Harsher in Hindsight/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* German romantic-nationalist poet and liberal thinker Heinrich Heine is most famous today for his observation that "Where they burn books, in the end they will burn people too", made in 1821 in a play about the Spanish Inquisition. Heine's works were censored in his own time and later literally burned by the Nazis. Heine was a Jew.
** This is the concluding passage of Heine's ''Religion and Philosophy in Germany'', written in 1832: "Christianity -- and that is its greatest merit -- has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame...The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals....Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder...comes rolling somewhat slowly, but...its crash...will be unlike anything before in the history of the world. ...At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. ...A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."
*** Not quite as prescient as it might seem. Hitler knew how to appease the population and could pander to Christians in order to win their acquiescence. Worth watching: https://web.archive.org/web/20130513210822/http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/HitlerOath.mpg (which is as chilling now as it was then).
*** Also, it is a typical Romantic 'pagan revivalism' that has pretty much nothing to do with political, materialistic nature of the Third Reich. And there was no dramatic revolution, just a long, cruel war that ended with fall of the Germany and final demise of German militarism.
*** This is actually an example in a different way - it can also be seen to refer to WWI. Rather than "mitigate the German brutal love of war", the Evangelical Church enthusiastically endorsed the Kaiser's army, and continued to be a bastion of conservatism and monarchism right through until 1945.
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