TV Quote of the Day (Norm Macdonald, on 20th-Century German Militarism)

“The entire earth, there’s only one country that frightens me – that’s the country of Germany. I don’t know if you guys are students of history or not, but… For those of you who aren’t, Germany, in the previous century – in the early part… they decided to go to war. And who did they choose to go to war with? The world. So you think that would last about five seconds and the world would f------g win, and that would be that. But it was actually close!”—Canadian stand-up comic, actor, and writer Norm Macdonald (1959-2021), “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip and Trickery” (special), Sept. 18, 2017

Well, there are a whole bunch of people right now who are not “students of history,” and that would be those American voters who put back in office a President who complained relentlessly about the cost of paying for the defense of Europe.

Now, as Isaac Stanley-Becker’s story in the new January 2026 issue of The Atlantic notes, Germany, which turned away from its militaristic tradition in atonement for World War II, is re-starting its war machine in earnest. 

It’s not just Vladimir Putin’s threat to Ukraine that has scared it, but the harsh rhetoric of Donald Trump (given unforgettable form by his chief attack dog, Vice President J.D. Vance, at the Munich security conference earlier this year).

And all of that was before the release late last week of the administration’s new national security strategy.

By overwhelmingly shifting blame for the rise in tensions in Europe from Russia to European democracies (which, the document helpfully informs us, is risking “civilizational erasure”), the reactionary regime in Washington is laying out nothing less than “a clear plan for subversion in Europe,” aptly notes Tara Varma’s summary for the Brookings Institution. 

Europe’s only alternative, she concludes, is clear: “prepare, invest in its own security and resilience, and resist these intimidation and influence operations coming from its closest ally.”

It might take a while, but MAGA will rue the consequences of what it has wrought in a rearming Germany. As Macdonald noted, this principal power in Central Europe was awfully good at making war in the first half of the 20^th century. The United States learned, to its regret, that isolationism only allowed that war machine to run amok.

Who is to say, in a country where the far right is rearing its head again, that history won’t repeat itself?

The image accompanying this post, of German troops parading through Warsaw, Poland, in September 1939, comes from the National Archives at College Park, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S).

Quote of the Day (Thomas Mann, on Christmas Season in 19th Century Germany)

“The great dining-room was closed and mysterious, and there were marzipan and gingerbread to eat — and in the streets, Christmas had already come. Snow fell, the weather was frosty, and on the sharp clear air were borne the notes of the barrel-organ, for the Italians, with their velvet jackets and their black moustaches, had arrived for the Christmas feast. The shop-windows were gay with toys and goodies; the booths for the Christmas fair had been erected in the market-place; and wherever you went you breathed in the fresh, spicy odour of the Christmas trees set out for sale.”—German novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Buddenbrooks (1901), translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (1924

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Martin Luther, on the ‘Pope’s Court’)

“If we took away ninety-nine parts of the Pope's Court and only left one hundredth, it would still be large enough to answer questions on matters of belief. Now there is such a swarm of vermin at Rome, all called papal, that Babylon itself never saw the like. There are more than three thousand papal secretaries alone; but who shall count the other office-bearers, since there are so many offices that we can scarcely count them, and all waiting for German benefices, as wolves wait for a flock of sheep? I think Germany now pays more to the Pope than it formerly paid the emperors; nay, some think more than three hundred thousand guilders are sent from Germany to Rome every year, for nothing whatever; and in return we are scoffed at and put to shame. Do we still wonder why princes, noblemen, cities, foundations, convents, and people grow poor? We should rather wonder that we have anything left to eat.”—German theologian and Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther (1483-1546), Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (1520)

The argument advanced by Martin Luther in this passage will elicit nods of agreement not just for millions of those who followed his lead in leaving the Roman Catholicism Church, but also theologians who have remained in the hope that the central teaching authority of the Church would eventually accept their thinking.

