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Germany approves nearly $1bn in arms exports to Israel (thecradle.co)
submitted 1 day ago by supersquirrel@lemmy.ca to c/europe@feddit.org
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[-] geissi@feddit.org 7 points 19 hours ago

I think Germany has a special relationship with “whiteness”

No that's the US. Racism in Germany and Europe as a whole, has always been about cultural and ethnic differences more than skin color. The persecuted slavs or jews were just as pasty as any German, unlike the "honorary Aryans" in Japan.

Germany is a culture bursting with contradictions, within a year of Mein Kempf being published another novel was published The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Two different authors with different backgrounds writing different books? What a uniquely contradictory culture Germany is.
Disregard that one of them is lauded for its literary and cultural significance while the other is basically as important as the art of the deal.

And of course the explanation for contemporary German culture and its problematic relation to Israel can be found in the literature of 1924.
Nothing significant happened since then, right? Everyone was on vacation in the 30s and 40s. Occupation, the Cold War, the literal formation of the country of Israel? Surely none of the could have any relevance.

I do agree that the Magic Mountain is a great book.
But although some of its themes do go against aspects of fascism, calling it "the most supremely antifascist novel imaginable " seems a bit of a stretch.

[-] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 0 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

No that’s the US. Racism in Germany and Europe as a whole, has always been about cultural and ethnic differences more than skin color. The persecuted slavs or jews were just as pasty as any German, unlike the “honorary Aryans” in Japan.

ahahahaha

Read The Color Purple or Their Eyes Were Watching God, the idea that racism actually cares about skin tone in any consistent way anywhere is impossible, contradictory and absurd, it is always mixed up with ethnicity, context and imposed categories. Germany is just the same as any other racist society in that respect. Check your ignorance.

You added nothing to this conversation other than a sense of condescencion.

The Magic Mountain is one of the most supremely antifascist novels ever written and its perspective from the eve of WW1 mirrors our current position with eerie and foreboding syncronicity. The Magic Mountain is easily one of the most important novels of the 20th century, if not all time.

In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Mann moved his own family to Switzerland, and then, after his German citizenship was revoked, to the USA, where he recorded monthly anti-fascist dispatches which were broadcast to Germany by the BBC.

He is ‘one of the great German writers’, wrote Malcolm Bradbury, ‘the spokesman for a modern humanism’.

https://henryeliot.substack.com/p/the-magic-mountain

Come up with a better argument if you want to cut me down.

this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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