| Oct 27 @ 10:23 PM |
Luther and Hitler
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Deborah551
Posts: 1,034
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I read this book a few years ago and just found it again. Anyone interested in conversing about it? Here's the link...Martin Luther, Hitlers Spiritual Advisor
A quote from the first page.
“If we wish to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought upon the world—not, perhaps a very scientific way of writing history—I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.”
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| Oct 28 @ 3:34 AM |
Luther and Hitler |
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CPUfan
Posts: 7,983
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Luther spoke out against the Jews in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Silesia.[179] Josel of Rosheim, the Jewish spokesman who tried to help the Jews of Saxony in 1537, later blamed their plight on "that priest whose name was Martin Luther—may his body and soul be bound up in hell!—who wrote and issued many heretical books in which he said that whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition."[180] Josel asked the city of Strasbourg to forbid the sale of Luther's anti-Jewish works: they refused initially, but relented when a Lutheran pastor in Hochfelden used a sermon to urge his parishioners to murder Jews.[179] Luther's influence persisted after his death. Throughout the 1580s, riots led to the expulsion of Jews from several German Lutheran states.[181]
Luther was the most widely read author of his generation, and he acquired the status of a prophet within Germany.[182] According to the prevailing view among historians,[183] his anti-Jewish rhetoric contributed significantly to the development of antisemitism in Germany,[184] and in the 1930s and 1940s provided an "ideal underpinning" for the National Socialists' attacks on Jews.[185] Reinhold Lewin writes that "whoever wrote against the Jews for whatever reason believed he had the right to justify himself by triumphantly referring to Luther." According to Michael, just about every anti-Jewish book printed in the Third Reich contained references to and quotations from Luther. Heinrich Himmler wrote admiringly of his writings and sermons on the Jews in 1940.[186] The city of Nuremberg presented a first edition of On the Jews and their Lies to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, on his birthday in 1937; the newspaper described it as the most radically anti-Semitic tract ever published.[187] On 17 December 1941, seven Protestant regional church confederations issued a statement agreeing with the policy of forcing Jews to wear the yellow badge, "since after his bitter experience Luther had already suggested preventive measures against the Jews and their expulsion from German territory." According to Professor Dick Geary, the Nazis won a larger share of the vote in Protestant than in Catholic areas of Germany in elections of 1928 to November 1932.[188 Wiki.
On the other hand, Martin Luther King stood for everything that the anti-Semitic Martin Luther was not.
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| Oct 28 @ 9:23 AM |
Luther and Hitler
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Deborah551
Posts: 1,034
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On the other hand, Martin Luther King stood for everything that the anti-Semitic Martin Luther was not. Who knows what would have happened to MLK if Luther if he had been born in Luthers time and place. After all, MLK preached a gospel of peace and love and Luther preached a gospel of war and hate.
Luther, admittedly, helped his commentators tremendously by his own writings. For these were a mass of contradictions. He was quite likely to affirm and to deny the same fact or phenomenon within a very short while; and thus he made it possible for “authorities” to quote whatever side they preferred. But it is just this wealth of contradictions which gives us the first clue to Luther's character. “For, like his doctrines and his writings, Luther's life was a mass of contradictions arising from the neurotic temperament” (Funck-Brentano).
From early youth, Luther was a very neurotic character. He had an extremely strict upbringing and tells us himself that “My mother flogged me until I bled on account of a single nut”. At school and university it was not much better. He was whipped by his teachers as often as fifteen times a day, all for ridiculous offences. “The undue severity of which he was the victim as a little boy left its mark on his character; he always remained somewhat timid, wild and mistrustful.” His friends already remarked then that young Luther “suffered from an uneasiness of spirit” and psychical abnormality”. He began very early in life to suffer from melancholia, and there can be no doubt that “his whole nervous system was strained”. I feel sorry for any child who is exposed to such horrendous abuse. It seems like most bullies were treated badly as children and felt unloved and unwanted. Some of these bullies turn it around and become loving fathers and husbands and others just abuse others because they haven't dealt with the demons that haunt them.
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| Oct 29 @ 8:25 PM |
Luther and Hitler |
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alaskenmike
Posts: 204
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Wagner and Adolf Hitler.  ..had much more in common ? 
" I have an enormous desire to commit artistic terrorism" . [Richard Wagner]
" With the exception of Richard Wagner", Hitler wrote, "I have no forerunner."
" Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must first know Wagner " [Adolf Hitler]
Wagner and Adolf Hitler had so much in common, that it is difficult, at times, to keep them separate. They were both rabid racists. Both were artists and politicians (Wagner, a would-be politician and Hitler a would-be artist). Both feared they had Jewish paternity, which led to fierce denial and destructive hatred.
The following are other beliefs that Wagner and Hitler shared: 
* Race is based on appearance, language, nationality, and "blood" (genetics).
