You can draw a line from Napoleon’s defeats at Leipzig and Waterloo to the rise of German nationalism in the 1930s. It’s not a straight line, but a line nonetheless and the elements were many. Culturally, one big thing factored in - the 19th Century realization that the many independent German states had much in common and a unified identity emerged. Oddly, two cultural items helped propel that. The first were the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, academics who’d cast a wide net collecting the ancient stories, many of which were violent and sexual and had to be sanitized after complaints arose. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, ended up a bloody mess and, in Rapunzel, the Prince and the girl in the tower had an explicit sexual encounter. The other was the music of the deeply antisemitic Richard Wagner. His operas spoke to the dark heart of Deutschland, so much so the Nazi Party made him one other their cultural icons. But all this had a predicate in German history - and a surprising one at that.
© 2024 John Oliver
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