#bavarian retinue

[archduchessofnowhere]

Is it true that empress sissy was bad mother? Or just rumours

I think it really depends on what do you understand as being “a bad mother”. First of all royal women were not expected to be the main carers of their children: this job was divided among the many people in charge of the well-being of the kids. Parents usually only saw their kids little on a daily basis, since they did not even ate together. So one shouldn’t expect Elisabeth to have been changing diapers and heating milk bottles. The second thing to consider is just how young she was when she became a mother; giving birth to three consecutive babies in such a short time spam (with the additional stress of knowing everyone is expecting you to produce an heir) must have take a huge toll on her, so I don’t think is that surprising if she didn’t smoothly adjust to the role of mother.

Even so, she did love her children, as this letter she wrote to a Bavarian relative soon after the birth of her first child shows:

My little one really is already very charming and gives the Emperor and me enormous joy. At first it seemed very strange to me to have a baby of my own; it is like an entirely new joy, and I have the little one with me all day long, except when she is carried for a walk, which happens often while the fine weather holds. (Hamann, 1986)

But Elisabeth had no control in how her eldest children were raised: her mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie, took charge of them. Something important to keep in mind, however, is that taking charge of them doesn’t mean that she personally cared them (again, this wasn’t the role of royal woman), but that she chose the staff of nursemaids, nannies, governesses and tutors that oversaw the children’s caring and later education. But this lack of control over her children ended up being a great source of sorrow for the young mother.

During this time the first big conflict between Elisabeth and Sophie arose: the children’s nursery was placed on the same floor as Sophie’s appartements, which meant that she could go over to see her granddaughters with a lot more of freedom than Elisabeth, whose appartements where on a different floor. Being on a different floor meant than she could only see her daughters during the times set by protocol, and always in company of her retinue of ladies and lackeys, which ended up limiting even more the time she could spend with them in privacy. She told to her lady-in-waiting Marie Festetics in 1872:

Only now do I understand what bliss a child means. Now I have finally had the courage to love the baby and keep it with me [her fourth child Marie Valerie]. My other children were taken away from me at once. I was permitted to see the children only when Archduchess Sophie gave permission. She was always present when I visited the children. Finally I gave up the struggle and went upstairs only rarely.

This statement comes from almost twenty-years after the events, so it should be taken with a bit of a grain of salt (in the first letter I quoted Elisabeth mentions that she had Baby Sophie with her “all day long”, so she wasn’t “taken away at once” as she claims here). The most important takeaway from this statement to me is that even after all those years the fact that she wasn’t allowed to see her girls freely hurt her. So it’s not surprising that her first act of “rebellion” at court was when she decided to move the nursery to her floor in 1856.

After successfully moving the nursery near to her appartements, slowly Sisi started to take more and more control of her children. At the end of 1856 Franz Josef and Elisabeth went on a state visit to Lombardy-Venice and they took Baby Sophie with them. This tour was relatively successful, and months later they tried to replicate its success on Hungary. For this tour the parents decided to take not only Baby Sophie but also Gisela, since it was planned to last two months and they didn’t want to be separated from their daughters for such a long time.

As it’s known, Baby Sophie sadly died of typhus during this trip. Although is often repeated that Archduchess Sophie blamed Elisabeth for the child’s death, she in fact was very sympathetic towards the young mother, since she also had lost an infant daughter and could understand her pain. But Elisabeth seemed to blame herself regardless, and soon fell into a deep depression that lasted months and filled her entire family with worry.

By the end of 1857 she showed signs of being pregnant again, and in September of 1858 she finally gave birth to the long awaited heir, Crown Prince Rudolf. And just as with her daughters, Elisabeth had no control over the boy’s upbringing.

In 1860 Elisabeth started to become ill - of what, nobody knew. I won’t go much into this (since that’s just an entirely different post), but by the end of the year, after exhausting all possible treatments, it was decided that the Empress should go away from court to recover from her mysterious illness. This was the beginning of Elisabeth’s two years trip - first to Madeira and then to Corfu. Franz Josef offered her to take Gisela with her, but since she couldn’t also take Rudolf (the heir had to remain in Vienna), she decided to leave her behind because she didn’t want to separate the siblings, who were very close (Winkelhofer, 2022).

Elisabeth returned a changed woman, much more confident in herself, no longer the shy girl who was easily intimidated by courtiers. But she still had no control over how her children were educated. Or that was until Rudolf started his formal education. At the age of six he was separated from his sister and governess, given his own household, and Count Gondrecourt was assigned as his tutor. Gondrecourt had the mission of “toughening up” the boy, since he was considered to be weak of mind; his method to achieve this consisted in psychologically torturing Rudolf, and after he fell ill, seemingly of a nervous collapse. When Elisabeth discovered what her son was going through she was horrified and decided to step in. So she did something almost unprecedented, not only for her personally, but also in general for a woman of her status: she gave her husband an ultimatum:

I wish to have reserved to me absolute authority in all matters concerning the children, the choice of the people around them, the place of their residence, the complete supervision of their education, in a word, everything is to be left entirely to me to decide, until the moment of their majority. I further wish that, whatever concerns my personal affairs, such as, among others, the choice of the people around me, the place of my residence, all arrangements in the house etc. be reserved to me alone to decide.