* An "Aryan" white race is the foundation of racial purity, beauty, and goodness
* Germans (the Volk) are destined by an urgent need (Noth) to rule the world
* All other "races" are inferior
* Nietzsche's Will to Power and social Darwinism are axiomatic
* A struggle (kampf) for racial survival is inevitable (hence, Mein Kampf)
* Conscience (guilt) is an evil Jewish invention and must be purged
* Jews and other foreigners were contaminating German blood
* Jesus was not a Jew
* Jews have no religion
* Jews lust after money and power
* Jews are physically repulsive
* Jews are parasites
* Jews are demons and must be expelled or destroyed
* Wagnerian Art would save the world
* Condemnation of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn and non-German art in general
* Theoretical tracts by philosophers would corroborate their bigotry
* Believed the world owed them a living
* Believed they were infallible
* Extreme egocentrism
As a young man Hitler fancied himself as a composer and artist, modeling himself after his idol, Richard Wagner. He attended Wagner opera productions obsessively and boasted that he had read everything that the master wrote. In 1904 or 1905, while attending the Linz Opera Theater, he met a young Czech musician named August Kubizek, who later published Adolf Hitler -- Mein Jungenfreund (The Young Hitler I Knew, 1953). It presents one of the few portraits of Hitler's formative years, and much of it has since been documented. This book reveals how Wagner became a model for Hitler's ideas.
Then one day the pair went to see a performance of Wagner's Rienzi (probably 1905-6). This became a decisive event for the teenaged Hitler, as he was to refer to it after he came to power. It is worth quoting Kubizek's entire account of this extraordinary event.
http://solomonsmusic.net/WagHit.htm
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| Oct 31 @ 7:00 AM |
Luther and Hitler
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CPUfan
Posts: 7,983
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 Right Mike, Wagner was a real inspiration to the Nazi elite. The racial 'Darwinist' crowd of interwar Europe combined religious anti-Semitism with racism. (i.e. so-called "Darwinist" - Darwin wrote that natural selection was a result or 'mechanism' of individual sexual preferences and choices - not racial - but there were people who just wanted to see it that way and even set up the death camps around "selection" of those best suited for forced labour - "Sophie's Choice.")
Incidentally, the German Monarch Kaiser (Caesar) WIllhelm II - head of the Lutheran Church in Prussia/Germany - advocated at the end of the First World War that the Jews be "exterminated" because they had undermined the moral and political "fibre" of the German Volk and caused it to lose the war.
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| Oct 31 @ 10:03 AM |
Luther and Hitler |
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eastham
Posts: 7,919
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The kaiser's words were reprehensible, especially when one considers the fact that many German Jews, including Anne Frank's father, fought for the kaiser and the Fatherland in WWI.
While the French never called for the extermination of all Jews following their loss to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, the treatment of Dreyfus follows the same thread. Of course, the French had Zola and other intellectuals, including Clemanceau who was later president of France, who condemned the miscarriage of justice. Zola's "J'Accuse" on the front page of L'Aurore, brought about a front page apology for Dreyfus' treatment is several other newspapers, including the major religious newspaper of the time La Croix and lead to Dreyfus' eventual exoneration.
The voices of opposition in Germany were far more muted.
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| Oct 31 @ 10:26 AM |
Luther and Hitler
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Deborah551
Posts: 1,034
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Taken from chapter 1
At other times he does nothing at all. “I am here in idleness,” he writes in 1521, “alas neglecting prayer and not sighing once for the Church of God. I burn with all the desires of my unconquered flesh. It is the ardour of the spirit that I ought to feel. But it is the flesh, desire, laziness, idleness and sleepiness that possess me” (ibid. vol. 3, page 189).
So it goes on and on; and the more we read Luther, the more we find how justified are those biographers of his who say: “It seems difficult to dismiss here the hypothesis of neuropathic disorder “(Maritain). Others describe his sufferings as “delirious hallucinations” (Funck-Grentano), “religious fanaticism” (Professor B. Schoen), or describe him simply as “mentally deranged” (ibid). He sems to be a Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde kind of man.
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| Oct 31 @ 11:13 AM |
Luther and Hitler |
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CPUfan
Posts: 7,983
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Right Debs. Happy Halloween birthday BTW... 40 soon, are you? 
East yes the Dreyfus case was an instance of clerical anti-Semitism in France but the country had deeper traditions of liberty and justice a hundred years after the guillotine lol... 
Normative acceptance of social "standards" and peer influences (including the zenophobic kind) were much stronger in Germany. Prussian philosophers like Kant had done what they could to reinforce the normative legal, political and (Lutheran) religious traditions of Northern Germany - long before Germans began to dream of democracy.
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| Oct 31 @ 11:31 AM |
Luther and Hitler
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Deborah551
Posts: 1,034
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Right Debs. Happy Halloween birthday BTW... 40 soon, are you? My 34 year old daughter keeps getting older and I keep getting younger. Pretty soon we'll be the same age. 
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