Degenerates on Display

We popped over to the Neue Gallerie today to take in the new show on "Degenerate Art" under the Nazis--which was not the best ever but good enough--and also the goulash, which was up to par.

The show builds on a defensible premise: to show some comparisons/contrasts between the art of which the Nazis approved and the dreadful modern stuff that came before.  By "dreadful modern," I mean the stuff you will have seen and enjoyed at--and will cherish from--your previous forays to the Neue.  By "Nazi," think Hitler, or Mussolini or Stalin, except in various ways I think maybe the competitor-scoundrels came up with a more interesting and varied product than the little man in the mustache itself.  Mussolini, after all, fancied himself a sort of modernist, at least in his early days, at least as long as there were lots of choo-choos and suchlike.  Stalin's contributions to the arts may be regarded as slender but the Soviets did keep grinding out those gloriously, yet oddly compelling, posters, right on into the post-War period (statement of interest: at Chez Buce, there is a Soviet kitsch poster on the bedroom wall, along with an array of mama in a selection of hats, and a photo  of bedful of babies).

Worth the price, as I say, and it seems to have found its audience:  at 11 am, the line ran around the corner onto Fifth Avenue and I tell you it was pretty chilly.  Someone in the line said something about their being extra security, so I guess the anti-degenerate party lives.

Still, I'm not sure the project works as a museum show.  Most of the goers will have seen the degenerate part--mostly right here at the Neue-- and the Nazi art doesn't deserve a second look (which is the point, of course, but still).  The comparisons themselves aren't immediately enlightening.   I suspect maybe the trouble here is that the real story is in the back-story: the particular machinations that led the Nazis (or really, Goebbels) to crack down on the degenerates as hard as he did.  Did Goebbels, or Hitler (or anyone) really care?  Or was this just posturing on the path to power?  The point is, perhaps, that I should have done my homework, or at least that I wish I had.  I suppose there was good stuff available on topic in that lovely museum shop.  But the stack is already high and other topics press their demands.  And, of course, as the Jews are said to say of any major holiday: we won, they lost, let's eat.

The Berlin Consensus

I swear sometimes the best reading of the week is in The Economist letters page:

SIR – The prolonged success of the German economy is always an inconvenient reality for thosewho support a broadly Anglo-American approach to economic management, such as The Economist (“A machine running smoothly”, February 5th). If liberal labour markets, low taxes and worship at the altar of shareholder value were the key determinants of success, you would be writing about the glittering future awaiting Britain and the United States, not Germany.

The truth is that the Germans are successful because their companies are well managed by competent, educated employees who care more about whether the company will exist in a quarter-century rather than just the next quarterly earnings.

Maximina Yun
London

 

How Grandpa Haddad Started World War I

A new account of the German/Ottoman relationship brings me back to Frank Haddad of Louisville--that would be Frank Senior, the building inspector and jovial raconteur, not his sons, the far better housetrained criminal lawyers. It was Frank who told me how his father started World War I.

Recall that Kaiser Wilhelm II had a withered arm (You knew? You can more or less see it here). The Kaiser came to visit Istanbul. Grandpa Haddad was part of the Imperial guard. He was to stand in front of the arm.

Grandpa Haddad executed his responsibilities with crisp efficiency. And so the Turks never knew that the German leader had a withered arm. Of course, explained Frank, they would never have permitted their country to go to war under the leadership of a man with a withered arm. The rest is history.

Tooze on Germany

You have to care a lot about the Nazi economy to wade through all 676 pages (plus tables and notes) of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006), but there are a lot of compensations. One is pure connoisseurship: it's a marvel to watch how Tooze marshals so much data and so much conceptual apparatus. And it's not just "economics" narrowly defined: Tooze navigates through the the details of military hardware, and he saves a lot of space for stark bureaucratic intrigue. And more than that: I can't say I'm a master of modern German history but I know a bit, and I'd have to say that Tooze dropped a surprise on (just about) every page.

Tooze coyly declines the opportunity offer his own rip-and-read summary but need now such hesitancy, so here is the shorter Adam Tooze: the Nazis were not a bunch of stumblebums. Oh, it goes without saying that the program was evil and insane. But they did a lot of things right. What finally got them was resources. When push came to shove (and pushing and shoving reached some kind of league record in 1943-5)--when push came to shove, there was no way a small country with no oil, not enough coal, and far too little food, was ever going to match the assembled might of the British Empire, the Soviet Empire and, most of all, the American whatever-it-was that mobilized so efficiently and so overwhelmingly once it went on the attack.