Even more surprisingly for the time, Franz Josef agreed, and gave her full control of the children’s education. Gondrecourt was dismissed and Colonel Josef Latour was personally chosen by Elisabeth in his place. Latour was highly unpopular at court because he wasn’t an aristocrat and had very liberal political ideas, but Elisabeth protected him and he kept his job. Latour ended up becoming a close friend to his pupil until his death. But even though she now had what she had always wanted, total control of her children’s upbringing, she never became really close to her eldest daughter and son.

This is the part in which we can talk about her being “a bad mother”. When you compare her relationship to her fourth and last child, Marie Valerie, born ten years after Rudolf out of her desire to have another baby, raised entirely by her (as always keeping in mind that this means she had full control of the staff that took care of Valerie), to how she was with Gisela and Rudolf, the clear favoritism is evident. It seems that she felt more distant towards the eldest, probably a combination of her not having a saying in their upbringing until they were older and her constant trips away from court didn’t help her to close the gap. Gisela, who was a very down-to-earth person, a lot like her father, doesn’t seem to have minded this (or at least she never showed it), but Rudolf always craved for a close relationship with his mother, which he never could truly have. He adored her and was always grateful for her intervention when he was little, but seeing how all his mother’s love and attention went towards Valerie made Rudolf jealous of his younger sister; because of this the siblings also never managed to become close.

Valerie ended up feeling overwhelmed by her mother’s love. Elisabeth was very emotionally dependent on her daughter and made her her constant companion and support, which isolated the girl from the rest of her family. Valerie adored her father and felt that her mother put her against him, and Elisabeth insistance in raising her as a Hungarian (Valerie’s mother tongue wasn’t German, but Hungarian) made her hate Hungary. She turned out to be quite different to what her mother had planned, and that was probably just the result of having so many expectations imposed on her since she was born. But even so Elisabeth loved her and only wanted her to be happy. And this is shown by the fact that (unlike Queen Victoria with her daughter Beatrice) she didn’t want her to stay by her side forever, but to marry for love and form her own family. So she supported her decision to marry Archduke Franz Salvator, who out of all her suitors was the least favorite (Franz Josef wanted her to marry the Crown Prince of Saxony and Rudolf Archduke Eugen).

So was she a bad mother? It’s complicated. She loved her children (and I do think she loved all of them, despite Gisela being often considered the “forgotten” child), fought to have control on how to raise them (which was unusual for the time) and when she lost them she deeply grieved them. But she couldn’t be the support that her son needed, and the child she did gave her constant love felt suffocated. Sometimes an answer isn’t as a easy as yes or not, and I think we should keep that in mind when looking at Elisabeth as a mother. I hope you find my answer helpful, and sorry if it’s too long!

SOURCES:

Hamann, Brigitte (1986). The Reluctant Empress: A Biography of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (translation by Ruth Hein)

Winkelhofer, Martina (2022). Sissi. La vera storia. Il camino della giovane imperatrice (translation by Federica Saccucci)

[microcosme11]

Text is from a site called The World of the Habsburgs. Hilarious--Napoleon’s reputation as an excellent lover! Never heard that one before.

At first her Austrian entourage was allowed to accompany her, but once she reached the Bavarian border her last confidantes were forced to leave her. “I assure you, dearest Papa, that I am truly unhappy and cannot console myself,” she wrote to her father after the handover in Braunau. Yet the longer the journey went on, the better Marie Louise felt. Napoleon, who was an expert at seducing young women, sent her frequent love letters and presents, and she soon began to develop sympathetic feelings towards him. Napoleon himself was waiting impatiently for his bride in Compiègne, and when, after 14 days, she and her retinue finally neared the city he spontaneously rode out to meet them. He met the column as they changed horses at a post station and without further ado joined her in her carriage. Once she had recovered from her initial shock Marie Louise was impressed by her husband’s handsome appearance. Napoleon decided to cancel the arranged ceremony of welcome and to travel immediately to Compiègne with his bride, where he – in a complete breach of normal protocol – made her his wife that very night. Napoleon’s reputation as an excellent lover was obviously deserved when it came to Marie Louise. In the first letter she wrote to her father after the early wedding she said that all the doubt that she had felt just a short time before had been replaced with euphoria: Napoleon loved her dearly and she returned his love, wrote an obviously happy young wife.

Marie-Louise by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, 1810 (wikimedia commons)

[parf-fan]

Did I tell y’all about the time I brought Bavarian cream doughnuts for the Bavarians for Oktoberfest?  I gave them each their doughnut individually throughout the day, and every one of them made the exact same face: A millisecond of blankness as they computed what I was offering and why, and then the purest, most beaming smile in the world, eyes widening, face lit up, almost disbelieving.

