Counter-Currents
Joseph Nash, The Autumn Manoeuvres, Officers Playing at Kriegs Spiel, or the “Game of War” (1872) (Courtesy of Wikipedia)
1,349 words
In my last essay, and against my better judgement, I quoted from memory something that Winston Churchill might or might not have said. I could be wrong; people attribute all sorts of things to Churchill that he never said. This, of course, launched a discussion about the Second World War in the comments.
You would be surprised — or perhaps not — how often the subject of the Second World War comes up in the comments sections of essays I’ve written that have nothing to do with the war. Once in a blue moon, one of my articles will get reprinted over at The Unz Review. When that happens, I appreciate being published in the same publication with Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire, but the best part is that the comments section is usually quite lively. Sometimes they like me, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they are even brutal and seem to hate me for no reason. But it’s always interesting.
The last time I was published at Unz, I was eager with anticipation at the response I’d get, but the entire comments section ended up being people discussing the Second World War. No one has been discussing the actual content of my piece. The pattern is always the same: Someone brings up the war, another responds to it, and then the whole comments section ends up being a discussion of the war.
There are two things that I believe it is unhealthy to spend too much time thinking about: the Second World War and the ethnostate. Far too much mental energy is spent dwelling on the past and speculating about the far-off future. Yes, there is value in knowing how we got here and knowing where you want to go, but first and foremost, an activist must live in the here and now. Revolutionary politics requires some degree of improvisation. Things will happen that will cause one to rethink strategy. Opportunities will arise in unexpected places, and one should be alert to emerging trends. Relitigating the Second World War takes people out of the here and now.
Better than knowing where you want to go is thinking about how you get to the next step. Yes, we all want our own white communities. What’s the first step toward getting there? Being in the here and now means thinking in terms of short-term goals. What’s the next step up the ladder? Elon Musk has given us a free-speech tool. What can we do with it? How do we turn anti-Zionists into White Nationalists? White Nationalists compete with several other movements for an audience — the Bronze Age Pervert sphere, the post-Left, the manosphere, etc. How do we reach these people? How do we address their talking points? These are far more important questions to be asking than where Hitler went wrong.
The Second World War is a fascinating subject, but I think people put entirely too much emphasis on it. In my opinion, The Great War of 1914-1918 was a far more devastating one because it broke the European spirit. The decades leading up to the First World War were an era of optimism and romanticism. Mankind was learning to fly, and for the first time people could send a telegram to the other side of the world. It was the golden age of speculative fiction. But the Great War and the Spanish Flu were so emotionally and psychologically traumatic for the European people that something inside them died. Cynicism and self-doubt crept in; their art got uglier and their literature got darker. The previous spirit of optimism lived on in the United States — at least through the twentieth century. Before the Iraq War, people thought America could do anything. This not to mention that the First World War broke the European aristocracy, which had historically been an obstacle to Jewish advancement.
Broke: Wishing Hitler had won
Woke: Wishing the Second World War could have been avoided.
Bespoke: Understanding that by the time the war came around, the damage had already been done.
You can buy Tito Perdue’s The Gizmo here.
Many moons ago, I went to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to see the grave of Oscar Wilde. Yeah, I saw Jim Morrison’s stupid grave while was there, too, but I was there to see Wilde. I also walked into the section containing the First World War dead and found the experience quite moving. It was raining at the time, which added to the dramatic effect. It occurred to me how little I knew of the conflict. Americans are famous for knowing very little about the First World war, even though more British, French, and Italians died in that war than in the Second.
The reason is that the Great War is not as sexy as the Second World War. The latter has an interesting cast of characters, clear-cut good guys and bad guys, dramatic turning points, and cool aesthetics. The Great War has none of these. There were some battles that lasted for month, but where no territory changed hands, including the five battles of Ypres, 12 battles of Isonzo, and a couple each in the Marne and the Somme. No one can even definitively answer what that war was about. The whole thing presents itself as a riddle, which is what makes it a far more interesting conflict.
