Did Germany suffer a bigger national trauma after World War 1 or 2?

Did Germany suffer a bigger psychological trauma and emotional scars after World War 1 or 2?

  • World War 1

    Votes: 42 16.0%
  • World War 2

    Votes: 220 84.0%

  • Total voters
    262

Deleted member 1487

You are quite right that German thinking for many decades has been much more influenced by modern German messaging which is tailor suited to an end point which subordination of national collective identity to an EU identity and policies.
Having studied abroad in 21st century Germany and Austria and talked to people about this sort of stuff it is quite apparent why people think about the past as they do. Every era's historiography is influenced by it's contemporaneous environment.
 
Having studied abroad in 21st century Germany and Austria and talked to people about this sort of stuff it is quite apparent why people think about the past as they do. Every era's historiography is influenced by it's contemporaneous environment.

Its more extreme in Germany then most other countries I talked to. Germans who grew up in the WW2 era kept very Bismarkian ideas on national self interest. The next generation came with a radical different framework for identity and view of self interest.
 
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So how serious is the trauma of World War 2 in Japan?

Japan has definitely dealt with its trauma differently, but I think it is also pretty deep. There is a definite kinship between German and Japanese post-war art, and the only country that I get the same "vibe" from is Soviet art and some of post-Soviet art.

And as of today, most of these limitations are imposed by Germany upon herself. There are quite some voices that call for Germany to take up a more important role in both Europe and the world, but Germans refrain from (openly) transposing their economic soft power into more substantial influence because they fear of being perceived as aggressors again.

It is true that Germany's self imposed limitations and German voter's support for those limitations is a major reason why the restrictions imposed by the WW2 allies still stand in many areas. Which I think say complementary things about the degree to which the allies of WW2 succeeded in creating a fair post-war settlement. Nonetheless, Germany, like Japan, is treated in special ways even today.

fasquardon
 

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
It is true that Germany's self imposed limitations and German voter's support for those limitations is a major reason why the restrictions imposed by the WW2 allies still stand in many areas. Which I think say complementary things about the degree to which the allies of WW2 succeeded in creating a fair post-war settlement. Nonetheless, Germany, like Japan, is treated in special ways even today.

I actually think that Germany got treated way more leniently after WWI. The treaty of Versailles was harsh and more or less a bad joke when compared to Wilson's lofty promises of a just peace, but IIRC Germany wasn't turned into a piece of ruble with millions of refugees after WWI, nor did it lose 1/3 of its ethnically cleansed nation while the rest was divided into two countries.

However, the Germans didn't have the power to challenge the WWII order in the same way they did after WWI, so they just accepted the unavoidable and adapted to the post-war order instead of trying to revise it (something very similar happened to the European victors – Britain, France and the Netherlands had to swallow that they wouldn't be able to restore their pre-war global position and so they just decided to work with the Americans and their former central European enemies to face the Soviet menace and to build a new European order).

The Japanese did more or less the same (and so did the Italians, but they're a special case anyway), but the Japanese government never faced the internal pressure to confront the ideas that led to WWII and so never took responsibility for the Japanese war crimes.

As for being treated differently, of course there is a certain cultural image of Germans who often get associated with Nazis, but as a part-German citizen, I don't feel discriminated on the international scene for whom I am. Germany could have all the attributes of a great power if it wanted (think of aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and influence overseas), but we prefer to spend the money on infrastructure, social services and soft power (even though we could always spend a little bit more, especially internally), which IMHO is a wise choice because military equipment is just dead capital, even if you use it.
 
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Certainly WW2 caused the greater national trauma to Germany, for many reasons. One aspect to this is how the atrocities carried out in the name of German nationalism scuppered any chance of citizens being proud of being German without having some very questionable views on what was carried out by the German people in that war. The permanent moral taint to German patriotism of the nationalist sort is certainly indicative of the sweeping changes in the national psyche brought about by the traumatic experiences of war. After WWI, German nationalism could seem moderately benign. After the indefensible things carried out in its name during WWII, though, it became untenable, and that is strongly indicative that WWII caused a much more drastic (albeit slower-acting in some ways) national trauma to Germany than WWI. And of course this is merely one facet.
 
