IN WEIMAR GERMANY, WEIMAR AMERICA, ROD DREHER WRITES:
There was also in this a crisis of masculinity. Lots of young German men died in the war. Many men who came into adulthood during the Weimar years grew up without fathers. Plus, the rapid liberalization of family and sexual mores, driven in part by nascent feminism and, in Berlin at least, the normalization of homosexuality and transsexualism, left a generation of young men confused about their purpose and identity in the emerging new society. Political extremists of the Left and the Right stepped in to fill the void of meaning, and to give young men who felt they had no power over the direction of their lives a renewed sense of potency, of agency.
The culture war of the 1920s had political ramifications, writes Peukert. The parties of the Right and the Center strongly reacted against modernizing cultural mores, which were popularly associated with Americanization. The parties of the Left considered the resistance to social liberalization to be an intolerable attempt to restrict individual rights and liberties. Neither side was willing to compromise with the other. When they did compromise on legislation, neither side was satisfied, and kept the fight going. The elites ended by being totally discredited in the eyes of many Germans, making way for extremists.
Finally, Peukert concludes that there is no simple reason to explain the rise of Hitler, but one can make the general diagnosis that he came out of Germany’s failure to deal with the crisis of modernization. Peukert says that every other major Western industrialized nation was dealing with the same crisis in that period, but it hit Germany especially hard, because of various historical reasons (the war and its effects, hyperinflation, etc.). In other words, any Western nation could have gone Germany’s route, but other nations had the internal resilience to manage the passage into modernization better than Germany did. One example of how helpless Germans felt, compared to other Western industrial powers: in 1932, the US had 85 suicides per one million inhabitants. Great Britain and France, which had been savaged by the Great War, had, respectively, 133 and 155. And Germany? It had 260 suicides per million.
So, what does this have to do with us?
Well, a lot, as Dreher goes on to write, and as Allan Bloom noted 30 years ago in the Closing of the American Mind. To understand how we got here, and how pernicious the culture of Weimar has been on American academia and cultural elites, in 2012, I produced one of my Silicon Graffiti videos cheekily titled “Weimar, Because We Reich You.”
