We will miss Christmas in Duluth. I imagine my family will spend time in our snow sculpture free house. Our cat will in any case not be neglected but she will do without a Christmas tree. Claudia and I have a rendezvous in Colorado to welcome our imminent new granddaughter. We plan to be there for however long it takes before our stay outlasts our use in helping with two little girls. I am uncertain when or if I will resume submitting columns for the Reader. They take longer to compose than a blog post which I only occasionally bother to carefully edit. Unless a lot of good wet snow falls before our drop dead date for departure in the middle of December there will most likely be no snow sculpture either although one tiresome subject will probably require more attending to…….After my return in the new year maybe.
I did pick up two jigsaw puzzles on our foray to Tennessee and the northern tip top of the three deep south states. It may not be finished either before we leave. Its going to be a challenge.
Our travels through the heart of Tennessee were something of a Civil Rights tour which I described in posts to my Facebook page. They would make for a long series if I were to detail all the thoughts Tennessee brought about. I see that today the only column I wrote and then reworked has made it to the Reader
Paperclips of Tennessee. Enjoy my fleeting optimism.
Yesterday I found a couple hours to crank out thoughts that I imagine putting into a book that talks about my family’s life in a more memoirish fashion than the collection of columns I published and then sat on in my summer’s race for Congress.
I might make that my work when not minding tiny little girls while I’m in Colorado. I cranked out a couple thousand words yesterday morning after consuming several hours of news from the New York Times and the Washington Post. The more ignorant the burgeoning Fox News becomes the more necessary it will be for me to keep track of the world Fox News looks at through the sand of Trumpism head bowed. In an hour my family will return to eat leftovers from Thanksgiving so I’ll add to my comments on the book by Toynbee I peaked at yesterday and mentioned in the previous post.
Acquaintances was not listed in the Wikipedia entry of Toynbee’s writings. I found it years ago in a used bookstore and saw it was a list of interesting people the Historian had met though his life. It was published when I was a Freshman in highschool in 1967 they year our Supreme Court ruled state’s right laws forbidding marriage between the races unconstitutional to give the date some historical weight.
A few years ago I began studying Hitler beyond the many mentions of him in the innumerable books and articles that fill libraries. I had once purchased a book by a noted psychologist who analyzed Adolph four the for runner of our Central Intelligence Agency. I red a bit but decided not having met Hitler I doubted I would find it as authoritative as I would want. The next Hitler book I got I found on our dining room table. It was his Mein Kamph, My Struggles, dictated to Rudolf Hess and practically given to German children after Hitler’s Trump-like rise to power like my Bible was given to me in third grade by my Sunday School. I think I mentioned I’m rereading the New Testament in yesterday’s post.
My 13 year old son had bought Mein Kampf to give to a teacher who let older kids make his bland class an awful experience. I would not let him give the terrible present. However daft his teacher, I did not regard the giving of the book as fair. Looking back I may have been too much the school board member who bent over backward not to have serious chats with teachers who failed my children.
The next book I picked out was translated from German from an author who theorized that Hitler was gay. The principle evidence came from his friendship with the head of the SA or the Brownshirts who was a blatant homosexual. Hitler did hold a gun to his face when the SA became a threat to Hitler and the SA leader’s life ended shortly thereafter.
Then I bought a book about the Trump like sleazoids attracted to Hitler eager to do his bidding which, of course, went beyond anything Trump seems to have in mind other than making our democracy more vulnerable to the rich and powerful.
Finally I saw a short book about Eva Braun, Hitler’s girlfriend in the shadows. I’ve only read the beginning of it but it put my suspicion about Hitler’s sexuality on the shelf.
Yesterday morning’s reading took me on several historical bird-walks and this was on. I discovered on Wikipedia that Chatom House was founded in about 1933 the year Hitler took power. It was a foreign policy organization and Toynbee was its first leader. To reduce ten pages into ten sentences it seems that Toynbee was invited to give a speech to a German Legal society in 1936 about a week before Hitler tempted war when he sent his army in to repossess the Ruhr the industrial region that had been seized from Germany after the First World War. The man who invited him to speak surprised him when he went to Germany by telling him Toynbee’s early unannounced arrival and visits with anti-Nazi’s had pissed off a bunch of bigwigs in Germany. Oh and also Hitler had extended an invitation for Toynbee to talk with him in advance of the speech he was to give.
Toynbee explained how he could understand German but not speak it so he opted to listen to the Fuhrer. Toynbee figured he didn’t want to waste time having an interpreter repeat everything and he was impressed with Hitler’s use of history to suggest Britain and Germany ought to be friends because Russia was an Asiatic country that threatened White Europe. Toynbee was not impressed with the historical arguments. They were shite. He was impressed with the way Hitler used them to curry favor rather like the sort of nonsense poured out by Trump about Mexican rapists.
But the most interesting thing Toynbee reported was how it came he got the invite. The man who invited him discovered that Toynbee had contributed a serious criticism of Hitler in an annual report from the Chatom House. However the publication was new and German officials were unfamiliar with it. However, had they learned that the man who had authored the criticisms was invited to come to Germany as a guest the idiot who invited it would get a quick send off to the camps. The man who invited Toynbee wasn’t concerned until politics in neutral Switzerland caught the attention of the German Nazis. Swiss government was pushing a law to deny journalists the right to criticize Germany because the Swiss were frightened. But the Journalists fought back and they had read the report with Toynbee’s comments. They made a fuss in all the papers saying that if the British press could bad mouth Hitler’s policies they should be free too as well. That meant that suddenly Toynbee’s invite was a deathly threat to the man who invited him to Germany.
But this official had a rare power. He was one of only a few people who were able to get Hitler’s ear. He decided to explain to Hitler what had happened and Hitler was intrigued. The last thing he wanted to have happen before he invaded the Ruhr was to outrage the British. Adolph decided to charm the British Historian and give him song and verse about how Britain and Germany were birds of a feather. It was only after this close call that the man who arranged the speech met with Toynbee to explain the circumstances of the lecture. He then explained that his fears were very real because a high official purposely sent him tickets to Toynbee’s speech that were so miserable he knew he’d be humiliated if people saw where he had been placed in the audience. So he skipped the speech and the humiliation.
When Toynbee learned this he had occasion to meet the humiliator and casually mentioned to him that the man who had invited him to Germany was in the meeting with him when Hitler gave him a two hour talking too. Toynbee knew that this would greatly elevate the man in his persecutors estimation and later he was told that his inviter had been greatly surprised a day after that to have a uniformed officer deliver an apology and flowers to him with an explanation that some clerical error had caused him to be sent the low level seating. In Hitler’s Germany, as in Trump’s Mafian organization, there is no end to backstabbing and paranoia.