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And hence, why the Allies devised their policy of unconditional surrender in 1943. They did not want that myth returning.
I think the unconditional surrender thing was basically a "loose mouth operation", neither fully thought through or discussed with others. But once said, there it was.
 
Well, but at least they aren't powered by renewable energies, because that would be even harder to build for the German industry...

Nonsense! Germany can use lignite like they use for most of their electricity!

I actually think that Germany got treated way more leniently after WWI.

For sure. After WW2, Germany was looted down to the bedrock just about. And if it hadn't been for the Cold War, Western Germany at least would have been much more harshly treated (the Soviets actually had the more lenient policy initially, as the Soviets thought that the best way to shear the German sheep was to keep it alive and take its wool, the US by contrast didn't need German "wool" so could seriously entertain ideas as extreme as the Morganthau plan).

The treaty of Versailles was harsh and more or less a bad joke when compared to Wilson's lofty promises of a just peace

Well, Germany did reject Wilson's lofty peace offer. It shouldn't be a surprise that the US backed harsher terms after the Germans had killed American boys. And the ethno-nationalist claptrap that was behind Wilson's ideas of drawing just borders were always going to provoke violent disagreements because real humans don't live in ethnically homogeneous communities where there's a line and all Germans live on one side and all French on the other and whathave you.

The League of Nations was a good idea. Industrial civilization needs some kind of international cooperation. But the guy had alot of bad ideas. This was one of the founders and great publicists of the "lost cause" myth that so blights US Civil War history. And the 14 points were always going to be messy to implement.

I think the unconditional surrender thing was basically a "loose mouth operation", neither fully thought through or discussed with others. But once said, there it was.

Nope. It was very serious. And it was mainly borne out of the distrust between the Allies. The French had already suffered an illegal coup that had surrendered to the German regime (the Vichy government was of dubious legality) and then the Soviets had become an ally. If France couldn't be trusted, how could the Brits and Americans trust the Soviets, whose regime had actively cooperated with the Nazis before Barbarossa? And how could the Soviets trust the British who had driven the appeasement of the 30s and had preferred to try to work with Hitler than entertain the Soviet offers to help ensure peace in Europe?

Also, the US wanted Soviet help against Japan. So the US pushing for unconditional surrender was one way of saying "we're with you against Germany, are you with us against Japan?"

And even between the relatively close and trusting relations between the western Allies, there were niggles of distrust. The US feared that the British might fracture like the French and the British feared that the US didn't have enough skin in the game and might peace out if the war grew too costly.

And people really believed the only way to ensure there wasn't a WW3 against Germany was to tear the whole rotten thing apart. During WW2, people didn't see a whole lot of difference between Hitler's regime and the Kaiser's regime. The Nazi's genocidal nature only fully sunk in after the war was done and the cost began to be counted.

So binding promises to fight on until unconditional surrender was a way to bridge the gap of trust between the various allies, to say: "look, we're in this to the end and you'd better be too." as well as to address the question of how to stop Germany from killing millions more people in the next war.

fasquardon
 

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
Nonsense! Germany can use lignite like they use for most of their electricity!

Maybe if the AfD wins the next elections we could just fuel it with diesel...

For sure. After WW2, Germany was looted down to the bedrock just about. And if it hadn't been for the Cold War, Western Germany at least would have been much more harshly treated (the Soviets actually had the more lenient policy initially, as the Soviets thought that the best way to shear the German sheep was to keep it alive and take its wool, the US by contrast didn't need German "wool" so could seriously entertain ideas as extreme as the Morganthau plan).

Well, without the Cold War Germany would have reunificied earlier, so it might have been better off in the short run...

Well, Germany did reject Wilson's lofty peace offer.

The 14 points were unacceptable to a German nation that still (felt that it) had a chance to win the war. One of Wilson's points called the Franco-German War (declared by France) and the annexation of Elsass-Lothringen (annexed by the French kings in the previous centuries) an "injustice", in a time when violent annexations were perfectly legal under international law. Now, I assume that Wilson just wanted to placate the French and maybe just didn't know that much about the German-French borderlands (in English it's mostly called Alsace-Lorraine, so it might just be that people thought that it's unambiguously French), but that condition alone made accepting Wilson 14 points very hard for patriotic Germans.