Those smiles were some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

[joachimnapoleon]

Doomed to Be Our Bane - Excerpt [Caroline's POV]

(NaNoWriMo 2021 - Day 11)

[Today's excerpt is from March of 1810--the first meeting between Caroline and Marie-Louise]

***

After days of rough journeying over horrid German roads flooded by the recently melted snows, followed by a brief rest in Munich, a weary Caroline arrived at the borders of Austria and Bavaria, where the first meeting between the two women was to take place. One pavilion, symbolizing France, had been constructed on the Bavarian side; another, for Austria, on the Austrian side. Centered perfectly between the two was a third pavilion, symbolizing neutrality. Napoleon had insisted on using the identical protocols that had been employed for the reception of his new wife's great-aunt, Marie-Antoinette, forty years earlier (Caroline had decided not to point out that this might not be the most auspicious example to follow). But it also brought to Caroline's mind the much more recent first encounter between Napoleon and the Tsar at Tilsit.

Mercifully, this meeting is not taking place over water.

At the appointed moment, she advanced from the French pavilion towards the neutral one, her retinue keeping a few steps behind her. Across the distance she could see the new Empress, with her own retinue trailing in her wake. The two women entered the neutral pavilion at the same time, and greeted each other with a kiss. Introductions were made, during which Caroline studied the younger woman closely--fully aware that she was being scrutinized in turn.

Marie-Louise was of fine bearing, taller than Caroline had expected, and full-figured. Her fine hair was the color of chestnuts, her eyes blue and guileless, and she had inherited the thick lower lip for which the Habsburgs had become known. Her complexion was fresh, her demeanor innocent and more than a bit shy. Certainly she was no great beauty, but Caroline believed the Emperor would be pleased with his new bride. There will be very little in her that will remind him of Josephine. And that will be good for both of them.

But would she be good for Caroline and Joachim? She was still the granddaughter of Marie-Caroline, their rival in Sicily, whose kingdom Joachim hoped to conquer by the end of the year. Guileless and innocent or not, the young woman still had the potential to do them harm. It was too soon to judge her political acumen, but that of her grandmother was considerable enough, and Caroline doubted the older woman would pass up such a golden opportunity. She will be in correspondence with Napoleon soon. If she isn't already. Joachim would need to move quickly; the expedition against Sicily would have to be launched as soon as he was able to return from the Emperor's wedding.

Marie-Louise was conducted to the French pavilion, divested of her Austrian clothes, just as her great-aunt had been decades before, and re-dressed in French ones. The dignity with which she bore the proceedings impressed Caroline; but her bearing failed her when it came time to part with her Austrian governess, and her beloved dog. Caroline was sympathetic, but firm; these were the Emperor's requirements, and she had no choice but to obey.

[northernmariette]

A tiny tidbit about Berthier, and a portrait of his future brother-in-law

Is it possible that Berthier met his future wife as early as 1804? If he accompanied Napoleon and Josephine to Aix-la-Chapele in September of that year, which is plausible, then he certainly would have been introduced to his future in-laws, including his bride. If such a meeting occurred, I doubt Princess Elizabeth would have made much of an impression on him; not only was she not pretty, but he had eyes only for Madame Visconti.

Mademoiselle d’Avrillion was part of Josephine’s retinue from sometime during the Consulate until Josephine’s death in 1814. She wrote her memoirs, which include this anecdote, mostly about Pic (what a name!), the brother of Princess Elizabeth, Berthier’s later bride:

Parmi les étrangers qui vinrent à Aix-la-Chapelle faire leur cour à Leurs Majesté, se trouvaient le duc et la duchesse Léopold de Bavière et leur fille, qui depuis a épousé le maréchal Berthier. Le duc et la duchesse avaient aussi un fils, qui était alors une vraie caricature : il n'y avait rien de plaisant que de voir ce jeune prince, aussi fluet qu'il soit possible de se l'imaginer, ayant la poitrine presqu'entièrement recouverte d'ordres et de décorations ; ses jambes surtout étaient réellement miraculeuses par leur exigüité : je me rappelle avoir vu l'Impératrice en rire de bon coeur, et une fois , l'Empereur se mettre de la partie, bien qu'il ne fût pas moqueur ; mais le prince Pic était si plaisant qu'il n'y avait pas moyen d'y tenir.

Among the foreigners who came to Aix-la-Chapelle to pay their respects to Their Majesties were the Duke and Duchess Leopold of Bavaria and their daughter, who has since married Marshal Berthier.  The Duke and Duchess also had a son who was then a veritable caricature: there was nothing more amusing than the sight of this young prince, as spindly as can be imagined, his chest almost entirely covered with Orders and medals; his legs, above all, were indeed miraculously tiny: I remember having seen the Empress laughing heartily about it, and the Emperor once joined in the fun, although he was not prone to mockery; but Prince Pic's looks were so laughable  that it was impossible to refrain from making fun of him.

https://numelyo.bm-lyon.fr/f_view/BML:BML_00GOO0100137001103976457/IMG00000105#, pp.94-95

Prince Pic’s physique must have been extraordinary indeed for Mademoiselle d’Avrillion to make such fun of him, as she is not at all vicious in her memoirs. She, Josephine and Napoleon must have had their laughs well out of Prince Pic’s earshot, as it would not have been in the interest of diplomacy to mock that unfortunate young man in public.

