where normal people could think and react to them. They just hunkered down and waited for the madness to end.

In closing, I would not contemplate these matters if by doing so implied a stance of judgmental superiority by virtue of being American. That’s historically foolish. Remember the Native Americans who used to live here? Or the legacy of slavery, our own “blood guilt”? A little more than a year ago, a downtown New Albany businessman was willing to state for the record that in spite of being a Democrat, he’d not be voting for Barack Obama because Obama is black.

I can’t see into his heart and mind, either.