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Pastimes : Book Nook -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (311)	6/7/2001 9:59:35 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 443

Thanks, Charley. I just signed up to take a summer school class at George Mason, and the library card works not only at Mason but at most of the colleges in the DC area, including George Washington, Catholic, and American, but not Georgetown, so I am fairly hopeful of taking a look at it without having to pay for it. The class, by the way, is a graduate level history class on the Nazis. The professor is very knowledgeable about German history - yesterday he gave me a list of recent books on German finances during the interwar period, which I thought was very nice of him. He says he doesn't understand financial matters - when he talks about the reparations schemes he sort of shakes his head. Of course I know quite a bit about reparations, but he is providing the framework for me to understand them in context. I've found that historians tend to specialize in economic history, political history, military history, or social history (I am probably leaving something out) - and then there are the Quigley types, who, as you say, write what reads like a novel, without footnotes - A.J.P. Taylor has that same fault. One of the things I am learning about interwar influence of the Communist movement in Germany - as you are no doubt aware, after the Treaty of Versailles the Germans were limited to 100,000 soldiers in their army, no air force, no navy. The Germans adopted a constitutional parliamentary democracy in hopes of being able to retain the boundaries they had in 1914, because Wilson promised self-determination to every country which did, but of course it didn't work out as they hoped. Many in Germany were not happy with getting rid of the monarchy and the privileges of aristocracy, many were not happy with universal suffrage, while many thought they hadn't gone far enough. There was a great deal of violent social unrest, communist uprisings, putsches. I've never studied the history of the Communist movement worldwide so I don't know how widespread that type of thing was. My perception is that during the Great Depression, the extraordinary measures taken by Hoover and Roosevelt were considered by the majority as preferable to communism - this is something I will have to study in the future. I've got a couple of intriguing tangents to go off on - the secret rearmament of Germany - the so-called "Black Reichswehr" under Hans von Seekt - and what connection that had with the cartels - like our old friend, I.G. Farben - so I need to look at Sasuly's book. The secret German rearmament is fascinating, but there are already books about it, apparently.