Also, Germany finally asked for peace on the basis of the 14 Points in late 1918, since Wilson never retracted his offer, but of course he had neither the will nor the power to restrain his British and French allied in the peace "negotiations."

And the ethno-nationalist claptrap that was behind Wilson's ideas of drawing just borders were always going to provoke violent disagreements because real humans don't live in ethnically homogeneous communities where there's a line and all Germans live on one side and all French on the other and whathave you.

While the borders in Europe are a mess, and Elsass-Lothringen was a complicated case, there were just territories that were clearly ethnically German (like Eupen-Malmédy, where Belgium conducted one of the most hilariously infuriating "plebiscites") or had a German majority (like Danzig and West Prussia) which were annexed my neighboring countries for clearly strategic reasons without any consideration for the principle of national self-determination.

After the Entente conducted a very successful propaganda war to drag America into the war, and after America led the same propaganda war against the authoritarian war criminals ruling in Germany, many Germans (Social-Democrats, Liberals, Catholics) sincerely thought that the peace order proposed by their enemies would actually respect the right to any nation to rule itself and achieve peace and prosperity. It was only when the newly formed democratic government saw the conditions for armistice that it began to realize what the Entente really had in mind.

Which really also plays into the entire theme of deception and unfair treatment that motivated Germany to revise the Versailles treaty in the interwar years and discredited the Weimar Republic which had had to accept the Versailles treaty.

After WWII, the Allies were much more straightforward: They didn't make Germany any other offers than peace on the basis of unconditional surrender, and they ethnically cleansed the territories to be annexed of almost all Germans so to make any revision of the post-war international order completely impossible. And I have to admit that, for all the horrors for which Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were responsible, they were quite successful...
 
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The trauma suffered by the front versus the homefront were very different beasts in WW1 and WW2. In WW1 the blockade-induced lack of many essentials was, next to news of fallen family members, the only real trauma suffered by the home front in Germany. German cities remained unscathed and even in the territories Germany had to cede as a result of either the armistice or the ToV, the German population could largely stay in place, though in some cases discriminated against.

In WW2 the homefront suffered far more, it suffered a bombing campaign, which left many German cities up to 90% destroyed, and hundreds of thousands dead, it suffered a front moving through most of the country and the war crimes of the victors and millions of refugees either fleeing the approaching Red Army or being evicted post war. All of this caused a trauma far more severe than what post WW2 Germans, pre-occupied with their physical survival, would show, but it's no coincidence that the use of soponofics and tranquilizers skyrocketed in the 1950s and that in many cases those untreated suppressed traumas would resurface only upon retirement.
 
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VVD0D95

Banned
World War Two, Germany went from beinf a nation with pride to a nation thay has become a pale imitation of what it once was with market liberalism its bread and butter. Hitler and the Nazis destroyed a once great nation.
 
You don't think a destroyed nation, mass rape, more than twice as many dead, occupation, etc. is a worse psychic wound than losing a war, but having an intact nation?
All that, followed by hunger, years of restricted political autonomy, mass forced deportations of millions of people, national guilt on a unprecedented scale.
I really thought this would be a non issue.
Germans knew they had lost WW1 because they read it in the newspaper. They knew they had lost WW2 when they saw a T34 or a Sherman parked on what was left of their street.
 
You don't think a destroyed nation, mass rape, more than twice as many dead, occupation, etc. is a worse psychic wound than losing a war, but having an intact nation?
The first time something bad happens can be worse psychologically than the tenth time. The first 5 happening at the same time can be catastrophic but leave you conditioned in facing the next 5.
 
That's modern education, not 'collective memory'.
But it's 'what make you anxious?' Yes, they didn't experience it personally (although their parents and grandparents did) but they know it's bad and something to fear as it takes away all your money. Is it conditioning? None in the Anglosphere would have this particular anxiety having never suffered it.
 
Nonsense! Germany can use lignite like they use for most of their electricity!



