But you are fundamentally correct about the connection of economic disorder and the willingness of people to accept an authoritarian government and desire revenge on those who caused the disorder:
'An American who feels queasy at the memory of the inflation of the
1970's and early 1980's would do well to reflect on the novelist
Thomas Mann's remarkable lecture, given in the United States in
1942, describing the consequences of the great German hyperinflation
of 1923:
"Just as the Germans saw their marks inflated into millions and billions
and in the end bursting, so they were later to see their state inflated
into the reich of all the Germans, the German Living Space, the
New Europe, and the New World Order, and so too they will see it
burst. In those days the market woman who without batting an eyelash
demanded a hundred million for an egg, lost the capacity for surprise.
And nothing that has happened since has been insane or cruel enough
to surprise her."
Serious stuff. Thomas Mann was not the only thinker to draw a
connection between the hyperinflation and the rise of Nazism, but he
conveyed his thought more vividly than the others, and he did so when
it was not clear that the Nazis would be defeated. It was clear to him,
however, that Nazism was as much an aberration as a
hundred-million-mark price for an egg, and not morally all that
different. "Having been robbed," he said, "the Germans became a
nation of robbers." ' |