Berthier was 54 when Napoleon railroaded him into marrying Princess Elizabeth. I’m not sure how old Elizabeth was, but certainly no older than 25. His great love Madame Visconti was by then 48, but he didn’t care; she was his wife in all but name, and he worshipped her. 

In spite of that, from the very start Berthier was on excellent terms with his in-laws, and there is no reason to believe that this did not extend to Prince Pic, whom Laure Junot describes in the same general terms but adds that he was of excellent character. Berthier, of course, was close in age to his father-in-law and mother-in-law, and might even have been a little older. The Bavarian princely couple must have been reassured too to realize they had not acquired some rough soldierly son-in-law, but one who was steeped from earliest childhood in the courtly manners of Versailles. 

[arcticdementor]

Some rambling, poorly-organized thoughts on state structures

On the recent nationalism and nations discussion, I don't want to give the wrong impression of my views, lest I seem like some sort of dedicated supporter of homogenous ethnostates.

After all, I've repeatedly said that it seems like practically nobody actually believes in Westphalian sovereignty anymore.

I get that nationalism creates a lot of problems, particularly in the wake of the breakup — or especially, carving up by outsiders — of a multiethnic, multicultural empire. The nigh-impossibility of fitting political borders to the human geography (thus usually leading the human geography to be forcibly transformed to match the political borders instead).

I mean, just earlier this month, when reading about the "highest" High German dialects, I wiki-walked my way into reading about the mess that was post WWI South Tyrol — a mess created by Woodrow Wilson's hard-on for "national self-determination" (and ignorance of the actual demography) — how one guy (Ettore Tolomei) created Italian place names to replace all the Austrian ones, and how its (Austro-Bavarian) German-speaking majority eventually faced the choice of either forced Italianization under the Fascists or relocation to Nazi Germany.

Or this recent thread at the Motte about the history of the Balkans from a couple of natives thereof, with, again, plenty of blame for Woodrow Wilson's dismantlement of the Habsburg domains.

Plus, I've seen plenty of people, left and right, argue that much of the problems of the Middle East are due to how the Western powers, and particularly Britain, carved up the failing Ottoman Empire (and yes, for many of the left-leaning ones, the creation of the modern state of Israel is at or near the top of that list).

One can also see all the messes in the former Soviet Union — Moldova, Transnistria, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, the Donets Basin, Nagorno-Karabakh, et cetera — as a similar "breakup of an empire" mess.

On the other hand, though, I also recall people once arguing that one of the major harms European colonialism inflicted upon Africa in "the scramble" was carving out territories and drawing up borders willy-nilly, without concern for the existing ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groupings — causing some groups who identified as one people to be split apart in some cases, and in others causing differing groups with historical animosities to be forced together. And further, that "fixing" this would involve African nations reorganizing themselves along ethno-religio-cultural-linguistic lines. (I have a further aside on this I may write-up later.)

And multi-ethnic empires have their own issues. Sure, some have allowed the constituent ethnic groups a fair amount of autonomy, such as the Ottoman "millet" system. But others, not so much — look at what happened to Gaulish and the other continental Celtic languages under Roman rule; or "Hanification" in China.

In multi-ethnic empires, there's always one central, ruling ethicity — usually the one that founded it. And there's a general extractive flow of wealth from the periphery to the core, and from subject peoples to the ruling people (when this flow reverses, and the ostensible rulers are instead paying the other peoples, is often when the Empire begins failing — note that it was the Turkish national movement that ultimately overthrew the Sultan). Plus, said rulers often play the subject peoples against each other.

In short, nationalist states have some problems, empires have some different problems.

Someone in one of the reply chains also made reference to Medieval kingdoms; particularly, to the idea that a ruler was "King of France" — because that's where the bulk of the territory he held was located — rather than "King of the French" — ruler of a specific people. The kind of thing that led to situations like the Spanish Netherlands, Norman Sicily, the King of England also being the Elector of Hanover, the kings of Sweden and Poland each claiming to be the rightful monarch of both territories, and so on.

Despite that, there's much to favor in such a thing. But, as so many people keep reminding me when I bring up my monarchist views, this was the product of a number of specific preconditions. First, the utter disintegration of the western Roman Empire, leaving mostly just hyper-local identities — particularly once the Germanic migrations stopped, and the Franks and Goths assimilated to their local subjects.

