Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

There are so many things these articles overlook.

Germany was coming out of the WW1 as a loser. The war in Europe was nothing like you've ever seen in America. Germany was paying reparations for many years. Germany lost two million soldiers (out of ten million world wide). Many civilians were killed. Poorness among the families of fallen soldiers. Many were wounded. Several hundred thousand Germans died due to lack of food.

The crisis of Germany in the 20s and 30s was also nothing, literally nothing, you have ever seen in the USA.

In 1923 one Dollar was 4.21 Billionen Reichsmark.

No kidding. 4.21 Billionen Reichsmark. That's a 4*10^12 in US numbers. The equivalent of one dollar.

1929 was another economic crisis which reached into the 30s. Mass unemployment, families looking for food, resignation, ongoing reparations, social security not developed, politicians failing, feeling of a total catastrophe - but this was based real problems. Not in 'the strongest nation with the largest military.'

The problems of the US today are tiny in comparison. There are poor people in the US. But it is nothing compared to the Weimarer Republik and their weak democracy, which was under fire from communists, the Nazi party, conservative parties, ... even the president did not support it and in the end caused its collapse when handing over the government to Hitler.

Mostly the social democrats were supporting the democracy.

If you think the times of the Weimarer Republik are similar to the US today, its political or its economic situation - this is total BS.

Don't forget the monarchists who held many an important position in the state. Indeed, the first german fledgling democractic state, the Weimarer Republic, still called the "Reich" bei many of its inhabitants, had a horrible economic start in a time of great social change.

Right, the monarchists were mostly against the Weimarer Republik. They lost most of their special rights in 1919/20.

Sorry, that was want I meant to imply.

I understood what you were saying. Everything is fine. I wanted to make clear WHY the monarchists hated the Weimarer Republik.

The war in Europe was nothing like you've ever seen in America.

I think Southerners might disagree with that point, especially through the post-Civil War Reconstruction AKA military occupation period.

Not saying they're directly comparable, but "nothing like you've ever seen in America" significantly overstates the differences.

> I think Southerners might disagree with that point

Trust me, WW1 in Europe makes the American Civil War look like a nice picnic with the kids in a park.

For the losers I don't believe that was true, although I agree it was less disastrous in a number of ways.

> For the losers I don't believe that was true

The continental "winners" of WW1 suffered more than the losers of the civil war.

Check out https://populationpyramid.net/france/1950/ and https://populationpyramid.net/germany/1950/ there are two features you can notice on these: one is a belt at the 30~34 level which is a birth deficit from the WW1 (combined with WW2 losses), the second is that the male side has a giant bite taken out above the 45-49 line, those are the deaths from WW1, 30% of the male cohorts of fighting ages were lost in the trenches, parts of the battlefields between Belgium and France are still completely unfit for any human activity, they remain "red zones" a century later[0] with poisonous compounds (e.g. arsenic) representing double-digit amounts of soil, and even in "rehabilitated" areas of farmers keep harvesting iron[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

Almost certainly true, but also certainly irrelevant to this subthread of lispm's on Germany.

Also striking is this graph of life expectancy at birth for the population of France in each given year, in Figure 1 of this paper [0]. You can click on the figure to see it without needing to login.

[0]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v538/n7624/full/nature1...

This Southerner wouldn't disagree.

Militarily, while the Civil War is in some ways a prefigure of WWI, the comparison only usefully reaches so far. In particular, Civil War artillery lacked the absolute primacy achieved by later developments, permitting a much more mobile style of warfare and preventing the stasis observed on the Western Front. The Civil War's belligerents were also much more unevenly matched, making it possible for a single engagement to produce a decisive strategic outcome; no such possibility existed in WWI until much later in the war, when new technology came along to counter the primacy of artillery and break the stalemate of the trenches.

Politically speaking, too, we observe a qualitative postwar difference; harsh as the military occupation of the South was in many ways, and in spite of bastards like Butler, there existed a strong desire for conciliation and reintegration of the erstwhile secessionists, which overall found considerable success; while the cultural and economic differences underlying the war largely still exist to this day, we've just passed the sesquicentennial of Appomattox without at any point seeing a serious desire for, or risk of, a new outbreak of warfare. Versailles, by contrast, while no doubt seeming justified to its authors in the astonishingly punitive terms it imposed, produced a new and much uglier war within just a few decades.

So, no, I can't really agree with you here. It's accurate to say that the Civil War is by far the ugliest war whose effects our young nation has ever directly felt. It is not at all accurate to say that those effects are in any way comparable in severity to those of the First World War - which, indeed, was nothing like we've ever seen in America, a fact for which, should you be so inclined, I recommend you nightly thank God.

But you're leaving out various post-WWI details, like how the strictures of Versailles were weakened, how some of the victors ... actually, didn't entirely buy into it to begin with, and/or significantly softened their stances after a while. The US post-Wilson, the U.K., and even Soviet Russia, while not a signatory, engaged in significant cooperation with Weimar and later Nazi Germany (after all, the German defeat of Imperial Russia was a necessary precursor to their capture of the country, and their attempt to gain territory to the west was stopped in Poland). After all, Germany was given enough breathing space to rearm and try again, both before and after Hitler's rise to power.

While I'll agree the desire for conciliation was much strong, on the other hand, the harshness of the occupation, the severe losses of wealth ... I too have Southern roots, my mother is Cajun, and one story in her family history is how a great-great or so grandmother kept the Damn Yankees from stealing the family horse by wrapping her arms around its neck and just not letting go. The South indeed started from a lower base, and was sufficiently knocked down that a new war was not in the cards, on the other hand, resistance to the military occupation was also harsh and didn't end until it ended.

Some don't count overall conciliation and reintegration to have been completed until 1994, when the Republican capture of the Congress included hitherto unseen gains for the party in the South.

And let me emphasize, as I noted to masklinn, I'm not focusing on the winners except as that is relevant to the losers.

Anyone here who was in the south during post-Civil War Reconstruction is free to share their experiences.

What about our ancestors? Specifically my Cajun mother's? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12949609 Non-slave owning rice farmers, didn't particularly have a dog in the fight until the Damn Yankee looters showed up. I could hear the venom engendered from Reconstruction in her voice, a century or so after.

ADDED: you'll find it about as difficult to get adult or thereabouts first hand experiences from the pre-WWII German era.

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