One thing Nazi fetishists do — due primarily to their lack of knowledge of about the First World War — is unquestioningly accept the Nazi narratives about it. “The Germans were outraged that they were made to accept guilt for the war.” Yeah, because the truth hurts. Do you know the events of the July crisis? Strictly speaking, you could say that Russia started the war, but Germany made it a far bigger conflict than it needed to be.
The Great War could have only ended up as a regional war, with Russia and Serbia on one side and Germany and Austria on the other, and it would have been over within a year. But Germany had only one battle plan, which assumed there would be a two-front war between France and Russia. Germany made no plans for what to do if only one side mobilized against them — which is what happened. As such, when Germany decided to go to war with Russia, France was going to war whether she liked it or not, and there was nothing she could have done to prevent it. France was the only one of the Great Powers to enter the war involuntarily. Thus, from their perspective, yes, Germany absolutely started the war.
Then there are the dumb talking points about how harsh the Treaty of Versailles was. Given that Germany was indeed able to rise up and invade France again, it clearly was not harsh enough. Since they weren’t able to prevent that, it was a lousy treaty for the victors. France wanted to annex the Rhineland but were talked out of it by a promise of an American defensive pact which never materialized. They should have held firm on the Rhineland. Germany had recently launched a completely unprovoked attack on them that destroyed a third of their industry and wiped out a generation of their youth. I think the Rhineland was a more than reasonable request.
What is undeniable is that the First World War produced more great artists. Many of the great interwar actors, novelists, directors, and playwrights served in that war: Ernst Hemmingway, W. Somerset Maugham, William Wellman. The Second World War does not have the same reputation for having produced great artists for some reason. It’s as if everyone who fought in that war returned home and became a normie. Maybe they wrote some adventure novels, but not the deep philosophical treatises about war such as A Farewell to Arms or All Quiet of the Western Front. The Great War also produced war poets. Did anyone who fought in it write poetry about the Second World War?
Moreover, would those who are heavily into the Second World War read it even if there were?
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44 comments
I agree with the overall point of the essay, but if we’re going to get into the nitty gritty about World War I, the Germans didn’t attack France in 1914 because they were somehow incapable of developing a strategy by which they would only go to war with Russia. It’s because France and Russia had been in a military alliance since the 1890s, and France was treaty-bound to come to Russia’s defense in the event of war. It would have been extremely short-sighted for the Germans to assume that the French would just abandon the treaty and do nothing while they sent the bulk of their forces to fight the Russians.
The French wanted to conquer Elsaß and Lothringen, originally German lands, so I do not understand why the author pictures them as an unwishing side of the conflict, some kind of an innocent victim.
The loss of Alsace–Lorraine was not as big of a deal for France as people make out and was mostly hyped up after the war started for propaganda purposed. France had acquired a vast global empire in the interim.
Nonsense. Revanche – Revenge for the loss of Alsace Lorraine was prominent in French society from the day of their conquest by Germany.
Britain. There is your culprit. Perfidious Albion was preparing to destroy Germany for decades before WWI.
Of course, in their usual manner they maneuvered their foe into a position where they could appear blameless.
I would add that the French occupied some of German lands on the Rhine at least since the 30-years war and Richellieu/Mazarin, and also never forget Napoleon’s conquests.
Italy was also had defensive treaty with Germany and Austria and weazeled their way out of it by claiming that they were acting as the aggressors. France could have done the same by claiming Russia mobilized first.
Italy always enters wars on one side and finishes on the another.
This comment is based on events between 1861 and 1945?
Before there was no Italy at all.
No, the Italians switched sides because the Entente offered them a better deal than the Central Powers could have, and then short-shrifted them with the “spoils” when it was over. That was one of Mussolini’s gripes at the end of the Great War.
🙂
I just can’t think of anything to say about all this anti-Germanic ahistorical nonsense…
Okay, first of all, I strongly disagree.
The reason that WWII has to be revisited so much is because it was a clear watershed event, and the enemy reinforces THEIR narratives endlessly, to the tune of trillions of dollars. That alone makes it necessary and vital to revisit the truth, and to keep pressing it over and over and over again, ad nauseam, until we are no longer under siege.