This matter of resources is a stark fact that puts all else in context. Consider the blitzkrieg of 1940, which left the Nazis the master of the European continent. It certainly looked like a victory--but in fact, the conquest cost the Nazis at least as much as it yielded, because the conquered territories had resources deficiencies of their own. Resource problems also explain the notorious neutrality of the Swedes and the Swiss--two small countries with resource problems of their own, utterly dependent on the Nazis as a basic lifeline.

Resources also help to explain the seemingly insane gamble that Hitler undertook when he invaded Russia in 1941, while still at war in the West. More cautious counsel would have told him not to start a second war until he finished the first one. But Tooze argues that Hitler's made sense if you understand him as in a race with time—he had to get his hold on the wheatfields of the Ukraine and the oil fields of Romania quickly, before the ineluctable power of the United States reached its full force. And for whatever it is worth, Hitler had already taken one desperate gamble—just the year before, in the West—and won.

Faced with these resource constraints, how did the German war machine respond? Tooze argues that it responded dispiritingly well. Not without savager internal conflict of course—bureaucracies are ever the same. But the hard truth appears to be that with a good deal of head-banging the top, the Germans performed about as effectively as you could expect of a complex modern social apparatus. In particular, Tooze tries to put paid to the idea that this was a war of “able technocrats” impeded by ruffianism and incompetence. On Tooze's account, there were able technocrats—and they cooperated with the ruffians fully, even enthusiastically at almost every turn.

There are plenty of villains in this piece, but if there is an arch-villain it would be Alfred Speer, the smooth-talking chief of production who deployed one of the greatest PR campaigns in modern history to dance away from the hangman at Nuremberg. Speer proved once again (if it needed proving) the value of a good haircut and polite grammar. He would have us believe that he was just idling on the streetcorner when the cast iron safe crashed to the sidewalk beside him. But Tooze puts together a formidable case that Speer was all in from early in the game. Indeed, it appears to have been Speer's very “technocracy” that did much to make the war more disastrous and menacing for everybody. Cooler or more timid heads had begun to have their doubts about the time the German army stalled at the gates of Moscow in 1941. It waa Speer more than anyone, dedicated and insidiously effective, who made sure that it all lasted for another three and a half years. And sadly for everyone, he had plenty of help.

Why Don't Germans Want to Own Their Homes?

A few years back I was on TDY at Stanford. With time on my hands, I dined out a lot with a visiting professor from Greece. He marveed at Palo Alto real estate prices (and this was long before the boomandbust). "At least our children can buy their own homes," he kept saying. "They can buy their own homes."

He was right. Greece had and has a high level of home ownership. Indeed, so do many of the poorest and least developed countries in and around the European common market (I believe Hungary may be the highest).

The flip side is that we get some of the lowest rates of home ownership in some of the richest countries--like Sweden, and Germany.

Frame it as a question: why does Germany have such a low rate of home ownership? I tried it on a few of my friends who know more about Germany than I do. I learned some stuff I didn't know before, but most of the answers get you nowhere because it isn't clear which way you are going on the ladder of causation.

• The German government doesn't promote home ownership.

• The banks make it difficult to get a long-term mortgage: lots of cosigners, high down payments.

• There's a horrendous transfer tax (20%+ of value).

• Huge protections for renters; almost impossible to evict.

All this is most interesting and instructive, but in every one of these instances, the phenomenon seems more like effect than cause: i.e., if society wanted home ownership, the government would promote home ownership; would get rid of the transfer tax, would squeeze the banks, would toughen up the eviction laws.

My friend Taxmom has some good anecdotes about the German aversion to home ownership. "My German friends (dual income no kids)," she recalls,

last time I was there explained to me that no-one seriously thought about buying a home unless they wanted to leave something for their heirs, and since they didn't plan to have kids, what was the point? At about the same time I read an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine about the beleagered misguided Brits, who put themselves into economic servitude for the sake of owning their own home.

Still, I wonder why.

Data: There's a convenient collection of links here. Here's a more tempered discussion of the "why" issue, although it really doesn't seem to add anything.

This Just In: Germany Prepares for War

... Germany is storing enough of what it already has to last out a two years’ siege (just in case Russia marches through Czechoslovakia); and what Germany hasn’t got, it is brilliantly inventing. Thus articles marked Reine Wolle (pure wool) now contain twenty-five per-cent pure wool and seventy-five per-cent pure something else. Automobile tires are an Ersatz composition of old rubber and a coal-oil compound, are very good indeed, cost ten percent more than the real article, and, like it, are at the moment unprocurable. ... Though edible grains may no longer be fed to livestock, even this summer's exceptionally fine wheat, rye, barley, and oat crops will not suffice for man, and winter bread will contain corn.

--Janet Flanner, The New Yorker, September 1, 1937