I'm fascinated by Weimar Germany. It was a time of experimentation, scientific brilliance, art, literature and culture. A lot happened there Germans could take pride in. It was also a time of political bumbling and indecision, and frankly, incompetence, complacency and cowardice. But it was never a time of cruelty or tyranny. It was freedom, perhaps too much freedom, and I don't think Germany liked it, in fact most Germans feared the new freedom. It reminds me a lot of the Sixties and Seventies here. We got Reagan as a reaction, they got Hitler. The latter was arguably much worse, but at least his legacy was severely limited.

Shirer was a brilliant reporter and a shrewd observer, but you need to approach his work critically. Even though he admired and respected German Kultur, he also explains too much of what happened during the NAZI years in what sounds a lot like racist terms to our ears. He felt Hitlerism was born in the German soul, it was a result of racial characteristics. It was "in their blood". That kind of talk troubles me.

There is, of course, some truth to this, but in my opinion he gives it too much weight. It might be instructive to consider what Shirer did after the publication of Rise and Fall. He joined and led an organization that lobbied against allowing Germany to rejoin the community of nations as a full and free member. He was also politically conservative, in fact, he mentions that one of the motivating causes of Germany's slide into dictatorship was its welfare system, which at one time was the standard in Europe. I'll try and dig up the passage where he states this, and I will cite it here when I do.

But he was no fool, either, and he anticipated some of your comments, and my own observations of right wing authoritarianism; his sketch of the psychology of the Prussian Junker landowning class is reminiscent of more than one American stereotype.