This is a brief departure from sex blogging, true, but it’s too good to pass up and the original poster should get wider notice.
Women’s history scholar Sungold of Kittywampus says
Stop scrambling German history.
It was [Otto von Bismarck, not Hitler, who introduced universal health care in Germany. Bismarck established public, non-profit insurance agencies funded by worker and employer contributions. He didn’t do it because he was a bleeding-heart liberal; his intent was to co-opt an issue that drew support to socialism.
Please get your mustaches straight.
It’s a great point you know. Confusing the current proposal for health-care reform, as illustrated in the accompanying chart…
...with socialized medicine, or, for that matter, confusing President Obama’s governing style with Hitlers is kind of dumb. Not as dumb as thinking the original Bible was written in English. Not as dumb as not knowing whether the Old Testament was written before the New Testament. Not as dumb as not realizing Stephen Hawkings is, in fact, British. Or, (and this is a new one) that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii but that Hawaii isn’t part of the United States! But still dumb.
To be precise, according to Wikipedia…
Bismarck’s program centered squarely on insurance programs designed to increase productivity, and focus the political attentions of German workers on supporting the Junker’s government. The program included Health Insurance; Accident Insurance (Workman’s Compensation); Disability Insurance; and an Old-age Retirement Pension, none of which were then currently in existence to any great degree.
Also note: Bismark introduced universal healthcare in Germany in 1883. Adolph Hitler didn’t come to power until 1933, fifty years later.
Nor was Bismarck exactly a political liberal…
In the year of his marriage, 1847, at age 32, Bismarck was chosen as a representative to the newly created Prussian legislature, the Vereinigter Landtag. There, he gained a reputation as a royalist and reactionary politician with a gift for stinging rhetoric; he openly advocated the idea that the monarch had a divine right to rule. His election was arranged by the Gerlach brothers, who were also Pietist Lutherans and whose ultra-conservative faction was known as the “Kreuzzeitung” after their newspaper, which featured an Iron Cross on its cover.
... in other words he more of a protege of the Fox News, National Review, or Washington Times of his day.
Sungold illustrates her post with a picture of Bismarck’s giant handlebar mustache. I’m illustrating mine with an entirely different, and even more appropriate mustache.
Photo by Flickr user blunderer. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Bottom line: if you’re into not just “worker” productivity but actual workforce productivity Otto von Bismarck and Barack Obama can be found on the right side of the divide, while Adolph Hitler and the post-Reagan ‘wingers can not.
Submitted by 3142 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-08-21 00:38.
Um, you're right it was Bismarck and you're right he was (in the American sense of the word) no liberal.
Then again, Bismarck launched one of the first major attempts to bribe the working class into submission. It was this form of "Prussian socialism", rooted in early 19th century concepts about a "Volksstaat" (Fichte), that inspired many German leftists (Sozialdemokraten) to become "national socialists" during the First World War, praising the national community ("Volksgemeinschaft") as their utopia come true.
Most leading Bolsheviks such as Lenin and Trotzki claimed the German war economy with its strict centralization and nationalization of the economy was the best precondition for communism.
During the 20s the German radical right wing adopted these ideas and started propagating "German socialism" that was directed against western individualism and the Soviet materialism at the same time (both these enemies were labelled "Jewish" in the course). This created the platform for the Nazis who didn't really have to come up with any new ideas but rather combined all the racist, antisemitic mainstream ideas in 1920s' Germany.
So, even though it's ridiculous to equate Obama with Hitler or the idea of public health care with totalitarianism, there is a strong historical connection between Bismarck's social politics and national socialism.
[Considering that since the 1880s Germany has been an ideal monarchy, an ideal fascist country (under Hitler), an ideal communist (in the East under the Soviets), and now an ideal democracy I think Lenin and Trotsky were right only in the extremely trivial sense that government-provided healthcare, like government-provided streets, schools, and law-enforcement create ideal conditions not just for communism but for *any* broadly civic (as opposed to individual survival) aspirations among the populace. Thanks, Classless. --fl]
Submitted by 3142 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-08-21 07:25.