Second, that the kings, particularly at the start of any given dynasty, and even sometimes well into the Early Modern period, were basically warlords — I recall reading one historian refer to Gustavus Adolphus as "the worst kind of sociopath," and another argue that the life story of Henry VII is, in its broad strokes, basically the same as any number of Latin American dictators. Look at Clovis I, Harald Hardrata, or William the Conqueror, or…

Third, this state of affairs was also a product of the comparative weakness of those kings. Because, for quite some time, pretty much any local baron who owned a castle was a power to be reckoned with, and kings were often more "first among equals" with these lords — see King John, the Magna Carta, the Barons' War, and so on. This was a product of the military technologies of the time; effective war-fighting was by highly-trained, heavily-equipped elite cavalry — knights — who were expensive… but not so expensive that local lords couldn't afford to maintain an effective retinue of them. Defensive fortifications like castles were highly effective, and slow and costly to besiege.

Then cannons and early firearms came along, which actually served to centralize power — kings were able to use them to take more power and authority from the aristocracy, leading to the replacement of decentralized feudal structures with royal absolutism (and a growing central bureaucracy to run and manage said centralized government). Then later firearms made the average commoner with little training into an effective war-fighter — thus "the Age of the Gun" and resulting democratization of the centralized state.

I'll admit, it's hard to see a pathway back to that sort of mid-level balance — where neither the numbers of the common masses nor the deep pockets of a centralized state provide much advantage in war over a localized petty elite. The "Age of the Gun" may have ended, but our current military modes (with multi-million-dollar equipment) again favor the centralized state — either a nation-state or an empire — over both local authority and the common citizen. Some argue that 4th-generation warfare might see a return of "people power" (though I have my doubts); and I've seen others debate how expensive effective autonomous weapons of a coming "Age of the Drone" might prove, and thus what scale of political organization it favors.

Then there's the city-state, which has even more local autonomy, and which seems to be in many ways a preferable manner of organization. But the problem there, is that they almost always run afoul of the economies of scale in war-fighting. There's a reason those feudal barons, for all their power, ended up pledging fealty to one king or another, and even in the modern era, unless you either have somehow obtained WMDs with an effective long-distance delivery system, or are under the protective aegis of a larger polity with such, a lone city-state is just too easy to push around militarily, if not de-facto conquer.

Sure, Nick Land argued that while nuclear-tipped ICBMs will remain out of reach for microstates, we can expect city-states to proliferate again once DNA technologies mean they can have a WMD deterrent in the form of "$1000 smallpox" or other bioweapons. I don't suppose I have to tell you, particularly now, why having hundreds of labs around the world manufacturing and storing virulent and deadly man-made plagues does not sound like a good idea to me.

Going all the way back to Westphalia, again, I'd like to note that the key principle there was not anything about nationalism directly, but about religion — ending the generations of bloody post-Reformation wars with the "truce" principle of cuius regio, eius religio. That the religion of each state was the business of its government and its government only, and that it's no longer a ruler's place to intervene in a neighboring ruler's territory to rescue the souls of his subjects from vile heresy with fire and sword.

There's a certain echo of this in the proposals of certain libertarian, ex-libertarian, and libertarian-adjacent left-wing people of a loose confederation of microstates wherein, in an example of exit-over-voice, people are free to relocate so as to sort themselves on ideological (compare to religious) lines. Friedman's seasteads, Yarvin's "patchwork," and Alexander's "archipelago" all come to mind as core examples. But these have a number of issues. First, the ways in which they presuppose a level of mobility, of ability and willingness to relocate, that I find unrealistic to expect from much of the population. I note here that it seems to be a very specific sort of person who recommends this sort of solution.

Second, it very much requires a Westphalian live-and-let-live, what happens in the patch next door is none of my business no matter how wrong I believe it to be, attitude. But replace "one true faith" with "universal human rights" and saving souls from heresy with "humanitarian intervention," and we see that, like I said before, such a spirit is quite dead — "all it takes for evil to triumph…", "an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere", et cetera. Like we saw with Libya, unless you have the WMD-MAD means to prevent it, expect the superpower to enact "regime change" on you if your way of life somehow offends their particular "universal" orthodoxy.

TL;DR: nation-state, empire, feudal kingdom, city-states, patchwork — it's trade-offs all around.

[nebris]

The Reader

By JACOB HEILBRUNNJAN. 2, 2009

In November 1915 a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, two miles behind the front lines in northern France, and walked into town. Instead of enjoying the traditional soldiers’ comforts of visiting a brothel or purchasing cigarettes and schnapps, he spent four marks to buy a slender book about Berlin’s cultural treasures. Referred to as “the artist” by his fellow message runners, he was something of a figure of amusement to them, partly because it was easy to get a rise out of him by declaring that the war was lost, and partly because he spent hours in the trenches hunched over news­papers and books during lulls in his duties. This withdrawn infantryman had denounced the Christmas Truce of December 1914, when British and German soldiers fraternized for a day. The only living being he reserved his affection for was a white terrier that strayed across enemy lines and obeyed him unconditionally.

Nor did his habits ever really change. Decades later he would abandon his companions late in the evening to retire to the solitude of his study, where reading glasses, a book and a steaming pot of tea awaited him. When his girlfriend was once so indelicate as to intrude upon his reveries, she met with a tirade that sent her running red-faced down the hallway. A sign hanging outside, after all, adjured “Absolute Silence!” By the end of his life, when he had been abandoned by most of his retinue and staged his own Götterdämmerung, the only personal effects the invading Soviet soldiers found in his Berlin bunker were several dozen books.

