Movie shows Germans not immune to return of Nazis

I currently live here, yeah. But I also do it in Germany where I have spent most of my life. Also, the bike I was referring to is my bike in Germany in case you were going to pick on that one as well.

The crossing on red here is completely different, as in traffic lights are only suggestions (for cars & mopeds as well, it seems). In Germany I do not cross on red as much but I do it when there's no traffic and no kids around.

I was just filling out the Verbrecheranmeldungsformular...

Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying. What a brilliant summary, I couldn't have written it better. You're deep and thorough understanding of someone else's opinion is nothing short than astounding, considering you do not agree with it.

Really, it's people like you who make debating so much fun, the was you take things at face value, try to keep discussion clean and to the points the other people are making.

I salute you.

We weren't talking murderous frenzy, just how a society turns from Dem to Dic without a military coup involved.

More examples? Fine.

An empty car in an Ubahn at 10 at night. Me the only person in the car, sitting wherever. Suddenly a Crazy Bavarian Granny boards and eyeballs me to death, at which point I ask if there's a problem, and she points at the sign saying I'm sitting on the disabled people's seat.

A situation, encountered again and again at the workplace, where you or you coworkers are completely stripped of some sort of right or whatever if you didn't fill in the forms correctly, or if you filled out the form but it turned out to be the wrong one (even if it contains all the information needed), complete with the "sorry, there's really nothing I can do". Yes there is. Ignore the stupid rule and process it as if it were the right form. Or make something up.

Do you need more?

Not examples, evidence. What you're telling are anecdotes. One or two persons are hardly representative of 82 million people. But never mind, I doubt you would find any studies suggesting the same as you did anyway, so save yourself the time.

Yes, the Germans like to have rules, the love to argue about creating rules, the typical Kegelverien spends more time arguing about rules than actually playing. On the other hand they are unable to self-organize into proper queues, which Spaniards and English people learn to do from an early age.
Now, does this have anything to do with the Nazi dictatorship? hmmm, makes for good hollywood scenes of officers clicking their heels, but that is fairly separate from the horrors that ocurred during the Nazi period. those sorts of horrors have ocurred in many countries with radically different cultures. Democracy in dictatorship? Well, we can give you a course on the history of latin american, but this would take quite a bit.

ERM...this story is based the states and simply proves that noone is immune to it...but what the hell

So now you want me to search for studies on a national scale to prove my point, but you just have to say from your experience it isn't so?

Hm. Sounds a bit like bullshit, but maybe I don't know the correct rule to apply to this situation.

EA Poe, Tell-tale Heart: "I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. "

Genie, perhaps you should consider undergoing some therapy.

You are the one claiming something pretty unbelievable no one else here seems to agree with. And you are the one claiming something that is very insulting to me and other Germans.

Oh, so sorry to have insulted you and the other Germans. So, let's keep it at a level that won't insult you anymore. How about this:

Germany? Never, they'd never agree to bow down to some funny Austrian corporal just because he changes the rules of their democratic republic so that he now controls it as a dictatorship. I mean, stories like that happen all over the place, all the time, but never in Germany. I mean, they have a history of dealing very roughly with regimes that cut down on their rights, kings that have too much power etc. Show me one nation on earth that has led so many revolts against oppressors of their own.

I hope you feel better now.

Sure, way to take the discussion to a level where there is no point in discussing it anymore. That's it for me in this topic. I have said my opinion, and I think you have made yourself more than clear to anyone interested, too. At least that will give people some insight in how to take your replies to this topic, I suppose.

The fact is, the Weimer republic did not take very well. In spite of the many attempts in German history to introduce some democracy, the established powers, the Junkers and the Army especially, simply were not accepting the need for a democracy. I can recommend a very good book: Fritz Stern's The 5 germanys I have known
http://www.amazon.com/Five-Germanys-I-Have...n/dp/0374155402
He grew up in the Weimer Republic, and his family was forced to flee when the Nazis took over. He had every reason to turn his back on Germany and hate all German culture, and yet he became a historian specialized in german history, and found himself coming back to Germany again and again.