And this reasoning about World War I is simply wrong. Some of us actually have degrees in History and know quite a lot about the Great War.
Briefly, the reason that the Versailles Treaty must be upbraided was because it assessed War Guilt upon Germany and therefore made it a Wall Street economic colony with open-ended Reparations at compound interest. Even the KPD despised the Versailles Treaty, but only the NSDAP had the gonads to reject it in toto. The bourgeois parties had no credibility precisely because they were willing to accept War Guilt and consequently the enduring moral and concrete debt in exchange for a (very smaall) piece of the global action (to paraphrase Mr. Spock).
What we know as the Holocaust today then manifests by an order of magnitude better than War Guilt ever did because that is now the new God that everyone must pray to.
The facts are that in 1914 the European alliance system was on a powderkeg of mutual-assured destruction. Only the United States as a neutral had the potential superpower stature to rectify this peacefully on behalf of Europeans, but she did not. Hank Ford’s Ark of Peace and so forth did not have the backing of the plutocratic elites, by far. They were too busy collecting the big money selling munitions and earning compound interest making the unsecured loans to the Allied powers who were buying the munitions. Mr. Wilson then actually used the sleeping giant in an attempt to effect his own Liberal global vision by messianically entering the war at the last hour ─ after having been reelected on the basis of staying out of the war.
What happened in 1914 was that the world was at war the instant that the Tsar mobilized the Russian Steamroller. Once that happened it was DEFCON 1 and Germany had to either surrender to the Entente or “launch the nukes.”
The way the Germans did things (obviously without ICBMs) was that their internal lines of rail communication enabled their Army to go from one front to the other rapidly enough to fight a two-front war while the enormous Steamroller was still plodding across the Masurian minefields. If the Germans had the benefit of radio-directed aerial artillery and motorization in 1914 as they did in 1940, then they could have defanged the Russian assault in the East and taken Paris in the West.
The Kaiser made a good-faith effort trying to smooth things out with his cousin, the Tsar of all the Russias. But the Tsar, fearing being labelled a German sympathizer, pushed the proverbial big button anyway.
For his part, the Kaiser could have taken a more-cautious stance and not blank-checked the moribund and Multikulti Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had needed to take a strong stance against Serbian terrorism after the assassination of their Archduke and his wife.
I’ve oversimplified things for the sake of brevity here, but this story is nothing new. Worth a read (other than the atrocity chapter about the rape of Belgium) is the classic 1962 book The Guns of August by (((Barbara Tuchman))) who was the granddaughter of President Wilson’s Ottoman Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. ─ the man who invented the Armenian Genocide narrative and was very keen to get the USA into the war on the Allied side.
American entry into the war had the happy effect of guaranteeing Allied loans after Germany had nearly defeated Russia ─ when it looked like the Germans would win the war (thus potentially making it impossible to free the Holy Land from Ottoman hands or otherwise settle the millions of endangered Ashkenazi Jews there).
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns of August is a worthwhile “systems analysis” approach to the 1914 debacle and was a mandatory study at the Kennedy White House on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to beancounter Doc McNamara himself.
One additional point about War Guilt and its importance: The Great War losers were also blamed for starting the war because their old school diplomats had the courtesy of actually declaring war rather than waiting for the armed engagements. In World War II, the belligerents did not make this mistake and let the Panzers and Stukas do the talking when the diplomats had nothing more to say. Funny how in class they teach that Hitler started aggressive war and conspired against the peace by using military force against Poland over Danzig (which everybody already agreed was German) but it was the Entente that actually declared war on Germany ─ something that Hitler had painstakingly wished to avoid, and continued to hold out an olive branch for.
Also, I read the classic 1929 book All Quiet on the Western Front as a teenager and I am not sure that audiences today can even understand the material. The latest film version was atrocious. Why would post-WWII literature be comparable with the Lost Generation’s Hollywoodified crapola in any case given the degree of censorship that followed the Second crusade to make the world safe for ─ “Democracy,” the Totalitarian Liberal fever dream with which we can never awaken from (like the poor Doughboy Joe Bonham in the Dalton Trumbo novel and 1971 film).
