Oh my, already things have become very Germany-heavy indeed, considering that you set out to explore what defined the whole West as a hemisphere. Of course there was antisemitism, even before the Twelve Years. Yet one could argue that the Kaiser, before he became a raging antisemite in his exile years after 1918, led a tolerant and relatively liberal society in which the Jews – and with them, the nation – flourished economically, scientifically, and even politically. I'd also have to disagree with your, frankly surprising assessment that the Versailles treaty wasn't extraordinarily cruel to Germany. The unjust and psychologically devastating unilateral guilty verdict for the war apart, Versailles led to the Ruhrbesetzung and deprived Germany of the very means to pay back unprecedentedly steep reparations. But we will have to discuss this on another day, because right now I'm packing my suitcase in order to become a Durchwanderer of the rain-soaked Alps. I won't say "see you on the other side", as I'm looking forward to reading your last two chapters on some mountain peak.
Thank you for another engaging reply! I'm afraid my own has gotten a bit out of hand, but at least you'll have yet another chunk to read in the Alps. ;)
Yes, by now in the series it's quite clear that I believe Germany's role in the development of the West up until at least the end of the Second World War was pivotal; one could even argue that the United States was culturally at least as influenced by its German immigrants (whose descendents to this day make up the country's single-largest ethnic group, or would if those descendants thought of themselves in ethnic terms) as by anyone else (even the British), and so German influence will remain pivotal, though submilinal, in any post-American future we face. (It is also remarkable that, reading the list of American and even British military officers in World War 2, just how many were of German heritage. I don't exactly remember how deeply I discuss this in the next essay, but it certainly puts paid to the racial foundation of a German unitary state that the American in charge of defeating the Germans in the West was named Eisenhower). In this I agree with Neil McGregor's excellent work "Germany: Memories of a Nation", first published in 2014.
And yet in this essay, exploring the roots of Western anti-Semitism in general, I tried not to dwell overly much on interwar Germany. I believe it was McGregor himself, or someone he quoted, who pointed out that if you travelled back to just before WWI (and thus well before a certain Austrian starving artist became a Gefreiter in the Bavarian Army) and explained the horror of the coming Holocaust to an educated person but omitted the country that started it, they'd have guessed France would be the culprit far more than Germany. Thus I did not wish to particularise the German experience too much -- it was, if not exactly random, then certainly unpredictable in the chaos-theoretical sense.
I also wish it better came across just how much of a self-inflicted wound I think it was that interwar Germans alienated German Jews, who had by then for centuries been of great import to German culture and for more than fifty years had been theoretically equal citizens. If I had the essay to write again, I would probably try to make that clearer. (I may detail this a bit more in the next essay, but probably not.)
And now onto Versailles. Yes, I acknowledge that my dismissal of its extreme harshness may seem surprisingly glib, but I think I did not want to dwell too much on it for the same reasons as stated above. Nevertheless I do believe my position is justified, or at least justifiable. That position is: Versailles was a harsh peace treaty, but not unthinkably so; considering the scale of the war, its costs to the victors, and the general terms of most peace treaties up to that point, it was within contemplatable margins for the victors to impose. A concise (four-minute!) video from History Matters outlining this view can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArVAS4lOFmc
I believe it is important to consider Versailles in its context: what other peace treaties were inposed in the war, and which ones were under consideration by the Central Powers had they won after all?
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed (but only partially implemented) by Germany upon Russia following the latter's capitulation was far more extensive than Versailles in the amount of industrialised territory and population the Soviet Union was expected to permanently lose; the two treaties imposed upon Austria-Hungary dissolved the very existence of that empire into disparate nation-states (St. Germain) and drastically reduced the size of the rump Hungary which emerged (Trianon) -- and set the stage for "continuation" wars in the Balkans which lasted basically up until 1946.
The Treaty of Sèvres similarly butchered the Ottoman Empire more extensively than Versailles did to Germany, though AtatĂ¼rk managed to organise enough resistance to restore those boundaries to the successor state he founded.
On the other hand, Germany's war aims were also fairly ambitious: another chunk of French border territory even greater than Alsace-Lorraine, the subjugation or perhaps outright annexation of the whole of Belgium, domination of the Netherlands and Denmark, and suzerainty over millions people in client states carved out of the Russian Empire. This is not to mention the reorganisation of Africa and the Pacific and perhaps even India, with the attendant neutering of the Royal Navy, that would have crossed the minds of victorious generals in Berlin had Britain fought and lost.
