..but i really wanted a nice relaxing sit-down, read something interesting, & then go home. The trouble is, my brain is now bouncing around inside my skull coz it's full of caffeine & sugar!
'The Governors' Cona coffee is cheap & good, so i sat there drinking & reading until i started get talkative inside my head & had to go home before i started boring some hapless listener with whatever my current interest happened to be - in this case European history, & in particular the Thirty Years' War (ca.1618-1648).
Why have i labeled this 'Life'? 'History' makes sense, but 'Life'?
Well, yes, actually. What happened in Germany in that period of European history had repercussions right down to the 20th century, to 2 enormously destructive World Wars, the second of which was more or less the result of the unconscionable blunders made by the victors (?) in the first. I read of one historian who described those two wars as the Thirty-one Years War - as i recall (?) he was German & therefore directly affected by the aftermath of the Great War, as the first of them is often called. Whether he actually lived through the precarious existence of the ill-fated Weimar Republic i don't actually know (if i could recall his name i could look him up using what 'New Scientist' magazine calls the Famous Web Search Engine, or FWSE - we all know what that is but for some reason they aren't allowed to say the name in print, not sure why!). Nonetheless, the aftermath of WW1 was a disaster for Germany, & subsequently for the rest of the world. As W H Auden put it:
"I and the public know
What every schoolboy learns
That those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return"
And, sad to say, in Germany's case, this was true. She was made to shoulder the sole blame for a war that was the result of an unstable European concoction of alliances, treaties (some kept from the public eye), nationalistic aspirations, colonial land-grabbing, & an arms race that was epitomized by the British political slogan "We want eight, & we won't wait!" - a reference to the advent of the Dreadnought class of heavy fighting ships that rendered their predecessors militarily obsolete because of their major reliance on very large (15-inch, i think) heavy naval guns which could out-shoot any of their smaller adversaries' weaponry. Not only was the war guilt unfairly assigned, but the war reparations broke Germany financially - never mind the vehement criticism of the opinions of an economist who was involved in the post-war 'negotiations' at a very high level & predicted trouble ahead in his report entitled "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace" - John Maynard Keynes was not popular with certain jingoistic elements of the 'victorious' nations. A certain Adolf Hitler had no trouble convincing a defeated & demoralized Germany that her army had been 'stabbed in the back' by the Allies, & while this had little currency in 1923 when Herr Hitler & his fellow Nazis were jailed for attempting a coup d'etat that failed, the Great Depression & the misery that followed `the Crash of 1929 had the German public grasping at the straws of restoration of German national pride &, in particular, Hitler's own take on German unity.
The result was, almost inevitably, the Second World War, from which my own father returned with what is now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - even as a small child i recall seeing him with the 'shakes' but the culture of the day did not see him as an injured war veteran - he had trouble seeing himself that way! Only years later, with the help of his more assertive RSA comrades did he finally obtain the War Pension i feel should have been his from the day he was demobilized. That's life, huh??
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