Adolf Hitler may be better known to posterity for burning rather than cherishing books, but as Timothy W. Ryback observes in “Hitler’s Private Library,” he owned more than 16,000 volumes at his residences in Berlin and Munich, and at his alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg. Ryback, the author of “The Last Survivor,” a study of the town of Dachau, has immersed himself in the remnants of Hitler’s collection, which are mostly housed at the Library of Congress. In poring over Hitler’s markings and marginalia, Ryback seeks to reconstruct the steps by which he created his mental map of the world. The result is a remarkably absorbing if not wholly persuasive book.

Hitler may never have completed any formal education, but as his friend from his early days in Vienna, August Kubizek, recalled, books “were his world.” As Ryback shows, in the early 1920s, Hitler not only plowed through hundreds of historical and racist books to shore up his ideological bona fides as the leader of the fledgling Nazi Party, but also went to great lengths to construct a canon for it. He furnished a list of recommended readings stamped on party membership cards that stated in boldface, “Books that every National Socialist must know” (weakly translated by Ryback as “should read”). It included such gems as Henry Ford’s “International Jew” and Alfred Rosenberg’s “Zionism as an Enemy of the State.” Confirmation of Hitler’s bibliophilic inclinations also appears in the form of a rare photograph of his small apartment in Munich showing “Hitler posed in a dark suit before one of his two bookcases” — a handsome piece of furniture with scalloped molding — “his arms crossed in an assertively proprietary gesture.”

After Hitler’s failed 1923 beer hall putsch in Munich, a sympathetic court sentenced him to the minimum five years for high treason, with likely early clemency, a slap on the wrist administered, fittingly enough, on April Fools’ Day. At Landsberg prison, where he was cosseted by his jailers, Hitler wrote his first book, “Mein Kampf.” According to Ryback, “the one book among Hitler’s extant prison readings that left a noticeable intellectual footprint in ‘Mein Kampf’ is a well-thumbed copy of ‘Racial Typology of the German People,’ by Hans F. K. Günther, known as ‘Racial Günther’ for his fanatical views on racial purity.” Though Ryback does not mention it, Hitler also received weekly tutorials in Landsberg from Karl Haushofer, a University of Munich professor of politics and a proponent of Lebensraum.

Ryback singles out the Munich publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann as possessing “the dubious double claim to being both the single most generous contributor to Hitler’s private book collection and the public architect for the Nazi pseudo­science of biological racism.” Ryback continues, “With this cache of Lehmann books we are in possession of a core collection within the Hitler library and the primary building blocks not only for Hitler’s intellectual world but for the ideological foundations of his Third Reich.                                           

But are we? Hitler was tapped in 1919 by Capt. Karl Mayr to attend propaganda sessions at the University of Munich and to lecture to soldiers about the Bolshevik peril. As early as September of that year, in response to a soldier’s written inquiry about the “Jewish Question,” Hitler declared that rational anti-Semitism’s “final aim must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether.” As the historian Ian Kershaw has observed in his biography of Hitler, this response indicates that he adhered unswervingly, from the end of World War I until his final days in the Berlin bunker, to nationalism and radical anti-Semitism. In short, Hitler’s brooding over texts seems far more likely to have confirmed rather than created his virulent hatreds.

What’s more, Ryback overlooks the importance of the city where Hitler first imbibed anti-Semitism. Hitler’s Vienna, to borrow the title of a book by the Austrian scholar Brigitte Hamann, was a cauldron of Jew hatred. Hitler admired the city’s anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger and steeped himself in racist newspapers and pamphlets. He also fell under the spell of German Romanticism, in the form of Wagner’s operas, which nourished the illusion that he was a new Rienzi, with a mission to resurrect the old German Reich.

For Ryback, the essence of Hitler is “a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which provided the justification for a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.” But there was more to it than that. While Hitler had no original thoughts, he wasn’t a primitive carnival barker. On the contrary, he championed notions that had percolated in Wilhelmine Germany and had been steadily gaining credence in intellectual and bourgeois circles. Hitler’s genius was to fuse German cultural nationalism with politics, allowing him to exert an aesthetic fascination on his contemporaries. As Thomas Mann unflinchingly and keenly recorded in his 1938 essay “Brother Hitler,” the Führer might have been “unpleasant and shameful,” but he was not someone whose kinship Mann could simply wish away.

Still, Ryback has provided a tantalizing glimpse into Hitler’s creepy little self-­improvement program. While being a bookworm may not be a precondition for becoming a mass murderer, it’s certainly no impediment. Stalin, too, was an avid reader, boasting a library of 20,000 volumes. “If you want to know the people around you,” Stalin said, “find out what they read.” When Ryback began exploring Hitler’s collection, he discovered that a copy of the writings of the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz was nestled beside a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed to “Monsieur Hitler végétarien.”

HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY The Books That Shaped His Life

By Timothy W. Ryback

Illustrated. 278 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest. His book, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons,” has just come out in paperback.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html

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Thursday, December 17, 2020

Turning the page? Republicans acknowledge Biden’s victory (AP) More than a month after the election, top Republicans finally acknowledged Joe Biden as the next U.S. president on Tuesday, a collapse in GOP resistance to the millions of voters who decisively chose the Democrat. Foreign leaders joined the parade, too, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Speaking from the floor of the U.S. Senate where Biden spent 36 years of his career, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell congratulated his former colleague as president-elect. A similar shift unfolded in capitals across the world, where leaders including Russia’s Putin and Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador acknowledged Biden’s win. The growing acknowledgement of reality in Washington was triggered by the Electoral College formally voting on Monday to seal Biden’s win with 306 votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump pulled together four years ago.

Oops: An Associated Press correction (AP) In a story on December 15, 2020, about the Mexican and Brazilian presidents congratulating U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Biden’s first name is Jose. His name is Joe.

Got $1 Million to Spare? You Can Buy an Ambassadorship (NYT) Who wouldn’t want to be an American ambassador? Beyond the pomp and social cachet, you get a luxury residence, six-figure salary, and private school tuition for your children—a comfortable diplomatic lifestyle bankrolled by taxpayers. For decades, presidents from both parties have quietly distributed a portion of these cushy posts (often in the touristy capitals of Europe and the Caribbean) to some of their most generous campaign donors. Although the practice is technically prohibited by law, Congress has long acquiesced. “We’re the only country in the world that does business in this way,” says Dennis Jett, a retired ambassador, career foreign service officer and professor who wrote the book “American Ambassadors.” “Nobody else has an open market on ambassadorships. If we really believed in capitalism, we would list these postings on eBay.”

Time is money on Wall Street (WSJ) High-frequency traders are using an experimental type of cable to speed up their systems by billionths of a second, the latest move in a technological arms race to execute stock trades as quickly as possible. The cable, called hollow-core fiber, is a next-generation version of the fiber-optic cable used to deliver broadband internet to homes and businesses. Made of glass, such cables carry data encoded as beams of light. But instead of being solid, hollow-core fiber is empty inside, with dozens of parallel, air-filled channels narrower than a human hair. Because light travels nearly 50% faster through air than glass, it takes about one-third less time to send data through hollow-core fiber than through the same length of standard fiber.

Mexico lashes out at U.S. with law expected to harm cooperation on drug fight (Washington Post) The Mexican Congress passed a law Tuesday that is expected to sharply limit cooperation with the United States in the fight against illicit drugs, as outrage over the detention of Mexico’s former defense minister escalated into a bilateral crisis just weeks before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. The Chamber of Deputies voted 329 to 98 in favor of the measure, which had been approved by the Senate. The legislation was promoted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is expected to sign it. The measure has generated alarm in the U.S. government. It would require any Mexican federal, state or local official to get permission from a high-level security panel before meeting with “foreign agents” and to send a report to the Foreign and Public Security ministries on what was discussed. That would probably choke off the sharing of sensitive law enforcement information because it would be distributed widely and run a high risk of being compromised, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Big Fines and Strict Rules Unveiled Against ‘Big Tech’ in Europe (NYT) Authorities in the European Union and Britain built momentum on Tuesday for tougher oversight of the technology industry, as they introduced new regulations to pressure the world’s biggest tech companies to take down harmful content and open themselves up to more competition. In Brussels, European Union leaders unveiled proposals to crimp the power of “gatekeeper” platforms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which policymakers argue deserve more oversight given their outsize influence. The proposed E.U. laws would require the companies to do more to prevent the spread of hate speech and sale of counterfeit merchandise, and disclose more information about how services like targeted advertising work. The string of announcements helped reinforce Europe as home to some the world’s toughest policies toward the technology industry.

Facebook calls out French activity (Foreign Policy) Facebook has removed dozens of accounts affiliated with the French military after it found instances of fake accounts or so-called sock puppets being used to parrot French talking points to African networks. It’s the first time Facebook has called out a Western government-affiliated entity for this kind of activity. The accounts posed as Africans voicing support for French military action while also discussing politics in West and Central Africa. Additionally, Facebook found that the French accounts had engaged in arguments with Russian accounts also posing as Africans.

Protesters keep pressure on Belarus’ dictator, and pay the price (CBS News) Anti-government protests continued on Monday in the capital of Belarus for the 128th day. Scores of demonstrators hit the streets of Minsk calling for President Alexander Lukashenko to resign, despite hundreds of people being detained for doing the same thing just hours earlier, and tens of thousands over the past few months. The mass-protests on Sundays have become a staple of Belarus’ beleaguered pro-democracy movement. Every week, despite frigid temperatures, they continue to gather to denounce the country’s long-time authoritarian leader, who claimed victory in a disputed August presidential election and assumed his sixth term in office. Every week, hundreds more are arrested for doing so. Thousands are believed to have come out again this past Sunday, but in a bid to complicate the security forces’ efforts to silence them, they tried a new tactic. Instead of one major rally in the center of Minsk, smaller protests were scattered across dozens of locations around the capital. Police officials said more than 300 people were detained during the Sunday protests.