We all feel some fustration with local customs that we don't like, but blow it out of proportion, or you will never be able to enjoy the your life anywhere.

If Germans have a moral obligation, because of the history specific to their own country, to continue to be at the forefront of efforts to make sure that no-one forgets the Holocaust, to continue to be admired as a country that honestly faces up to its past and thus is seen as having the moral authority to help prevent the same thing occurring again, isn't there a danger in arguing that modern-day Germans are no more susceptible to dictatorship than other nations? Not because it isn't true but because, by considering the Nazi regime/Holocaust to be just another dictatorship and nothing unique, it allows the present generation of Germans to forget this obligation?

Lorelei, your argument is somewhat lacking in logic. If something is unique, that means it won't recur, right? So if we think of the Nazi regime as something unique (and I do, not only because of the scale of crimes, but simply because history doesn't repeat itself), then saying that a Nazi type of dictatorship won't reappear doesn't mean playing down any alarming tendencies in this country. I still think that linking his movie (reviews are not so positive) to German history is just the director's marketing strategy, and journalists then adopt this angle of looking at the movie. As I see it, the original message of the book "The Wave" was something different, an ahistoric theory of how groups can be manipulated.

Well, that depends. WW1 was unique, until WW2 happened.

I don't feel I have any moral obligation at least no more so than you would have a moral obligation to right your ancestors wrongs.

I do believe that the UK has a moral obligation to help right the wrongs of slavery.

The UK as a whole perhaps what do you as an individual, or what do you think I, as an individual should do?

Should I live in shame that I had one ancestor that was forced by threat of death to join the Nazis (and died in combat) while his wife and 4 children were forced to flee the country because he didn't cooperate at first and then forced to flee the country they fled to because in the end he had no choice?

That's exactly what infuriates me so much about the people from Birmingham I sometimes have to deal with at work. I guess there must be a particularly high concentration of Anglo-Saxons (with their very German genes) in Birmingham...

You are a funny man in asuming that it was so easy as you said in that time to "render H. harmless". Yeah, passive resistance maybe like this:
Hitler to state official: "You putz me my shoes please. I need them clean and shiny for the opening of a KZ"
State official to Hitler: "Nope, I will not do that"
Hitler to state official: "Than I cannot open the KZ!"
State official to Hitler: "Fine."


What a load of bollocks.

Never said I thought it might be easy (by the time H. got to power that is, there were many jump-off stations on the way, by I digress), but other nations got into much bigger brawls with their own governments over much less. Examples off the top of my head - the 13 colonies and the war of independence over a bit of economic exploitation, the French revolution against a system that always existed (not right suddenly taken away), The October revolution (same same), all examples of nations going to much larger extent to say fuck off to internal exploiters.

What I'm saying is very simple, I really don't understand why the whole ruckus. German culture is susceptible to a certain form of rule dictation that I don't believe would have worked so easily in other cultures. As soon as someone has power and starts dictating the rules, a large part of German society just says "oh well", and end up giving away a lot of what constitutes their personal rights in society for a meager price. The right to form parties, the right to express opinions, the right to due process when up against the state in court. Cooperation with these things goes easier, people suck up much more of this spitting upon and simply ask if it's already raining again. Even after the war this was true, at least in East Germany. The Stasi had an estimated 500,000 cooperators, 2 million if you count lesser operators. In a land of 16 million people, that's more than 2.5% of the population. Where were they bringing up these levels of cooperation from?

I believe the Stasi, as well as Hitler, knew the material they were dealing with and knew how to take advantage of the weaknesses they perceived in it. I'm sure H. had exactly this in mind when he laid down his plot to take over Germany already in the 20s. His only mistake there was that he didn't enlist the support of the army through its Officer Corps, again a body with a venerable tradition that derived authority from power and tradition and therefore could stand up to Hitler, but chose not to in '33 because of the guarantees Hitler gave to its heads. The "people" were not a significant factor, they would just need to be fed the right things and would go along. I believe he would not be able to pull this trick in another land.