The vast bureaucracy underlying the Church has been the subject of both humor (Pope John XXIII, asked how many people worked at the Vatican, joked, “About half”) to lamentation (“The Curia does its best to stifle criticism in the episcopate and in the church as a whole and to discredit critics with all the means at its disposal,” German theologian Hans Kung charged in a 2010 “Open Letter to Catholic Bishops”).

But few have matched the extraordinary vigor of the questioning by Luther. It cites striking statistics (those “three thousand papal secretaries”!), historical allusion (sinful ancient Babylon), animal imagery, and tying it all to the condition of his native Germany.

In contrast to another pillar of the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin, whose presentation and style often reflected his early training as a lawyer, Luther’s prose burned with passion and invective.

Address to the Christian Nobility, issued 500 years ago this month, was the first of three tracts in 1520 that propelled the rebellious monk further towards irrevocable defiance of the Pope. In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he called for reducing the number of sacraments instituted by the Roman Catholic Church from seven to two. In The Freedom of a Christian, he continued to attack abuses of the Vatican, only this time he began to explore, with greater eloquence, the essential equality of all believers: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

But Address to the Christian Nobility especially fell on fertile ground. It helped that Luther wrote it in German rather than the Latin common to theological explication of the time. Communicating in the vernacular, coupled with the rise of the printing press (particularly in Luther’s own Wittenberg), meant that his attacks on the papacy found a far wider audience of lay readers than just his own community of theologians.

Within this wider lay community, Luther reached two receptive groups. The first—more important in ensuring he would not be executed like an earlier Church dissident, the Bohemian cleric Jan Huss—was the German nobility. 

Jealous of their prerogatives, they resented especially what Luther called the “three walls” used to safeguard the papacy’s absolute sway: the elevation of spiritual power above secular; the claim that nobody but the pope could interpret scripture; and the assertion that only he could convene a council of the Church.

In this environment, Luther’s call for secular princes to assert their proper temporal authority (“Oh noble princes and gentlemen, how long will you suffer your lands and your people to be the prey of these ravening wolves?”) furnished them with intellectual and theological justification for defying the papacy. 

The second lay audience for Luther’s tract—those outside the nobility—was far more problematic for him. He predicted that Germany would suffer the same fate as Italy, where, to create and maintain cardinals of the Church, “the convents are destroyed, the sees consumed, the revenues of the prelacies and of all the churches drawn to Rome; towns are decayed, the country and the people ruined.”

This baleful prophecy fed anger not only among merchants who might have read his tracts themselves but also German peasants who, though illiterate, would have heard his thoughts spread through the network of preachers already flocking to his standard. 

Five years later, when the “Peasants’ Revolt” erupted and spread in southern Germany, Luther—angry at insinuations that he had provoked the disorder, alarmed that he might lose the protection of powerful princes against the papacy—reacted with another tract whose title conveys better than any commentary the intensity of his feelings: Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.

Luther’s appeal to secular authority and his frequent, revolutionary use of the German language arose from his intense identification as a German—an instinct all the more remarkable because that land was still a motley collection of states within the Holy Roman Emperor, not the united nation-state it became after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

But in calling for the overthrow of one form of unequaled authority, he was merely exchanging it for another: the power of the princes. Once he advocated for obedience to these secular rulers—even urging these princes to forsake leniency against protesters (“It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace”)—he was priming the masses for absolute fealty to a political colossus unrestrained by the fear of God that gripped and restrained him throughout his life: Hitler’s Third Reach.

 (For a searching discussion of the consequences of this, please see William Castro’s “Luther and German Nationalism” in the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ “Reformation21.”) 

This Day in Classical Music History (Wagner Dies, But His Controversies Survive)

Feb. 13, 1883—A heart attack suffered on vacation in Venice may have ended the life of Richard Wagner at age 69, but the tumult he engendered outlived him. It survives, in some ways, even hotter today, as biographers, musicologists, even the entire German nation consider whether this musical revolutionary spurred reactionary politics that infected an entire continent.

