I think Germany has a special relationship with “whiteness” that makes it especially vulnerable to fascism, especially in how Germany is perceived and treated by other groups of white people.
Also though, Germany is a culture bursting with contradictions, within a year of Mein Kempf being published another novel was published The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann by an originally German author who moved to the US.
The Magic Mountain is firmly cemented in German culture… and is indisputably one of the best novels ever written in German or English and is certainly one of the most humanist and openly accepting of humanity in all its “failures” of any great novel of the 20th century. The Magic Mountain is the most supremely antifascist novel imaginable and it is equally allergic to racism and discrimination.
With the start of the Cold War, he was increasingly frustrated by rising McCarthyism. As a “suspected communist”, he was required to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was termed “one of the world’s foremost apologists for Stalin and company”.[19] He was listed by HUAC as being “affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts”.
Being in his own words a non-communist, rather than an anti-communist, Mann openly opposed the allegations: “As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’. … That is how it started in Germany.”
As Mann joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found “the media had been closed to him”.[20] Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress,[21] and in 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland. Here he initially lived in a rented house and bought his last house there in 1954 (which later his widow and then their son Golo lived in until their deaths).
He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly traveled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main (then West Germany) and Weimar (then East Germany), as a statement that German culture extended beyond the new political borders.[22] He also visited Lübeck, where he saw his parents’ house, which was partially destroyed by the bombing of Lübeck in World War II (and only later rebuilt).
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
I think Germany has a special relationship with “whiteness” that makes it especially vulnerable to fascism, especially in how Germany is perceived and treated by other groups of white people.
Also though, Germany is a culture bursting with contradictions, within a year of Mein Kempf being published another novel was published The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann by an originally German author who moved to the US.
The Magic Mountain is firmly cemented in German culture… and is indisputably one of the best novels ever written in German or English and is certainly one of the most humanist and openly accepting of humanity in all its “failures” of any great novel of the 20th century. The Magic Mountain is the most supremely antifascist novel imaginable and it is equally allergic to racism and discrimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.