There is one point that I think Versailles really was extraordinarily, self-sabotagingly harsh in, and that is the unilateral war guilt that you also mention. With this unrepayable moral debt, combined with the more "reasonable" measures (or at least those measures that were considered matters of course for the losing party of a war), meant that Versailles was at once too soft and too harsh -- just soft enough that the German state could still conceivably repay the exhorbitant reparations, but harsh enough to make the peace an exceedingly bitter one, and a convenient scapegoat for all the problems Germany faced after the Revolution. Couple this with the DolchstoĂŸlegende, and the disaster was...if not exactly plain to see, then at least foreseeable.
If the Entente truly believed Germany to be singularly guilty of the war, they should have made the treaty at least as harsh as St. Germain-Trianon or Sèvres and effectively dissolved Germany as a unitary state (or left it as a true rump between the Weser and Elbe or something). In that sense, Versailles was "not harsh enough". But the victorious powers did not believe they could milk the resultant statelets of enough reparations to justify the war (indeed, it would have brooked enormous ongoing costs to keep them vassalised), so the Entente limited these ambitions in just the sort of compromise which leaves noone happy.
Of course I wish the victorious Entente had had the wisdom to make Versailles much less harsh -- for example *actually* stipulating realistic reparations rather than shooting for the moon and only expecting a third of their demands (which was already too much), and allowing rump Austria to join Germany in an Entente-organised plebiscite to make up for losing the Polish Corridor, allowing reparations to be made directly via raw materials from the Ruhr rather than occupying it and trying to press the Saarland into France, more humble and time-limited restrictions on the German Army after the war, etc. etc.
I am not trying to argue by any means that Versailles was just. But such restraint was unrealistic to expect from the Entente; the terms I've just outlined would have found no purchase among the victors, except perhaps for Wilson, who was...in no disposition to insist upon them, shall we say. In other words, it would have taken a wisdom and foresight unknown since before the Greek Dark Age, if ever such existed, for the kind of just peace I envision to have been implemented. It took the catastrophic consequences of Versailles' unsatisfying compromise, and American imperial generosity in response, to keep similarly rapacious and revanchist impulses from ruling the day in (Western) Europe at the conclusion of WW2; in Eastern Europe, peace was established with all the harshness, and yet more, that Versailles could have been.
In any case, I wish you lots of recreation and even a bit of relaxation in those high mountains, and I look forward to any other thoughts you may share.
Oh my, already things have become very Germany-heavy indeed, considering that you set out to explore what defined the whole West as a hemisphere. Of course there was antisemitism, even before the Twelve Years. Yet one could argue that the Kaiser, before he became a raging antisemite in his exile years after 1918, led a tolerant and relatively liberal society in which the Jews – and with them, the nation – flourished economically, scientifically, and even politically. I'd also have to disagree with your, frankly surprising assessment that the Versailles treaty wasn't extraordinarily cruel to Germany. The unjust and psychologically devastating unilateral guilty verdict for the war apart, Versailles led to the Ruhrbesetzung and deprived Germany of the very means to pay back unprecedentedly steep reparations. But we will have to discuss this on another day, because right now I'm packing my suitcase in order to become a Durchwanderer of the rain-soaked Alps. I won't say "see you on the other side", as I'm looking forward to reading your last two chapters on some mountain peak.
Thank you for another engaging reply! I'm afraid my own has gotten a bit out of hand, but at least you'll have yet another chunk to read in the Alps. ;)
Yes, by now in the series it's quite clear that I believe Germany's role in the development of the West up until at least the end of the Second World War was pivotal; one could even argue that the United States was culturally at least as influenced by its German immigrants (whose descendents to this day make up the country's single-largest ethnic group, or would if those descendants thought of themselves in ethnic terms) as by anyone else (even the British), and so German influence will remain pivotal, though submilinal, in any post-American future we face. (It is also remarkable that, reading the list of American and even British military officers in World War 2, just how many were of German heritage. I don't exactly remember how deeply I discuss this in the next essay, but it certainly puts paid to the racial foundation of a German unitary state that the American in charge of defeating the Germans in the West was named Eisenhower). In this I agree with Neil McGregor's excellent work "Germany: Memories of a Nation", first published in 2014.
And yet in this essay, exploring the roots of Western anti-Semitism in general, I tried not to dwell overly much on interwar Germany. I believe it was McGregor himself, or someone he quoted, who pointed out that if you travelled back to just before WWI (and thus well before a certain Austrian starving artist became a Gefreiter in the Bavarian Army) and explained the horror of the coming Holocaust to an educated person but omitted the country that started it, they'd have guessed France would be the culprit far more than Germany. Thus I did not wish to particularise the German experience too much -- it was, if not exactly random, then certainly unpredictable in the chaos-theoretical sense.
