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The Collapse of Weimar Democracy: Not a Uniquely German Event
There are those who think that the collapse of a fully functioning democratic system in the form of Weimar German democracy is a uniquely German event. We are told it was caused by the "German Mind"....
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Wonderful Unintentional Comedy
Thank you for the reader who shared this delightful piece of unintentional comedy with me over Twitter:HITLER AND WAGNERISMJanet Gregory To the average person the name Wagner means nothing more than...
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Why Donald Trump is Not Hitler
This post is less related to musicology than usual, but not entirely far off the sociopolitical discussion on history found in the Wagner discussions.Hitler comparisons have become something of a tired...
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Review of “The Effect of Richard Wagner's Music and Beliefs on Hitler's...
The source of this publication is Musical Offerings, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 55–66. ISSN 2330-8206 (print); ISSN 2167-3799 (online). The full text can be found at the following...
View ArticleRichard Wagner: A “Communist” After All?
I have been spending days revising my review of Joachim Köhler’s book:http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.htmlThe main insight is that despite the fact that...
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Amerika über alles: American Exceptionalism Follows the Path of German...
It you read the longest post on the blog, a systematic critique of Joachim Köhler's book Wagner's Hitler, one of the key themes is the rejection of German exceptionalism. In the early post-war decades,...
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Is Racism Just an Instrument of Capitalist Imperialism?
If we look at nineteenth century discourse on ethnicity, of the sort we stumble across in studying the writings of Richard Wagner, we find that it is quite different from what we are used to in late...
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Did Hitler Ever Say that He Had No Forerunner Other than Richard Wagner?
In the vastly speculative Nazi opera conspiracy literature, almost entirely written by amateur pseudo-historians evincing little evidence of credible qualification to write on this period of history,...
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Total War: A Prediction About Donald Trump
Reading about the history and origins of the Dritte Reich is fascinating because of the philosophical questions it raises. First of all it raises the question as to whether history is predestined. For...
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What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Dritte Reich
Historian Timothy Snyder wrote an interesting piece for the Guardian a while back:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/hitlers-world-may-not-be-so-far-awayThe turn of phrase that struck me...
View ArticleMy Wagner Book is Slowly Being Written
I have been sitting on sketches for it for years, and it may takes years yet to complete and publish it. But I am writing a book on Wagner. It is slowly progressing, but a lot of research is still...
View ArticleProgress Report on my Wagner Book
I have half written the draft version of my Richard Wagner book. All of the chapters have had their content planned out. I just have to fill in the gaps I have left. I know pretty much what I want to...
View ArticleHappy New Year
Happy New Year to all!I hope all of my readers have had a nice little break. Naturally, I have been working away furiously at my promised Wagner book. If not always writing, then at least doing lots of...
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Comment on Article by Justin Reynolds in the New European
My book is continuing to progress. I swore I wouldn't write much on this blog as all research efforts are going into my book, but I am going to briefly stop and write a brief review of this article in...
View ArticleA Minor Update
I feel a bit guilty not to have published a blog post since February. Of course, much time is being taken up by my book. The sort of research findings I used to put into blog posts now goes into my...
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Progress Update
Once again, the blog has gone silent for months on end, but readers will hopefully understand that any research goes towards the book rather than used as the basis of a blog post. Admittedly, some...
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The American Axis and its Influence on Hitler
As suggested in my last post, there will a resumption of regular articles that give snippets of insight into the sort of background research that needs to go into what will eventually be a book on...
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A Condemnation of All Notions of Political Innatism
A little comment on this diagram called the Vienna Circles: the Field of Cultural Production.It was recently posted on Twitter:“A brilliant map of intellectual Vienna in the times of Karl Kraus, Arnold...
View ArticleWhen a Book Writes Itself
My book on the place of Wagner in German history is begging to be written. It is being written.Some time ago, it felt like a first draught was coming together. That was almost a year ago now. Then...
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Fake Quotes on Gun Control Attributed to National Socialists
This blog post by American academic in media studies, Professor Randall Bytwerk, on fake and apocryphal quotes often attributed to leading figures in the National Socialist movement, is worth...
View ArticleDepressing History
Just a quick update. I have had to give up researching and writing for my book up for a while. I just found it too depressing reading about the WWII era and the Shoah. Just go to the descriptions of...
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Beijing's Triumph of the Will
As I was watching video footage of developments during the Hong Kong protest movement, I saw Beijing had symbolically mobilised the People's Liberation Army on the island. The PLA soldiers were seen...
View ArticleHappy New Year 2021
What a strange year 2020 was. I remember encountering the words "the past is a foreign country" somewhere in the writings of historian Sir Richard J Evans. One day, we woke up to find that the world...
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The Longue Durée of German Intellectual History
It's time to write something. It's a bit of recent commentary on an old post prompted by a new comment made on Goodreads about my review of Sherratt's Hitler's Philosophers from around 2013....
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Book Review: Blood and Iron by Katja Hoyer
A Review of Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918 by Katja HoyerAmazon Kindle eBook edition (the edition used for the review) ASIN : B08R9DKRV1Publisher : The History Press...
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