About “that free-speech tool that Elon Musk has given us,” well, I don’t want to discourage anybody, but I am skeptical. If it were important to ZOG, it would be shut down already.
Much of it consists of “based” generational astrology/drama:
“Yuk, Yuk, I was having this inconsequential conversation with a MAGAtard Boomer today and …”
(And, of course the “Boomer” is probably an Xer or a Millennial rather than someone actually born between 1946 and 1964, but you get the idea.)
In any case, I guess we do have to make use of what media we have.
🙂
The world was at war the instant that the Tsar mobilized the Russian Steamroller.
Well, maybe even a little earlier, when the Serbian intelligence service, which has arranged the murder of the Austrian Erzherzog, was supported by Russian intelligence, and Russian diplomates celebrated this political assassination in Belgrad more than openly. Russia, as always, wanted to “liberate” Slav peoples of Österreich-Ungarn, and so provoked the war.
But the Tsar, fearing being labelled a German sympathizer, pushed the proverbial big button anyway.
Yes, that’s correct, but that’s not the whole picture. The Tsar, a German by origin, but absolutely Anglophile, was a victim of a self-delusion, called Panslavism. Invented by Russian intelligence service, promoted by Russian intelligentsia, and designed to destroy Austria-Hungarian and Osman Empires allegedly to “liberate” Slavs there (Russian and “liberate”?!), this mad idea of Panslavism has destroyed all three empires in the end, and opened the era of both Communism and Fascism, mass murders and bloodshed, and all conflicts of the 20th and 21th centuries, in Middle/East Europe and in the Near East, are only “fallouts” of the destruction of these three empires.
Russian intelligence said that the Hapsburgs were anti Slav. The one who was assassinated – Franz Ferdinand – was actually married to a Czech.
Yes. The Panslavism is one of the biggest lies in history with very bloody consequences. Only Poles were clever and did not buy it.
And I would also add that in the second half of the 19th century and later the Slav peoples in Habsburger Reich, and even in Osman Empire have had more civil rights than Russians have had. How can one unfree people liberate somebody else?
Panslavism was terrible.
What a comment! I notice you often provide an avalanche of interesting factual information (as does your frequent responder Kok Bori, albeit doled out in smaller tidbits). I agree that it is important to get the facts out about the World Wars (really, intra-racial new Thirty Years civil war), but Trav’s point – that we do need to be forward looking, if only because a) we can’t undo the past, and b) whites are heading to extinction without massive, concerted political action (ie, every racial trend line is negative) – is also valid.
Tangentially, I don’t think it’s fair to speak of “inventing” an Armenian genocide “narrative”, however disgusting Morgenthau was. The Armenian tragedy happened. Moreover, I’ve been arguing here & there for decades that the Right should use that “narrative” to create hostility towards Turkey, the ultimate purpose of which is to drive it out of NATO (and any possibility of accession to the ‘borderless’ EU). I think a true rightwing President would be making a very shrewd play if he made a big publicity effort on behalf of US recognition of the Armenian genocide, as well as issued a demand that Turkey formally acknowledge its crimes, and make reparations to Armenia (as Germany has done for Israel). He could offer this in the guise of “acknowledging and addressing past wrongs”, a favorite rhetorical ploy of our progressive enemies.
There are more Armenian-Americans than Turks here, and they feel strongly about this. So electorally, this would play well for an America First Republican. Moreover, while Armenia seems to be only borderline ‘white’, the Armenian-Americans of my acquaintance have looked more or less white, and have thought of themselves as such. While some Turks are also racially white, civilizationally, they are not of the West.
[In borderline cases of determining whiteness – ie, where the biology is unclear – I think it’s acceptable to move to a “culturalist” standard. Armenians are borderline-white but Christian, and therefore can be considered as part of Europa. Turks are also sometimes borderline-white (though less often than Armenians), but being Muslim, they should not be considered part of ‘our sphere’.]
