Tag Archives: Germany

book report: The 30 Years War, CV Wedgwood

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Published in 1938, this study of the ghastly conflict which wasted large swathes of early 17th-Century Europe is almost impossible to follow due to the chain of chaotic event, and various kings bearing the same names; but it’s very well-, humanly-written, and it avoids too much harping on contemporary politics. I probably should have made notes of which king is which and which war is started by which, for what purpose; at the end I was reminded of a line from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, as the police come across a drug-related crime scene:

Cop: It’s a mess, aint it?

Sheriff: If it aint, it’ll do till the mess gets here.

I enjoyed it in spite of frequently forgetting what was going on, just for the splendid, pre-corporate/Theory academic prose, e.g.:

The energy of the educated was perverted into the writing of scurrilous books, which were joyfully received by an undiscriminating public. The Calvinists exhorted all true believers to violence and took special delight in the more bloodthirsty psalms. But the Catholics and Lutherans were not innocent and force was everywhere the proof of true faith. The Lutherans set upon the Calvinists in the streets of Berlin; Catholic priests in Bavaria carried firearms in self-defence; in Dresden the mob stopped the funeral of an Italian Catholic and tore the corpse in pieces; a Protestant pastor and a Catholic priest came to blows in the streets of Frankfort on the Main, and Calvinist services in Styria were frequently interrupted by Jesuits disguised among the congregation who would tweak the prayer book from the hands of the worshipper and deftly substitute a breviary. 

Wedgwood is very good at bringing the distant – event or person – near, telescoping centuries:

There was one other influence to be reckoned with in the household of the Elector Palatine, his wife Elizabeth. This princess combined buoyant health and high spirits with character, intelligence and beauty. Her loveliness was that of colour and animation, and her begrimed and faded portraits can do no more than indicate a forgotten glory. The splendour of auburn hair, the subtlety of flushed cheek and swift gesture, the expressive changes of the shrewd, observant eyes and witty mouth, mirrors of that ‘wild humour’ which scandalized and bewitched her contemporaries – these are lost for ever. Her letters give us fragmentary flashes of the brave, frivolous soul, fragments too of the harder substance beneath, a courage matched by resolution in which obstinacy and pride played their part.

The Thirty Years war, actually a series of overlapping conflicts between Sweden, Austria, Spain, Denmark, France, England, various Germanic principalities, and probably others I’ve forgotten, presents a tableau of utter savagery and utter indifference, and resilience. There is a hard contrast between the rulers, who continued a mostly untroubled life of luxury, and their brutalized subjects, e.g.

In Spain itself the bankrupt Court maintained its façade of dazzling splendour. The King was growing old, his health was failing and he was much given to melancholy and religion; he continued nevertheless to pour out money on masques and theatres, bull-fights, mistresses and bastards.

And the war on the ground:

Wantonly destructive, the soldiery set fire to villages and slaughtered such cattle as they did not drive off. In their lust for plunder they dug up the graveyards for concealed treasure, combed the woods in which the homeless peasants had taken refuge, and shot down those they found, in order to steal their ragged bundles of savings and household goods.  They wrecked the churches, and when a pastor, braver than the rest, denied them entrance, they cut off his hands and feet and left him bleeding on the altar, a mangled sacrifice to his Protestant God. Nor did they spare those of their own faith; at the convent of Amelungsborn they ripped up the vestments and shattered the organ, carried off the chalices and ransacked even the graves of the nuns.

The people were slaughtered, tortured, starved. But as Wedgwood points out, it was not common for rulers to feel any responsibility towards the ruled. After three decades, about 8 million in the German realms came to an end:

The German Empire, including Alsace but excluding the Netherlands and Bohemia, probably numbered about twenty-one millions in 1618, and rather less than thirteen and a half millions in 1648.

So, an enjoyable read but perhaps not an altogether easy one.

Plague Journal, 1 May

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Lousy weather here in North Italy, overcast and windy. It now seems mandatory to wear a mask and gloves outside, previously it was only in the few open shops; I would rather stay indoors than go out with a mask and gloves just to get some exercise, and since it’s too cold to sit on my balcony with a book I am becoming increasingly a pale hermit in my cavern.

It is typical of Italy that no one is really sure if you need a mask & gloves to go outdoors; the government change the regulations every few days, so I’ve now filled in three different autodichiarazione (self-declaration) forms in case I’m stopped by the police – each has the same basic info (my address, where I’m going, why I’m going there, and that I haven’t had Coronavirus) but with pointless variations. Probably the latest version is now out of date and I can be arrested and imprisoned for not filling in an almost identical update.

A contrast between German and Italian bureaucracy: both are heavy, but the former eventually makes some sense, as the Hun are a race of engineers in search of function and efficiency; Italian bureaucracy is more akin to a building made up of randomly hurled pasta and old wine bottles and dead prostitutes: it is inefficient, burdensome, and incoherent to the point of insanity. It is as if the Italians wondered at the Germans: “Mario! Come see! The Germana they have-a so many a-moneys! How is possibile? Maybe because of-a all-a tha paperaworka! If-a we have-a many bureacracia we have-a money like-a the Germana!”

