How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
A crude Darwinism? A sadistic fantasy? An irresponsible egoism? A megalomania? It was all of these in part. But it was something more. For the mind and the passion of Hitler—all the aberrations that possessed his feverish brain—had roots that lay deep in German experience and thought. Nazism and the Third Reich, in fact, were but a logical continuation of German history. (1.4.55)
As we mentioned earlier, this argument provoked considerable criticism of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. In your view, how justified is Shirer's attempt to describe Germany's national character in this way?
Quote #5
Germany never recovered from this setback. Acceptance of autocracy, of blind obedience to the petty tyrants who ruled as princes, became ingrained in the German mind. […] This political backwardness of the Germans, divided as they were into so many petty states and isolated in them from the surging currents of European thought and development, set Germany apart from and behind the other countries of the West. There was no natural growth of a nation. (1.4.62)
The "setback" that Shirer refers to in this passage is the legacy of the Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 concluded Germany's part in the Thirty Years' War. Shirer describes Germany as reverting to a feudal society under the Peace. It was a society that he characterizes as a "barbarous" conglomeration of petty states in which "[t]he peasants, the laborers, even the middle-class burghers, were exploited to the limit by the princes, who held them down in a degrading state of servitude" (1.4.61-62). He believes this resulted in Germany's arrested development as a state and influenced events as far as three centuries into the future.
Quote #6
Bismarck's unique creation is the Germany we have known in our time, a problem child of Europe and the world for nearly a century, a nation of gifted, vigorous people in which first this remarkable man and then Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, aided by a military caste and many a strange intellectual, succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authority, for authoritarianism. (1.4.68)
That's a pretty strong condemnation of Germany. Reading this passage, what would you say are some of Shirer's basic social values?