Upheaval_Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

Author:Jared Diamond [Diamond, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316409131
Amazon: 0316409138
Goodreads: 41716904
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-05-06T23:00:00+00:00

Other fits of Germany to our framework can be summarized more briefly. Germany since World War Two does illustrate selective change (factor #3). Of all the countries discussed in this book, Germany is the one that experienced the largest changes in its political borders. It drastically reassessed its Nazi past. It made some large social changes, especially with regard to its former authoritarianism and the status of women. But many other core values of traditional German society have remained little changed, including government support of the arts, government support of everyone’s medical care and retirement benefits, and emphasis on community values over untrammeled individual rights. Whenever, as an American, I return to Germany, I am pleasantly surprised to re-discover that even small German cities have opera houses, that my older German friends can still afford to live comfortably after retiring, and that villages preserve local color (because zoning laws specify that your house’s roof style has to conform to the local style).

Support from other countries has varied greatly with place and time in recent German history (factor #4). American Marshall Plan aid, and West Germany’s wise use of it, made possible West Germany’s economic miracle after 1948. Conversely, negative economic aid—i.e., extraction of war reparations—contributed to the undermining of East Germany after World War Two, and of Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War One.

Germany’s strong national identity helped it survive the traumas of devastation, occupation, and partition (factor #6). (Some non-Germans would go further, and would argue that Germany has had too strong a national identity.) That national identity and pride are based especially on Germany’s world-famous music, art, literature, philosophy, and science; the bond of the German language as codified by Martin Luther’s Bible translation transcending spoken German dialectical variation; and memories of shared history that enabled Germans still to identify themselves as one people despite centuries of political fragmentation.

Germany illustrates patience born of past defeats and initial failures (factor #9), and also illustrates confidence born of past successes (factor #8). It recovered from defeat in two world wars. Its successes requiring patience included unification against heavy odds culminating in 1871, re-unification also against heavy odds culminating in 1990, and the post-war economic miracle.

Post-war developments in Germany involved both internal triggers and external triggers. Internal triggers drove Germany’s coming to grips with its Nazi past, and the explosion of student revolt in 1968. External triggers—such as Hungary opening its border with Austria in 1989, and the Soviet Union’s decline—set in motion the achievement of re-unification.

Among questions arising for national crises without close parallels in individual crises, Germany illustrates to an outstanding degree reconciliation between former opponents. Germany’s acknowledgments of its Nazi past, symbolized by Brandt’s kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto, have made possible relatively smooth and honest relations with Germany’s neighbors Poland and France—far more so than Japan’s relations with Korea and China (Chapter 8). Another question arising specifically for national crises is whether drastic change occurs by revolution or by evolution. Modern Germany has experienced three revolutions or

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