Thread #533281436
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"Sonderweg" has meant different things at different times, and before 1945 was held up by Germans as a point of pride, and after 1945 has generally been considered a source of shame or a false idea: there was no Special Path in Germany's development as compared with the rest of Western Europe.
But there was, no matter what anyone thinks about its goodness or badness.
Some historians trace Germany's special path back to the Dark Ages, claiming Charlemagne's wars against Slavic peoples, and the early Holy Roman Empire's wars in the East, were all part of an ancient way of thinking, among Germanic peoples, toward the East and its Slavic inhabitants.
Even the name "Slav" is an exonym bestowed by Germanic peoples on the peoples of Eastern Europe: slaves.
Those historians who reach back this far argue that Germanic peoples have always regarded Slavic peoples as either slaves -- natural inferiors to be used for labor -- or as obstacles to be cleared out in an effort to repopulate the East with Germanic people.
Prussia, and late modern Germany's, inception of the welfare state is also seen as an example of the Sonderweg.
>The term Sonderweg was first used by German conservatives in the imperial period, starting in the late 19th century as a source of pride at the "Golden Mean"[1] of governance that in their view had been attained by the German state, whose distinctiveness as an authoritarian state lay in taking the initiative in instituting social reforms and in imposing them without waiting to be pressured by demands "from below". That type of authoritarianism was seen to be avoiding both the autocracy of Imperial Russia and what they regarded as the weak, decadent and ineffective democratic governments of Britain and France. The idea of Germany as a great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East, was to be a recurring feature of right-wing German thought right up to 1945.
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>>533281436
The idea here is that Germany's development into an industrial powerhouse was unlike other Western countries' industrialization, in that the Prussian, then the German state didn't wait for socialist movements to pressure the state from below to enact labor reforms, but instead, the German state behaved proactively and implemented the modern welfare state before demands from below reached a pitch that could no longer be ignored.
>Taylor wrote in his 1945 book The Course of German History that the Nazi regime "represented the deepest wishes of the German people", and that it was the first and only German government created by the Germans as the Holy Roman Empire had been created by France and Austria, the German Confederation by Austria and Prussia and the Weimar Republic by the Allies.[7] In contrast, Taylor argued, "but the Third Reich rested solely on German force and impulse; it owed nothing to alien forces. It was a tyranny imposed upon the German people by themselves".[7] Taylor argued that Nazism was inevitable because the Germans wanted "to repudiate the equality with the peoples of eastern Europe which had then been forced upon them" after 1918.[8] Taylor wrote that:[8]
Another issue:
>The historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler of the Bielefeld School places the origins of Germany's path to disaster in the 1860s and the 1870s, when economic modernization took place, but political modernization did not happen, and the old Prussian rural elite remained in firm control of the army, diplomacy and the civil service. Traditional, aristocratic and premodern society battled an emerging capitalist, bourgeois and modernizing society. Recognizing the importance of modernizing forces in industry and the economy and in the cultural realm, Wehler argues that reactionary traditionalism dominated the political hierarchy of power in Germany, as well as social mentalities and in class relations.
Did Germany follow a unique path in its development, and if so, how long has
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>>533281625
>>533281436
Slav means Glory, you'd do well to remember that you little rapebaby
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>>533281654
Germany been on this unique path?
And was it just Germany, i.e. the peoples and states of Central Europe who have spoken Germanic languages and who eventually became the modern German State born in 1871, who went along this Special Way, or was it a wider section of the Germanic peoples who did?
With regard to the East and the Slavs there, all of Western Europe has regarded them as inferior for centuries, and Eastern Europe as a place for future conquest. We're seeing it again today as the EU and Britain want Russia defeated and either reformed into a puppet regime for the West or else dismembered and ended as a country.
So this tendency to regard Slavs and Eastern Europe as the plaything of others is spread throughout the peoples of Western Europe, not just in modern Germany.
The reason this interests me is because Germany is again trying to gear up to take down Russia. Merz just had a meeting with Zelensky and promised Germany will not stop its support and if the US pulls out of NATO, then Germany will lead the charge against Russia.
And Germany, via the EU, has managed to take control of Europe. By economics and diplomacy, Germany has achieved the central role in European politics that it could not achieve militarily in the two World Wars.
This is why the UK left the EU. Britain has never been willing to tolerate being under Germany in any way. The British could accept losing their empire to the Americans, but never, not in a million years, to Germany.
The British, by the way, are also very unique in their development, and could be described as having followed a Sonderweg at least since the Norman Invasion and definitely since the Magna Carta and the earliest beginnings of Parliamentarism.
I just wonder people's opinions on all this.
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>>533282019
True.