I also wish it better came across just how much of a self-inflicted wound I think it was that interwar Germans alienated German Jews, who had by then for centuries been of great import to German culture and for more than fifty years had been theoretically equal citizens. If I had the essay to write again, I would probably try to make that clearer. (I may detail this a bit more in the next essay, but probably not.)
And now onto Versailles. Yes, I acknowledge that my dismissal of its extreme harshness may seem surprisingly glib, but I think I did not want to dwell too much on it for the same reasons as stated above. Nevertheless I do believe my position is justified, or at least justifiable. That position is: Versailles was a harsh peace treaty, but not unthinkably so; considering the scale of the war, its costs to the victors, and the general terms of most peace treaties up to that point, it was within contemplatable margins for the victors to impose. A concise (four-minute!) video from History Matters outlining this view can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArVAS4lOFmc
I believe it is important to consider Versailles in its context: what other peace treaties were inposed in the war, and which ones were under consideration by the Central Powers had they won after all?
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed (but only partially implemented) by Germany upon Russia following the latter's capitulation was far more extensive than Versailles in the amount of industrialised territory and population the Soviet Union was expected to permanently lose; the two treaties imposed upon Austria-Hungary dissolved the very existence of that empire into disparate nation-states (St. Germain) and drastically reduced the size of the rump Hungary which emerged (Trianon) -- and set the stage for "continuation" wars in the Balkans which lasted basically up until 1946.
The Treaty of Sèvres similarly butchered the Ottoman Empire more extensively than Versailles did to Germany, though AtatĂ¼rk managed to organise enough resistance to restore those boundaries to the successor state he founded.
On the other hand, Germany's war aims were also fairly ambitious: another chunk of French border territory even greater than Alsace-Lorraine, the subjugation or perhaps outright annexation of the whole of Belgium, domination of the Netherlands and Denmark, and suzerainty over millions people in client states carved out of the Russian Empire. This is not to mention the reorganisation of Africa and the Pacific and perhaps even India, with the attendant neutering of the Royal Navy, that would have crossed the minds of victorious generals in Berlin had Britain fought and lost.
There is one point that I think Versailles really was extraordinarily, self-sabotagingly harsh in, and that is the unilateral war guilt that you also mention. With this unrepayable moral debt, combined with the more "reasonable" measures (or at least those measures that were considered matters of course for the losing party of a war), meant that Versailles was at once too soft and too harsh -- just soft enough that the German state could still conceivably repay the exhorbitant reparations, but harsh enough to make the peace an exceedingly bitter one, and a convenient scapegoat for all the problems Germany faced after the Revolution. Couple this with the DolchstoĂŸlegende, and the disaster was...if not exactly plain to see, then at least foreseeable.
If the Entente truly believed Germany to be singularly guilty of the war, they should have made the treaty at least as harsh as St. Germain-Trianon or Sèvres and effectively dissolved Germany as a unitary state (or left it as a true rump between the Weser and Elbe or something). In that sense, Versailles was "not harsh enough". But the victorious powers did not believe they could milk the resultant statelets of enough reparations to justify the war (indeed, it would have brooked enormous ongoing costs to keep them vassalised), so the Entente limited these ambitions in just the sort of compromise which leaves noone happy.
Of course I wish the victorious Entente had had the wisdom to make Versailles much less harsh -- for example *actually* stipulating realistic reparations rather than shooting for the moon and only expecting a third of their demands (which was already too much), and allowing rump Austria to join Germany in an Entente-organised plebiscite to make up for losing the Polish Corridor, allowing reparations to be made directly via raw materials from the Ruhr rather than occupying it and trying to press the Saarland into France, more humble and time-limited restrictions on the German Army after the war, etc. etc.
I am not trying to argue by any means that Versailles was just. But such restraint was unrealistic to expect from the Entente; the terms I've just outlined would have found no purchase among the victors, except perhaps for Wilson, who was...in no disposition to insist upon them, shall we say. In other words, it would have taken a wisdom and foresight unknown since before the Greek Dark Age, if ever such existed, for the kind of just peace I envision to have been implemented. It took the catastrophic consequences of Versailles' unsatisfying compromise, and American imperial generosity in response, to keep similarly rapacious and revanchist impulses from ruling the day in (Western) Europe at the conclusion of WW2; in Eastern Europe, peace was established with all the harshness, and yet more, that Versailles could have been.
In any case, I wish you lots of recreation and even a bit of relaxation in those high mountains, and I look forward to any other thoughts you may share.