The controversy starts, though, with Wagner’s personal life. Over a week ago, Joseph Horowitz’s article in The Wall Street Journal took to task Simon Callow for propagating the “monster” myth about the composer in the actor-biographer’s new book, Being Wagner.

To be sure, Horowitz is correct that Wagner was an early victim of “fake news." The article cites an 1866 newspaper report that, ignoring generous-to-a-fault payments Wagner made his estranged wife Minna, claimed that she had been reduced to poverty following their separation. Horowitz might just as easily have mentioned the rumor that Wagner’s fatal cardiac incident resulted from his argument with second wife Cosima over excessive attention to a 23-year-old soprano who played one of the flower-maidens in his recent triumph, Parsifal.

In one way, it is surprising that so much murkiness has developed around what Wagner did, said, or meant, as he is virtually unrivaled among composers in the documentation he left about himself (approximately 12,000 letters, along with additional prose works that are projected to run to eight volumes when scholars complete the task by 2030).

But, on second thought, such a swirl of rumors might be understandable, as Wagner’s contemporaries believed him capable of almost anything—not just herculean feats of creativity, but also impulsive acts destructive to his livelihood, his family, and his reputation.

How, for instance, could the composer who counted on wealthy patrons to bankroll his outsized ambitions be the same man who cuckolded those benefactors? How could the member of the culturati who counted Jews among his friends and supporters be the same man who wrote the notorious 1850 essay, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music)—which even Horowitz acknowledges as “egregiously anti-Semitic”?

In fact, amid constant upheaval in his life, anti-Semitism prevailed as a leitmotif in Wagner's thought. As he aged, he edged away from the radical ideology that forced him into exile after 1848. But, even with his late-life embrace of Christianity and German nationalism and his exclusion of much youthful writing that now embarrassed him, he never repudiated his poisonous racial nonsense.

Wagner was hardly the only anti-Semitic major figure in classical music history, nor can he be held solely or even largely responsible for the Holocaust. But his prejudice was virulent; Hitler idolized him; and the element of bombast so present in his music made it a natural culture lodestone for the Fuehrer.

Oscar Wilde, in his inimitable way, sent up that last quality perhaps the best of anyone I have read: “I like Wagner’s music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.”

Not hearing what is being said—when your laughter dies down, just remember that this last effect of bombast is also what allowed millions of ordinary Germans to pay no mind to Hitler when he divulged his mad notions about conquests and scapegoats.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Isherwood, on a ‘Clever and Unscrupulous Liar’)

“It is indeed tragic to see how, even in these days, a clever and unscrupulous liar can deceive millions.”— “Mr. Norris”—himself a “clever and unscrupulous liar,” commenting on the far more dangerous one who took over Germany in 1933, in Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935)

Christopher Isherwood’s novel is not just a study in a louche, corrupt con man, but also of how the society that makes his kind possible also endangers the prospects of democracy. I’m afraid that this year, as in no other in my lifetime (and that includes Richard Nixon’s twists and turns amid Watergate and his impeachment crisis), we are witnessing a similar frail democracy thrashing about. Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to what transpired in 1930s Germany.

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on the Nazi Invasion of Russia)

“I see the 10,000 villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this, in hideous onslaught, the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents, fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, so delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey. And behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who planned, organized and launched this cataract of horrors upon mankind.”— Winston Churchill, radio address on Germany’s invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941

Even as he made history, Winston Churchill sought to shape how it would be interpreted. He didn’t wait until he penned his bestselling six-volume  war memoirs in retirement, nor even as he departed Whitehall in 1945, when he carted off 68 bundles of state papers to help him with this massive proect (as revealed in David Lough’s recently published No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money). 

The British Prime Minister did so, quite memorably, as early as Adolf Hitler’s disastrous decision to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on this date 75 years ago today.

Twenty-two months before Hitler’s troops opened fire on the Soviets, without either a declaration of war or even an ultimatum, Joseph Stalin had made a cynical secret deal with his fellow dictator: a division of the spoils that allowed them spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, subjecting that region's inhabitants to exploitation by these conquerors. (See my prior post on the background to the event.)

