Constraints on progress: role of stability of government? but what about flexibility? when does flexibility become chaos? how significant is it to feel 'liberated'?
1927 (Ch 11)
Science
- Why had German scientists not tried to develop the bomb? Hostility to Hitler?
- Einstein (to the nationalists) epitomized everything contemptible [215] : Jew, liberal, internationalist, pacifist, skeptic, innovator whose works baffle average intelligence.
- Paradoxes:
- straight line / curve ; time as a dimension like length width and depth.
- light as wave and a particle
- relativity
- Heisenberg: Principle of Uncertainty = Unschärferelation; can determine the position or velocity, but not both at the same time.
- Relativity and their moral implications. [218] no such thing as scientific fact. QUOTE ON THIS PAGE. A Dada universe. Cosmic pantheism?
- Uncertainty and relativity: On the latter: "The absence of standards of absolute and universal application.
The dependence of various physical phenomena on relative motion of the observer and the observed objects" Important to note that the scientific and the popular use of these words are not the same.
- Note that Germans dominate the Nobel Prize list for sciences during this period; over half of the prize winners were German [and many of them also Jews]
On German education.
- Difference between discrimination and persecution [221].
- Work on p 222 . Gymnasium [secondary education] for the elite, to establish class consciousness. conformity of political belief in higher education?
- [223] on American radicalism!
- Reality of university politics and the left-right dialogue [223-4] Note the paradox: "the Weimar government was contemptible. This was true on left and right, but more so on the right." The gulf between the small minority of intellectuals and the general mood of the country [224].
German youth movement
- Wandervoegel, Heil, [225].
- Divisions, but not for Jews or girls. Increasingly nationalistic. Prussian and 'Landadel' traditions. Bursenschaft
- Note 227-8 at bottom on 2/3rds of students committed to right. Note too the number of students very different. READ passages on pp 228 -9.
Paul Krantz and Hirschfeld, the latter a sexual scientist. READ 234 and 235 (C. P. Snow).
Generals and growing military budget, pocket battleship, rockets. The function of art and literature [240].
1928 (Ch. 12)
Showtime.
- Brecht. Literature as expression of proletarian solidarity (244).
- The Homecoming plays (cf. post Vietnam). Note the use of an international (American setting) for his plays. Germans and drama.
- Brawling at plays. Use of Shakespeare and Euripides. Piscator and drama as a medium of revolution.
- epic theater: audience and actors interact. [251-2]
- Note that the device (multi media, nameless, interaction with audience are still considered "modern" [253] The madman who shows the sane world to be insane [253, as in Cabaret!]
New Freedom and New Prosperity 271-2 [nazis win just 12 seats of 500]:
- 257-8: "Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another" [259]
- Riot as a measure of theatrical success. Three penny opera and communism, but not the criticism on 265 about Brechts passport, bank account and contract. Lotte Lenya in 1959. QUOTE on 271 about freedom under Weimar; low vote for Nazis.