For sure. After WW2, Germany was looted down to the bedrock just about. And if it hadn't been for the Cold War, Western Germany at least would have been much more harshly treated (the Soviets actually had the more lenient policy initially, as the Soviets thought that the best way to shear the German sheep was to keep it alive and take its wool, the US by contrast didn't need German "wool" so could seriously entertain ideas as extreme as the Morganthau plan).



Well, Germany did reject Wilson's lofty peace offer. It shouldn't be a surprise that the US backed harsher terms after the Germans had killed American boys. And the ethno-nationalist claptrap that was behind Wilson's ideas of drawing just borders were always going to provoke violent disagreements because real humans don't live in ethnically homogeneous communities where there's a line and all Germans live on one side and all French on the other and whathave you.

The League of Nations was a good idea. Industrial civilization needs some kind of international cooperation. But the guy had alot of bad ideas. This was one of the founders and great publicists of the "lost cause" myth that so blights US Civil War history. And the 14 points were always going to be messy to implement.



Nope. It was very serious. And it was mainly borne out of the distrust between the Allies. The French had already suffered an illegal coup that had surrendered to the German regime (the Vichy government was of dubious legality) and then the Soviets had become an ally. If France couldn't be trusted, how could the Brits and Americans trust the Soviets, whose regime had actively cooperated with the Nazis before Barbarossa? And how could the Soviets trust the British who had driven the appeasement of the 30s and had preferred to try to work with Hitler than entertain the Soviet offers to help ensure peace in Europe?

Also, the US wanted Soviet help against Japan. So the US pushing for unconditional surrender was one way of saying "we're with you against Germany, are you with us against Japan?"

And even between the relatively close and trusting relations between the western Allies, there were niggles of distrust. The US feared that the British might fracture like the French and the British feared that the US didn't have enough skin in the game and might peace out if the war grew too costly.

And people really believed the only way to ensure there wasn't a WW3 against Germany was to tear the whole rotten thing apart. During WW2, people didn't see a whole lot of difference between Hitler's regime and the Kaiser's regime. The Nazi's genocidal nature only fully sunk in after the war was done and the cost began to be counted.

So binding promises to fight on until unconditional surrender was a way to bridge the gap of trust between the various allies, to say: "look, we're in this to the end and you'd better be too." as well as to address the question of how to stop Germany from killing millions more people in the next war.

fasquardon
Not according to some sources; Churchill claimed he was surprised by Roosevelt's announcement but went along with it. The men doing the fighting were probably equally surprised.
 
Not according to some sources; Churchill claimed he was surprised by Roosevelt's announcement but went along with it. The men doing the fighting were probably equally surprised.

Well, Churchill is up there with folks like Guderian in terms of "mythologizing" (being a lying liar who lies) the war. And indeed, some of his lies had good reasons behind them. Both the US and the UK benefited from the myth that they were the best and most trusting of allies both during and after the war. And in fairness, it was an amazingly close alliance. Just people were human.

So when and where did Churchill claim this surprise? And who were his audience when he made the claim?

The 14 points were unacceptable to a German nation that still (felt that it) had a chance to win the war. One of Wilson's points called the Franco-German War (declared by France) and the annexation of Elsass-Lothringen (annexed by the French kings in the previous centuries) an "injustice", in a time when violent annexations were perfectly legal under international law. Now, I assume that Wilson just wanted to placate the French and maybe just didn't know that much about the German-French borderlands (in English it's mostly called Alsace-Lorraine, so it might just be that people thought that it's unambiguously French), but that condition alone made accepting Wilson 14 points very hard for patriotic Germans.

Right. You see why I used it as an example then. Applying linguistic nationalism to the natural mixing at borderlands is a big invitation to violence, and Wilson was really keen on it.

While the borders in Europe are a mess, and Elsass-Lothringen was a complicated case, there were just territories that were clearly ethnically German (like Eupen-Malmédy, where Belgium conducted one of the most hilariously infuriating "plebiscites") or had a German majority (like Danzig and West Prussia) which were annexed my neighboring countries for clearly strategic reasons without any consideration for the principle of national self-determination.

I think most border areas are complicated cases... Though Eupen-Malmedy was an exception.

