Trans Acdeptance in Weimar Berlin

[Fitzcarraldo]

The Weimar Republic era in Berlin was a fascinating time. There was an explosion of magnificent art and culture, and the city was the most modern metropolis in the world at the time.

There was also a lot more acceptance of sexual and gender diversity than in many places even today. Read and learn:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...cus-hirschfeld

And of course, the Nazis ruined everything.

[morim]

Many, too many lies about Nz government.
They lift Germany from a poor WWI destroyed country (economically, and politically) to a word leading nation.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Many, too many lies about Nz government.
They lift Germany from a poor WWI destroyed country (economically, and politically) to a word leading nation.

Bullshit. The only way they had to lift the country was via war. They killed millions and laid waste to Europe.

[ts interrupted]

Bullshit. The only way they had to lift the country was via war. They killed millions and laid waste to Europe.

You're definitely not wrong. However, until crazy Adolph came along and created a group of people to point their finger at to blame for losing World War I and destroying Germany, the Weimar Republic was a dismal place.

It's a shame that it took turning a particular religious group into Germany's boogie man before they could get their act together.

The national Socialists gave Germans back their pride. That alone is a powerful lesson for how you can turn an entire nation around by giving them something to be proud of AND somebody to demonize.

It's a fascinating history lesson. I doubt that transgendered people would have fared very well during this time though. Same thing goes for homosexuality. It wasn't talked about, but everybody in the country knew that a great number of the higher ups were closeted gay. Herman Goring has stories about him being involved in gay orgies.

[Fitzcarraldo]

The national Socialists gave Germans back their pride. That alone is a powerful lesson for how you can turn an entire nation around by giving them something to be proud of AND somebody to demonize.

They gave a false sense of pride to anyone willing to sell their soul to a crazed charismatic leader. The first thing they did when they came to power was ban and burn books. How could that possibly be a source of pride?

[Stavros]

The national Socialists gave Germans back their pride. That alone is a powerful lesson for how you can turn an entire nation around by giving them something to be proud of AND somebody to demonize.

The Germans never lost their pride, but some did, and built their resentment into a 'national' movement defined by Race. They created an alternative reality, based on the demonization other Germans -Communists, Jews, Homosexuals being the three most obvious, Black people, Slavs and 'Gypsies' in the mix.

They did not 'turn and entire nation around' but re-defined it as being an 'Aryan' nation, and if someone was not 'Aryan' they not only did not belong, they were identified as the cause of the German 'defeat' in 1918, and the 'degenerate' culture in music, literature, film and theatre. You name it, they were blamed for it. And then the solutions to this 'problem' -discrimination, exclusion, and a violent death. And once in power, they consolidated their rule through violence and fear, to the extent that ordinary Germans did support the Nazis, and other ordinary Germans were terrified of saying they did not, and those who did, were mostly imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. And the Nazis did not turn Germany around, they created an industry whose sole purpose was to fight the war that led to its own destruction, on a scale few thought possible, until it happened.

And who today says that the arts and the 'liberals' who create it are 'degenerate' and destroying their beloved 'God, Family and Country' -if not Donald Trump and his supporters? The ones who think Rapists Have Rights, and the American citizen they attacked and made pregnant no rights other than to breed the 'rape baby'; the same people who are banning books, taking away the right to vote of people they don't like -Black people of course-, demonizing Transgendered Americans as if they were a significant threat to the moral order, demonizing them as Marxists or 'Radical Leftists', all tossed into a word soup of resentment and hate.

You cannot build a nation on resentment and hate. But you can destroy it.

[MrFanti]

Bullshit. The only way they had to lift the country was via war. They killed millions and laid waste to Europe.

Some historians theorize that restrictions handed to Germany brought about by WW-I in part enabled some type of radical government in Germany to come about.

[Stavros]

Some historians theorize that restrictions handed to Germany brought about by WW-I in part enabled some type of radical government in Germany to come about.

One of the earliest warnings of the consequences of reparations was made by John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). The question for both Weimar and Hitler was why diplomacy failed to deal with some of the decisions made by the Versailles treaties, not just the economic ones, but the territorial ones. Germany was only a member of the League of Nations from 1925 to 1933, and was burdned by numerous domestic problems to which the hostility of France made revisions to the treaty diffiicult if not impossible. Zara Steiner has dealt with these issues with hair-splitting detail in her books The Lights that Failed (2007), and The Triumph of the Dark (2013). Needless to say, Hitler did not attach much value to diplomacy, for him 'Might is Right' and that is how he 'solved' the problem of the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, Austria and so on.

[Fitzcarraldo]

I've always found it interesting that the failed Weimar Republic lasted longer than the "Thousand Year Reich" did.

[MacJae]

Many, too many lies about Nz government.
They lift Germany from a poor WWI destroyed country (economically, and politically) to a word leading nation.

I really hope this is a misunderstanding or a joke. Germany at the time was a world-leading nation in many fields. If anything, the Nazis destroyed a lot of the things that Germany was great at -- driving out a lot of eminent scientists, and otherwise undermining education and science in Germany by subordinating them to politics. The economy recovered under their leadership, but that recovery was unsustainable, because it was based on military build-up (which was temporary) financed through massive debt (that they expected to pay for by looting). They also benefited from being treated better than the democratic Weimar governments had been by the French and British -- who realized being too hard on debt collection wasn't going to lead anywhere good by the time the Nazis took power.

If they hadn't started the war, the economy would have dipped again after a few years. They did start some social programs aimed at producing more children -- but they also invented privatization for the purpose of reducing public services in order to make common people more motivated for war. On top of that, they destroyed the free market in favor of private oligopolies strongly controlled by the government, introduced slave labor, and workers overall experienced a drop in real wages even before the war started.

They were good at propaganda, though, including convincing lots of people that they had made Germany great again. But in reality, their policies were awful for anything but making war. And that is aside from all the other awful stuff they did.