But the real goal of this strategy is not to offer a human rights ‘sop’ to Armenians (though they’re good people who really have been brutalized by Muslims for centuries), but to engender division and strife in US/NATO/EU relations with Turkey, with the ultimate goal of ridding ourselves of a Turkish presence in any area of Western life.
[Along similar lines, a true nationalist President should begin a campaign for Puerto Rican independence, perhaps also to include Guam, “American” Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands – other “shameful” “colonialist dependencies”. Ultimately, we want Hawaii to go its separate way, too.]
The Armenian tragedy happened.
Yes, there was a tragedy. But it was also a tragedy for both the Türks and the Kurds. Because the massacre was not one-sided. Just as the Türks and Kurds slaughtered the Armenian villages, so the Armenians destroyed the settlements (köyler) of the Türks and Kurds. The reason for the bloodshed was that the Armenians, i.e. Armenian nationalists, provoked by Russian intelligence service, and to a lesser extent also by the Americans and the French, began an armed separatist uprising. Similar to how the British instigated the Arab separatist revolt at the same time. The Türks began to suppress the rebellion (note: this was a violent mutiny during the war), and as is usually the case with separatist and anti-separatist actions, purely military actions quickly escalated into mass and undifferented repression against civilians (as was the case in the American Civil War 50 years earlier). So, yes, there were massacres, but they are not genocide, since they were not unilateral. This has been and still is the official position of the government of the Türkish Republic since the time of Atatürk to this day. (I will not now talk about the massacres of Özbeks in Fergana, carried out by Armenian nationalists a little later, in 1918, since this is a completely different story, but still very bloody too).
That concords with what an educated Greek friend of mine always says about the Armenian genocide. I read that the Armenians raised huge amounts of charity money in New York over the slaughter of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks after the war. New York. I wonder what clever people might have taken notice…
I found many good things in LeBlanc’s review, but also beg to differ. The German war guilt. The two countries who had the most to gain by war was Austria-Hungary…to get Serbia back in its place, and France…to get back Alsace Lorraine. Russia also had a grudge with Austria-Hungary over Serbia and their plans to acquire Constantinople, so the Czar was easily led into what was assumed to be a quick fix.
As for the rest, a childhood history book of mine explained it best, that Europe was like a room with men carrying loaded guns, and the lights got turned off and people kept bumping into one another, and Boom! This has been the accepted view of why WWI started. It was agreed for decades that NOTHING was worth WWI. Then, when the great celebration came a few years ago, all I heard was how democracy was saved, and…yes, if the allies hadn’t won “we’d all be speaking German.” After a hundred years, that’s the best we can do.
Versailles was bad treaty mostly in that it was simply dictated to the Germans, but as Sebastian Haffner wrote in his book Hitler, it really wasn’t that bad for Germany. The restrictions were terrible, but the treaty, in its lust for nationalities getting their own piece, eliminated Austria-Hungary, and Russia ceased to matter. This meant these barriers to German expansion were removed, and the entire east was practically open to Germany, and if patient, all of central Europe would be a German colony. Which was pretty much what happened.
The larger conflict, that of a plutocratic versus a nationalistic ethos, was the deeper current of WWII. It was what J.C.F. Fuller called a struggle between economic man and heroic man. Plutocracy won, and the results are now before us.
“we’d all be speaking German.”
And what is bad to speak German? Still one fifth of white Americans are of German origin, and when we add also the Dutch/Vlaams, who are generally part of the broader German ethnos, the number would be even bigger. There is a good book about this, “Deutsche helfen Amerika bauen – und Amerikas Dank?”, von Heinrich Piebrock. And, well, even in the 18th century the US could choice German as its official language instead of English. 1794 Herr Augustus Conrad Muehlenberg has decided for the English, even if he himself was a German, of course. Allegedly he said, “Je schneller die Deutschen Amerikaner werden, desto besser ist es.”
Very interesting piece, Trav.