As for Danzig and West Prussia, there was no way that a Poland of any kind could sit next to post WW1 Germany and have national self-determination without secure access to the sea. Keep in mind that even in the US in this period, Polonophobia was strong. Imagine how much worse it was in a country where Poland's existence served as a reminder of defeat.

After the Entente conducted a very successful propaganda war to drag America into the war, and after America led the same propaganda war against the authoritarian war criminals ruling in Germany, many Germans (Social-Democrats, Liberals, Catholics) sincerely thought that the peace order proposed by their enemies would actually respect the right to any nation to rule itself and achieve peace and prosperity. It was only when the newly formed democratic government saw the conditions for armistice that it began to realize what the Entente really had in mind.

I'd recommend reading some actual histories that deal with the negotiation process of the treaties that ended WW1. One of the problems faced by the negotiators is how to build a European order where any nation had the right to rule itself and achieve peace and prosperity. German sovereignty, peace and prosperity had to be compromised with French, Lithuanian, Danish, Czech, Belgian and Polish sovereignty, peace and prosperity. And French SP&P had to compromise with German and British SP&P. And Polish SP&P had to be compromised with German, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Russian SP&P.

And this was a time when the whole set of rules had changed and the new set of rules were in the process of being written.

Sure, the Germans weren't allowed to take any official role beyond signing the finished product, but the aim of the Entente after WW1 was to settle things with a prosperous Germany in a prosperous Europe. Compare Versailles with any of the treaties the German allies got. Or with Brest-Litovsk or the 1918 treaty of Bucharest that Germany imposed on Russia and Romania respectively. Or with the treaties that ended any of the major 19th Century wars in Europe.

Contrary to popular myth, the Entente did make a good-faith effort to deliver a new Europe based on the ideas in the 14 points. Just, when you really think about those ideas, and think that German fantasies would have to co-exist with the fantasies of other people it is clear why no-one would or could get what they imagined.

Which really also plays into the entire theme of deception and unfair treatment that motivated Germany to revise the Versailles treaty in the interwar years and discredited the Weimar Republic which had had to accept the Versailles treaty.

I would venture that what really discredited the Weimar republic was the efforts of the army to shift the blame for losing the war by any means necessary.

Between that, the Great Depression and the former Entente members trying to wriggle out of their responsibilities under the treaty by any means, the peace was lost. Not because it was an "unfair" treaty. But because the interwar years saw actors on all sides undermining the peace in an effort to bolster their own narrow self-interest.

Similarly, one can say that the peace that ended WW2 didn't succeed because it was far harsher. Rather, it succeeded because of the hard work on all sides to build on the foundation provided by the return to peace. I have no doubt that if the US and UK had behaved after WW2 as they had after WW1 the chances for peace continuing would be much lower.

Bringing this back to national trauma, what really stands out to me is that conditions being conducive to healing after the trauma has occurred is really important.

fasquardon
 

Coulsdon Eagle

Monthly Donor
Well, Churchill is up there with folks like Guderian in terms of "mythologizing" (being a lying liar who lies) the war. And indeed, some of his lies had good reasons behind them. Both the US and the UK benefited from the myth that they were the best and most trusting of allies both during and after the war. And in fairness, it was an amazingly close alliance. Just people were human.

So when and where did Churchill claim this surprise? And who were his audience when he made the claim?

Supposedly a US journalist, ignoring the fact that apparently the British War cabinet had been informed of the announcement some days earlier.
 
World War Two, Germany went from beinf a nation with pride to a nation thay has become a pale imitation of what it once was with market liberalism its bread and butter. Hitler and the Nazis destroyed a once great nation.
As a German I really don't feel particularly destroyed. I'm not a market liberal, but I'll gladly take the 70 years of peace and prosperity under the Federal Republic over the preceding 30 years of war, chaos, famine and mass murder under the Reich.
 

VVD0D95

Banned
As a German I really don't feel particularly destroyed. I'm not a market liberal, but I'll gladly take the 70 years of peace and prosperity under the Federal Republic over the preceding 30 years of war, chaos, famine and mass murder under the Reich.

The second or the third? Third I could understand, they were quite literal monsters. Second, Germany seemed to be advancing leaps and bounds no?
 
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