After Hitler; part 1 PDF

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reading response After Hitler; part 1...

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Katie Kaminski 23 September 2020 After Hitler; Part 1 Reading Response Chapter 1 of After Hitler deals mainly with demilitarization and how that turned the times from the romanticization of war to the romanticization of peace. It was decided at one point that due to the guilt that Wehrmacht had brought about, “the consensus was that it could not be reformed but, rather, needed to be completely dissolved” (26). Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about America today and the people who are calling for a complete tear down/uproot of our systems. There were many ways that the Allies destroyed the military as an institution, a couple included “draining the social and cultural sources of militarism by expressly forbidding the celebration of martial traditions and the pursuit of military training” (28-29), and the “bans on the maintenance of military traditions, designed above all to prevent the continued glorification of war” (29). This also extends into chapter 2 where they discuss the distancing from socialism and Hitler. These two methods in particular again made me think about America today. We see how media, culture and society are so important as far as shaping the way people think. As far as the glorification goes, we saw just months ago the destruction of confederate statues; this was aimed at stopping the glorification of them. What I see as interesting is that what they are doing this for in After Hitler is to stop spreading glorification of an awful war, but what’s going on in America with all this has nothing to do at all with a recent war; at least, not a physical one. Some parts of chapter 2, including people turning Nazi membership files in, makes me wonder if there were any sort of Prisoner’s Dilemmas going on at this time. I’ve heard of and studied the Nuremberg defense as it relates to this time, but I haven’t heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in other classes as it relates to this time. I hope we can discuss this in class because I think that would be interesting to talk about, especially given how much we just finished reading about it. Chapter 2 does focus on, though, the efforts of denazification, which petered out in the short run, but achieved most of what it wanted to in the long run. Even more important than this, it seems, was distancing from nationalism. This was achieved partly by dividing Germany as a country and “robbing nationalism of its political stage” (56). Another thing I found really interesting is the concept of constitutional patriotism, as he says is the “departure from an ethnic understanding of the nation and built instead on moral values such as human rights” (66). I think this is another thing we are seeing play out similarly in our country today. There’s so much in chapter 2 I want to talk about but don’t have room to so I hope we can discuss it tomorrow. Chapter 3 discusses the restructuring and the building back up of the economy. While originally the goal may have been to weaken Germany, after some time “priorities… shifted slowly from stripping Germany of its economic power to reviving a transformed economy within the victors’ respective sphere of control” (79). The issue is, the victors aren’t going to be able to control their economy forever. Eventually, citizens began believing that “individual initiative, in contrast to collective compulsion, to be responsible for the success” (87). I really think it’s amazing how much you can change another country like this. I wish I had more room to write about it....