There are surely other factors, foremost of which the economic situation in the 30s and the memories of the early 20s it evoked. But I believe, as Sebasian Hafner puts in his Geschichte eines Deutschen, this has more to do with the acceptance not of what they were dealt with, but rather with who was doing the dealing. It's a bit too complicated for the level of this discussion, but basically the crisis of the 20s killed the middle class, the civil servants who were the pillars of the state by their tradition of working hard and saving their hard earned cash, and elevated the risk-happy, young entrepreneur that outdid his parents' generation in the course of a few months by taking the right risks and playing games they weren't too happy to play. But the non-revolution in 1848, as well as the bowing down to Bismark and his dissolving of the previous German states all show that this what wasn't a big novelty for the German people.

Now, I got a bit carried away last few posts (being attacked as I was can do that to me, sorry), I certainly think that the law-abiding nature of der kultivierte Deutsche has very many advantages. Just take a look at how certain things work so efficiently here compared to, say, in Bombei or in L.A., I'm just saying - these things have their downsides as well. Being more susceptible to the authority-takeover plot is one of them.

Such as ?

Members of the German Confederation (Deutsches Reich / German Empire 1871-1919):

Preußen Königreich

Bayern Königreich

Württemberg Königreich

Sachsen Königreich

Baden Großherzogtum

Mecklenburg-Schwerin Großherzogtum

Hessen Großherzogtum

Oldenburg Großherzogtum

Sachsen(-Weimar-Eisenach) Großherzogtum

Mecklenburg-Strelitz Großherzogtum

Braunschweig Herzogtum

Sachsen-Meiningen Herzogtum

Anhalt Herzogtum

Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha Herzogtum

Sachsen-Altenburg Herzogtum

Lippe Fürstentum

Waldeck Fürstentum

Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt Fürstentum

Schwarzburg-Sondershausen Fürstentum

Reuß jüngere Linie Fürstentum

Schaumburg-Lippe Fürstentum

Reuß ältere Linie Fürstentum

Hamburg Freie Stadt

Lübeck Freie Stadt

Bremen Freie Stadt

Elsaß-Lothringen Reichsland

Genie, I don't know if the French Revolution with the Jacobin terror regime that followed or the Russian Revolution with brought about two years of bloody civil war and then the Leninist dictatorship of the proletarian class is preferable to a less violent, more tentative revolution or rather evolution. In fact, in the 20th century, Germany witnessed two revolutions:

The November Revolution that led to the abdication of the Kaiser and brought about short-lived workers and soldiers councils governing in several cities. The moderate social democrats prevented a soviet style development.

The revolution of 1989 was triggered by the development in Poland and Gorbachev's reforms, but nonetheless it was a courageous movement that started among simple citizens.

I know what you mean, I lived in Munich for about 10 years. You are however making the same mistake that too many TTers make, that is assuming the rest of Germany is like the Bavarians. They definately are not, a lot are very different, that is more friendly, more liberal etc.

Someone ought to remove or alter the bullshit preview text on the munich-starting page. It undermines the respectability of this site and simply doesn't correspond to the truth, besides.

Part of what made Germany so susceptible to Hitler's charisma was the general misery wrought upon her by the Treaty of Versailles. He got the luck of the draw that Germany was so beaten down during those times and was actively looking for something to rally around.
The problem with this story is such a sensationalist headline that reeks of yellow journalism. I find it sad that instead of making this a beautiful example of humanity's fallibility as herd creatures, someone has instead chosen to use it as a LOL HITLER piece of work that really probably doesn't deserve the time to watch it.

Long made short, don't blame Germany for the state the Treaty left her in, and don't make nationalist assumptions because it happened once there. May I remind all of you that the Salem Witch Trials were brought on by this selfsame situation: desperate people developing a cult of personality for some charistmatic leader, and the tragedies that followed.

The words "Lighten Up" come to mind, but then that'd make "context" a dirty word.

Individuals willingly follow and fall into ultimate opression, where each individual has found purpose and meaning, in collective enslavement. Analogy to a battered wife beleiving her marriage is going well. Cancer does spread,and it takes only one cell after chemo therapyand there you have history repeating itself.