Climate change and Russia (NYT) A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm; only the southernmost stretches along the Chinese and Mongolian borders, including around Dimitrovo, have been temperate enough to offer workable soil. But as the climate has begun to warm, the land—and the prospect for cultivating it—has begun to improve. Twenty years ago, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter. Across Eastern Russia, wild forests, swamps and grasslands are slowly being transformed into orderly grids of soybeans, corn and wheat. It’s a process that is likely to accelerate: Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food. Around the world, climate change is becoming an epochal crisis, a nightmare of drought, desertification, flooding and unbearable heat, threatening to make vast regions less habitable and drive the greatest migration of refugees in history. But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate. And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation. Like Canada, Russia is rich in resources and land, with room to grow. Its crop production is expected to be boosted by warming temperatures over the coming decades even as farm yields in the United States, Europe and India are all forecast to decrease. And the steps its leaders have steadily taken—planting flags in the Arctic and propping up domestic grain production among them—have increasingly positioned Russia to regain its superpower mantle in a warmer world.

King of Thailand Allegedly Ruling His Nation From German Ski Resort (Daily Beast) The king of Thailand, one of the world’s richest men with an estimated fortune of $40 billion, has been accused of breaking international law by governing his country from a luxury German ski resort, where he’s said to be seeing out the coronavirus pandemic in the company of a retinue of concubines. Thailand insists King Rama, otherwise known as Maha Vajiralongkorn, is visiting the country in a private capacity. But WDR, a German public broadcaster, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper have published evidence that he’s using Germany as a base to conduct state affairs. Over the past 18 months, he has sent nearly 100 letters to heads of state, most of them from his Bavarian retreat, according to an account of the investigation from The Times of London. He allegedly congratulated the Greek president on his appointment, named several new generals, and banned his sister from standing in Thai elections—all from the comfort of the luxury resort. German leader Angela Merkel has been urged by the Thai opposition to expel him, and Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, has warned the king that he’ll face “immediate consequences” if he’s found to be unlawfully carrying out government business on German soil. German consciences have been pricked by reports of increasingly heavy-handed repression of a Thai protest movement against the excesses of the monarchy. Reports of the king’s sex life, eccentric practices such as appointing a poodle as a courtier, and photos of him at a German shopping center wearing a tiny crop top haven’t helped matters. Thailand’s economy, which is heavily reliant on tourism, has been battered by the pandemic, sharpening grievances against the king’s indulgent lifestyle.

Delivery Workers in South Korea Say They’re Dying of ‘Overwork’ (NYT) At a logistics depot the size of an airplane hangar in southern Seoul, couriers recently held a ritual at the start of another grueling work day: They stood for a moment of silence to remember more than a dozen fellow couriers who they say died this year from overwork. The delivery workers say they feel lucky to have jobs amid growing unemployment, and that they are proud to play an essential role in keeping the country’s Covid-19 cases down by delivering record numbers of packages to customers who prefer to stay safe at home. But they are also paying a price. There have been 15 deaths among couriers so far, including some who died after complaining of unbearable workloads that kept them on the clock from dawn until past midnight. The delivery workers say they’re dying of “gwarosa,” or death by overwork. “The workload has become just too much,” one said. “Since the coronavirus came, going home early enough to have dinner with my children has become a distant dream.”

Fiji braces as category five Cyclone Yasa bares down (Reuters) Fiji closed schools and urged people to stock up on emergency supplies on Wednesday as a potentially devastating cyclone was due to hit the island nation within days. Cyclone Yasa, a category five storm—the highest category—is expected to bring high-speed winds and torrential rain across Fiji’s two largest islands when it makes landfall on Friday. Fiji’s National Disaster Management Office has said about 600,000 people lie directly in the cyclone’s projected path.

More than 300 boys (Washington Post) Boko Haram claimed responsibility Tuesday for abducting more than 300 boys from a secondary school in northwest Nigeria, marking a striking leap from the extremist group’s usual area of operation and a chilling expansion of Islamist militancy in West Africa. Hundreds of gunmen surrounded the boarding school in Katsina state on Friday and opened fire in a community that had never known such violence, witnesses said, before dragging the students deep into the woods. The mass kidnapping shocked the continent’s most populous country as deaths from a multifront conflict in the region soar. West Africa is home to the fastest-growing Islamist insurgencies in the world, conflict researchers say, with unrest from disparate forces gripping Nigeria and three of its regional neighbors: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Boko Haram has killed at least 36,000 people and displaced millions over the past decade, but the campaign of terrorism has rarely stretched far from its stronghold in the Lake Chad Basin. The assault in the town of Kankara, however, signaled the fighters’ murderous reach has shifted nearly 500 miles west, endangering peace in new territory.

[parf-fan]

It’s been one month since the end of the season, and I’m still talking to myself in a German accent.