Waiting in the local town hall back in early March, the ticket system screen inoperative (someone had probably stolen a cable to sell the copper), the Italian staff wandering slowly around looking grumpy and baffled to be at work, I thought, This is what happens when a low-IQ, low-conscientiousness nation adopts a high-IQ/conscientiousness technology and system. While it wasn’t quite as bad as e.g. some African shithole, it explains the prevalent corruption in Italy: over the last few months I have been repeatedly tempted to just say, Do you want a bribe? Can I pay you 100 Euros and you do your job the way you should, instead of losing all my documents for the third time?

Strangely, some ice cream shops are now open. I’d be curious to know the reasoning behind such a choice, a government office somewhere with a group of grumpy, baffled Italian bureaucrats indolently pushing papers about a big table, then one says, Mario! I ‘ave an idea! We can open the gelaterie! and they then spend two weeks creating bureaucracy to this effect. I suppose it might be a good idea to have a phased return to normalcy, and why not begin with ice cream, especially since the weather is so shitty no one would want to stand about eating anything cold anyway.

The Italians seem to accept the dictates of lockdown with their usual cynical equanimity, they don’t like it but then everything the government does is insane anyway, so who cares.

Döner and dog

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Twenty years and more ago, a Pakistani schoolfriend told me he had stolen a bottle of Tipp-ex from a market stall (shoplifting was his family’s custom) and later, at his university library an unknown student turned to him and asked if he had any Tipp-ex. He lent his stolen goods like a true English gent.

Later, he ruminated gruefully: “Uh, and I thought, uh, like, uh, maybe that was, like, the only reason I was born, that like uh like this guy needed Tipp-ex. So like now like I’ve done what I was like born to do, and stuff and like something really bad will happen.”

I’ll be leaving my little Bavarian suburb this autumn. Last night I went to do my laundry in the building’s subterranean washroom and found a young German nervously talking to someone over the stair rail. As I came closer he said something that I couldn’t understand, then pointed down to a frisky black dog staring up at him from the stairs below. He said, in German, that he was scared of dogs and could I go with him because he couldn’t otherwise get out of the building. I accompanied him down and the dog ran happily about, the German scarpering as soon as he reached the ground floor. (As far as I could tell, the dog was just wandering about my apartment block on its own: I live in that kind of building).

And last year, in a rainstorm, I passed a drunk or crazy man on a bicycle outside a fastfood joint, he was simultaneously trying to light a cigarette (in the rain) and stuff an aluminium-foiled Döner into his jacket pocket, and get a foot into a pedal. He called to me, in barely-comprehensible Bavarian, asking me to help. I was unsure how, exactly, to help a man in such complexly awkward straits but walked bravely over, in the rain.

It turned out he could manage the cigarette and pedal on his own, but couldn’t jam the Döner into his jacket pocket, so I thrust it in and he grunted his thanks and rode waveringly off, into the night.

I have, I feel, accomplished that which I was born to do.

why do normies trust the media?

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Why do most people, especially Germans, trust the mainstream media? I think in part it’s that, to question the accepted narrative, you have to be an outsider of some sort – perhaps why so many in the Alt-Right and even -Lite are homosexual or, as in the case of Milo, homosexual and Jewish and married to a negro. And since Germanic peoples create orderly societies, pretty much the only disorder and violence in such nations due to 3rd-World migrants, most people trust the chaimstream narrative and have no real pressing urge to question whatever garbage they are fed by State-funded TV and newspapers.

Another reason occurred to me while reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. In one section, a 1970s journalist talks about the Watergate reporters in mythic and hallowed terms, as fearless crusaders against evil, instead of being most likely Mockingbird plants. Since everything we hear about the media, about journalists, comes from the media, it’s unsurprising people think of the newspapers as apolitical bastions of integrity and virtue, rather than Deep State propaganda organs. How exactly would people think about e.g. the Halifax Bank if they only heard about it through Halifax Bank press releases? If they had problems with internet banking, their credit, or with surly staff, they would think it must be only their problem, that everyone else is highly satisfied. And if they knew others in the same boat, they would probably think themselves a statistically meaningless outlier.

And so with the media. I was talking to some German automotive lawyers and they said every single article written about autonomous driving was full of basic errors, even in the most prestigious of publications; and yet they continued to believe everything else in the pages of Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. They were convinced Donald Trump was an ignorant and retarded buffoon despite him being a self-made billionaire and occupying the most powerful political office on the planet. For them, this could all be hand-waved away – for Der Spiegel told them that in America a moronic clown can easily become a billionaire and President – because, after all, America is not like Germany.

Germany, in short, is a good nation for men like Claas Relotius.