Classless, I'm going to use the historian's standard line and say: It's more complicated.
Some members of the German *Communist* party embraced National Bolshevism, but I'm not aware of a major migration of the Social Democrats toward either National Socialism or National Bolshevism. Indeed, many Germans on the right blamed the Social Democrats after 1918 for the loss of the war, alleging that they were insufficiently nationalistic and had failed to support the war sufficiently (the "stab in the back" legend). It's not plausible to blame the Socialdemokraten for advancing the cause of National Socialism.
Nor does it make sense to draw a straight line from Bismarck to Hitler. Yes, there were strong authoritarian and militaristic currents from the very beginning of the German Reich. However, the radicalization that occurred between 1918 and 1933 was nourished by factors that did not exist before the war: the humiliation of defeat, the catastrophic inflation of the early 1920s, and the spread of racist, anti-Semitic ideas (which were not unique to Germany but were common throughout the Western world, including among some "progressives").
Sorry to get all pedantic, but easy generalizations about Bismarck leading straight to history imply a teleological course of history; they imply that Nazism was inevitable. And that lets the actual actors off the hook.
FYI, figleaf: using the preview function eats the comment even if you've first typed in the Recaptcha phrase. So it's still broken. :-(
Submitted by 3142 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-08-22 02:29.
Oh, it's even far more complicated than that. I just think blog comments aren't a very goof place to go into all that much detail.
The term "Nationalsozialismus" was at first the denomination and self-denomination of German social democrats ("Sozialdemokraten") during World War I. Their enthusiasm for an authoritarian, etatist socialism made obvious how the allegedly revolutionary party had turned to Lasalle's paternalist Volksstaat and away from Marx' internationalism.
I can only refer to German books on this which would be: Willy Huhn, Der Etatismus der deutschen Sozialdemokratie and Sebastian Haffner: Von Bismarck zu Hitler
Nazism surely wasn't inevitable but it was much more a consequence of the social constitution of Germany at that time as is generally admitted today when the Nazis are depicted as some kind of conspiracy against the other Germans.
I look at it from the perspective of how not to have it happening again. And thus, one main point seems to be that the Nazis came right out of society's mainstream.
Submitted by 3142 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-08-22 12:58.
Well, my original post didn't go into *any* detail - I was just trying to be pithy and concise, for a change! :-) You're quite right that blog comments aren't going to disentangle German history and historiography.
I'm still very skeptical that the SPD (Social Democrats) ever called themselves "Nationalsozialismus" during WWI or at any time. The German Wikipedia entry traces the term to the birth of the NSDAP (Nazis) as a party, with no reference to the SPD. I don't have a copy of "Von Bismarck zu Hitler" but I have Haffner's "Failure of a Revolution" at hand, and its intro chapter doesn't say anything about the SPD adopting the term Nationalsozialismus. They surely were statist, patriotic, and reformist. (That's less true of the minority group, the USPD, which splintered off during the war.) But it's a stretch to identify even the majority SPD with either the term Nationalsozialismus or its ideological content.
I agree that Nazism didn't materialize out of thin air. My (German) husband refers to this as the theory that the Nazis arrived from Mars in 1933 and returned there in 1945. As you note, it's important to look instead at what *mainstream* ideas and political currents paved the way for national socialism. Some of those currents (e.g., eugenics) were equally prevalent outside of Germany prior to 1933. It's also important to look at the legacy of Nazism, as many former Nazis managed to make a career for themselves after 1945. Tolerance for former Nazis was a major factor in turning people like my husband, born during the baby boom, toward critical and left-wing politics. That spirit of self-criticism has faded greatly in the past decade or so, partly due to unification, partly due to generational change.
My, we've strayed awfully far from sex. Sorry, figleaf!