You may have thought of it as kind of an “in passing” type of statement, but I was very interested to see how you noted that European art, music, and literature were profoundly affected by the sheer ghastliness and brutality of the so-called “War to End all Wars.”
If I’m remembering the terminology correctly, I believe the cultural and artistic zeitgeist immediately following WWI was known as the Expressionist movement. Anyway, you were spot on in noting how art in general at that time got darker, more tormented, and even flat out uglier.
A perfect example was the atonal opera Wozzeck, composed by Alban Berg, an Austrian who was part of the famous Second Viennese School of composers — the members of which revered the Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg as their collective mentor.
If you’ve never heard of Wozzeck, rest assured it’s really jacked up. In short, the titular character is a shell-shocked WWI vet who lives in poverty with his wife and son, has war injuries, has a doctor who mistreats him, and finally, worst of all, has a spouse who ends up disdaining and ultimately cheating on him. So eventually he stabs her to death, before accidentally drowning himself in a lake in which he was trying to wash off all the blood — leaving his only son an orphan.
The end.
As you can see: Not exactly a cheerful libretto for that one. And the whole thing is set to this unearthly sounding, atonal orchestral score that’s surprisingly beautiful at times.
If WWI wasn’t the stupidest, most evil war that ever existed, it’s at least a close second.
The ugliness was by design, and not just in art but all other spheres. This is from Willi Münzenberg, one of those very influential men who your history teacher never heard of. (As near as I can tell, surprisingly he was a garden-variety German.) During a speech at Moscow’s Marx-Engels Institute in 1922, likely during a Comintern conference:
“We must organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
That’s how it’s been since then, and they’re running on autopilot now. Since the old Comintern and the old Party Line transmission belt are no longer in effect, that means that these people have no “off” switch telling them that enough’s enough.
Exactly. I was kind of hinting in this direction, but I didn’t want to elaborate too much for fear of producing a text wall.
But yes, it’s like there was a concerted effort to make everything that was beautiful ugly, and everything ugly beautiful.
Besides art and music, you had Freud and all of his perversions and obsessions. You had the proto-transgender movement. You had Arthur Schnitzler (who was big buddies with Freud) writing stuff like Dream Story, famously adapted by Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut.
Oy vey, how scandalous and kinky!
Did anyone who fought in it write poetry about the Second World War?
Of course, Russian and another Soviet poets wrote some wonderful poems about the “Great Patriotic War”, and the best of their verses were not pro-Communist and pro-Stalinist at all.
There are deep and tragic poems written by Hans-Werner Nachrodt, who served as Obersturmführer in the SS division Wiking. I have only read some wartime translations into Estonian, but those I’ve read capture profoundly a soldier’s sense of duty and longing for home in the harshness of the Eastern Front, without any explicit ideological message.
(This is not to argue in any way against the message of the article, which sounds reasonable to me.)
Hidden History – The Secret Origins of the First World War is the name of a very interesting book written by two Scotsmen Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty. Lots of facts you won’t find in the lamestream media. For instance, Belgium was not a genuine “neutral” – it had entered into an alliance with Britain from 1906 onwards. This military pact was kept from the public in the UK – so much so that even members of the Prime Minister’s cabinet were unaware of it. King George V was quoted as saying “Find an excuse to declare war on Germany”. Belgium was the excuse. Just a few years earlier the Belgians and their King Leopold were being excoriated by sections of the British press for their barbaric mistreatment of the inhabitants of the Congo. That all changed in an instant and it was now “gallant little Belgium” standing up to “the Huns”.
https://firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com
There is a good book written by German author Helmut Roewer, “Kill the Huns! – Tötet die Hunnen!: Geheimdienste, Propaganda und Subversion hinter den Kulissen des Ersten Weltkrieges”. I do not know if it was translated into English.
Fetishism?
People are massively interested in WW2 because it’s massively interesting and important. So many of our current social problems arise from the US having fought on the wrong side in WW2.
I’d rather people interested in WW2 than in Monday night football and the Academy Awards.
The US has fought on the wrong side of the WW1 too.
