Thread by @shrikanth_krish

While reading on Hitler here's something that is not mentioned enough

He was born an Austrian, yes. But not just that
Right up to 1913, he spent all his life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mostly in Vienna and Linz

Not Germany

So he was 24 when he left for Munich in May 1913

What this meant was -

He grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A cosmopolitan state.

And much of his time was spent in Vienna - perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in that cosmopolitan Empire

Vienna was the third largest city in Europe circa 1910 after London and Paris with nearly 2 million people

Its population was growing by 30K per month (source : Thomas Childers)

And much of this immigration was from Eastern Europe and was Jewish

So the point to note is that -

Hitler was this ardent German growing up in a cosmopolitan state which was hardly German in entirety

Now the big what if in history is - What if Bismarck's Prussia had managed to terminate the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the war of 1866, and created a Pan-German state?

But Bismarck desisted from Pan-German nationalism

So you had this anomalous continuance of an Austrian regime housing a large, influential German population, cut off from the Prussian state

With the rise of universal male suffrage in early 1900s, this naturally meant German angst in Austria against the "other"

The Pan-German movement took root in Austria in the 1880s / 90s

Not so much in Germany, where German power was secure

Because it was in Austria that Germans felt insecure especially with the rise of universal suffrage, which meant greater influence of non-German minorities

An early proponent of Pan Germanism in Austria was Georg Ritter von Schönerer

Who turned anti-semitism into a political weapon in Viennese politics

The motto of his Pan-German movement was - "Through Purity to Unity"

Part of his movement was about Anti-semitism - on the need to guard the Aryan race against Jewish infiltration

The other part was anti-Catholicism, as the Church was viewed as a source of cosmopolitanism

von Schönerer was a major influence on Hitler, who was in Vienna b/w 1908 and 1913 - which coincided with the introduction of universal male suffrage

This was also the period of the rise of political Marxism through the Social Democrats (mostly a movement powered by Jews)

Another influence on Hitler was the Viennese mayor - a German named Karl Lueger (mayor from 1897 to 1910)

Lueger too was very vocal in his protests against Eastern European migration into Vienna

He warned - "Greater Vienna must not become greater Jerusalem"

So both these foundational influences on Hitler's world view and his anti-semitic attitudes were in Vienna! Not in Germany

This has some lessons for us on the consequences of cosmopolitanism in a period of nascent democracy

Empires by nature tend to be cosmopolitan

But when those Empires experiment with mass democracy, cosmopolitanism is often a source of troubles.

Would Hitler have shaped up as he did had he lived all his life in say a purely German city somewhere in Prussian heartland?

A question worth asking.

None of this is to "explain" the rise of Nazism - which remains an odious ideology

But Hitler's youth is an interesting case-study of how democracy + cosmopolitanism proved too heady a mix engendering highly deleterious political views

Should Bismarck have pushed for the creation of homogeneous German state for German peoples back in 1870s?

Would that have prevented the rise of Pan-Germanism (1880s-1900s) and its offspring Nazism in the 1920s?

A valid question

Also the rise of Pan-Germanism enforces this view of mine -

Empires are cosmopolitan

But Democracies are usually antagonistic to cosmopolitanism. Suffrage creates tensions and promotes ethno-nationalisms

All the proponents of Democracy need to be aware of this limitation / feature of democracy

You can't have the cake and eat it too

Sure. You can have Constitutions, Bill of Rights etc to protect Republics against majoritarian tyranny (a possibility inherent in a Democratic set-up)

But these will always be uneasy, unsatisfactory safaguards