Though stunned by Hitler’s treachery—initially, it seems, almost to the point of paralysis—Stalin should not have been. Hitler had shown an insatiable appetite for land; he had broken the Munich agreement that Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had naively negotiated; and, as secret agents and Allied leaders (such as Churchill himself) had told the Soviet dictator, Hitler planned to turn on him.

When he addressed his country after hearing this news, Churchill was already calling it one of four “climacterics,” or “intense turning points,” of World War II. (The others to that point, as listed in the speech, were the British decision to fight Germany alone after the fall of France, the performance of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and the American decision to provide aid through the Lend Lease Act). This, though, may have been the turning point that sealed Hitler’s fate, for Great Britain would no longer be facing Germany by itself on the battlefield.

In the quote above, Churchill resorted to benign images of the common Soviet folk because he wanted his own countrymen to identify with people who had just become their allies. Even this, however, wasn’t enough. He also felt compelled to acknowledge his own past: “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years.” Nor would he retract a word of it even now.

But the crimes of Hitler were so “monstrous,” he noted, that “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose….to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.”

Though Hitler had approached the decision to invade the U.S.S.R. with mounting anxiety, he could not shed the same logic that had doomed Napoleon Bonaparte over a century before, General Walther Warlimont would note later:

“Why Hitler invaded Russia is, in my opinion, that he found himself in exactly the same situation as Napoleon. Both men looked upon Britain as their strongest and most dangerous adversary. Both could not persuade themselves to attempt the overthrow of England by invading the British Isles. Both believed, however, that Great Britain could be forced to come to terms with the dominating continental power, if the prospect vanished for the British to gain an armoured arm as an ally on the Continent. Both of them suspected Russia of becoming this ally of Britain’s.”

For all his vivid imagery, Churchill surely could not foresee the extent of the grievous harm inflicted by Germany on the U.S.S.R.: more than 26 million lives lost. Nor, for all the fighting spirit he praised among the Russian common people, could he have anticipated that the Soviet military would ultimately be responsible for approximately 70% of the Wehrmacht loss of life over the next four years, as the powerful German war machine first became trapped by the winter weather, then by Hitler's refusal to walk away from a quagmire. Churchill remained convinced, as he wrote in his memoir The Gathering Storm, that “Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism.”  But he also believed that allying now with the Soviets was the only feasible way to destroy Nazism and to preserve Britain as a nation.

This Day in Economic History (Euro Debuts, to Premature Hoopla)

January 4, 1999—The euro, backed by 11 European countries, debuted, fueling the dream not merely of a common continental currency but even of a common continental economy that could compete against the United States.

There hadn’t been a common currency in Europe since the days of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, back at the start of the ninth century. We all know how that ended. Now, even with 17 nations using the currency, the euro has had its own struggles, as can be seen by turning to almost any newspaper with any kind of international coverage. (If you really want the major milestones for the euro crisis, this dandy timeline will do nicely.)

“Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries' abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency,” wrote Amity Shlaes in a Bloomberg News article from 2010.

What Ms. Schlaes is talking about can be seen even in the deliberations that brought about the pact. Germany, still fearful of the hyperinflation that doomed the Weimar Republic and helped bring on Nazism, wanted to call the treaty a “Stability Pact.” The leaders of France, balefully eyeing the prospects of putting that before their voters, pushed to have it called a “Growth Pact.” In one of those compromises that make political economy what it is (i.e., essentially meaningless), the agreement hammered out at a quarrelsome summit meeting in 1996 ended up calling it “the Stability and Growth Pact.”

(That meeting, by the way, took place in Dublin Castle. Ireland has had reason to question its relationship to the International Monetary Fund following the extreme austerity imposed as part of a bailout program designed to remedy their pell-mell struggle for—take a bow, France!—“growth.”)

It just goes to show that reality—or, at least, reality in the form of the traditional nation-state—is bound to rear its head against any economic theory.