The US fighting alongside the Germans during the First World War ?….hmmmm. This would have meant that instead of being equipped with the French Renault FT17, the world’s first tank with a revolving turret and British “Brodie”-pattern steel helmet, the American troops would have had to have made-do with the extremely slow, cumbersome and monolithic A7V tank. The upside however would have been they’d of got to worn the really cool and Gothic-looking M1916/18 stahlhelm with those funky brow plugs!
Maybe it was better to stay at home and let European idiots kill each other if they wanted to?
Wasili: Some clarification on Wozzeck. The work is derived from the drama Wozzeck, written by Georg Buchner, a German writer who killed himself in the early 1830’s. The story, pretty much kept byBerg, was all in the play, and has nothing to do with WWI, although Berg was strongly influenced by the war when he decided to write the opera. Buchner is considered a master artist, although he died very young and there wasn’t much art he produced. The Death of Danton and Leonce and Lena his two plays, in addition to Wozzeck. He also wrote Lenz, a novella. He was forgotten, but got a revival in the later 19th century, proving that suicide or early death is always a good career move for a writer.
Buchner has become a James Dean of German classical literature. Leonce and Lena, his “comedy,” has a prince and princess named Popo and Pipi. Guess what they mean in German? Buchner comes out as a kind of precursor to Jarry’s Ubu Roi, the scatalogical reinterpretation of Macbeth.
There have been two film adaptations of Wozzeck, both setting the play in the mid 1800’s.
As for the Expressionist movement coming after WWI, this is partly true, but it was actually growing in 1910, well before the war. Postwar trends merely grew what was already there.
Berg actually believed his atonal music would help revive German classical music and give Germany a lead in all forms of music as it had in the 19th century.
That’s pretty frightful. As it is, atonalism finally died out. In her book Mozart in the Jungle, oboist Blair Tindall recalled Von Webern, a composer fond of serialism, and she filed his works under H for honk-beep-squeak. She seemed pleased that an American GI shot and killed Von Webern during WWII.
She said works by Von Webern and Berg were always programmed before the intermission, because hardly anyone would stay for the second half to hear
all that Berg, Von Webern, and honk-beep-squeak.
When I grew up, this kind of music was simply in control of classical music. You didn’t DARE compose something with melody in it. I noticed a lot of the big proponents of this kind of music were, you guessed it, Jews.
Sorry, my mistake. One fifth of ALL AMERICANS are of German origins, more than 60 millions. It means, that their part in the WHITE population is even bigger. Of course, there always have been American Germans, who were strongly anti-German, like Dr.Seuss or General Eisenhower.
Kok bori
As far as I’m aware, Eisenhower was a Swede with Jewish heritage.
As for Alsace-Lorraine, I guess the squabble goes back as far as Charlemanges tripartite division of the empire.
It’s interesting that Germany gets to wear the militarism hat in Europe considering the French invaded German territory no less that 15 times in the few centuries before the 19th.
Everywhere is written that Ike’s ancestors were German Mennonites.
Counter-Currents, where you can never, ever blame Britain for anything.
Yes, I have the same impression. You can criticize Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, Negroes, sometimes even the Chinese (very very carefully), but not the British Empire (as always when somebody said “the English”, he/she thinks about British or not so British ruling elite, not about common people somewhere in Sussex villages).
Randal Jarrel, Gavin ewart poets of the Second World War. Derb’s excellent online anthology has poems by them. I think the lack of writers and poets related to the second world war has something to do with the change of emphasis of the society. People didn’t have the classical education and literary foundations that they did before the first world war to create literature after the second world war. People lost interest in that kind of thing and became more technological and scientistic. Also, the rise of television and movies shifted expectations of art in that direction. TV and stadium sports. It may also be that all the talent got killed in the hugely dysgenic first world war. I do believe that could be possible.
The First World War has a useful moral for Whites, which is that we should be less willing to slaughter each other.
It did not work then, in 1939, and it does not work now.
If you read German you can find many interesting books and articles here
https://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/deutsch/archivindex.html
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