Talk:Sebastian Haffner

Call to kill 500.000 Germans

Apparently Sebastian Haffner advocated in an Article (United States of Europe? The Reintegration of Germany into Europe.) in the World Review of August 1942 the killing of 500.000 Germans. http://www.historiography-project.com/jhrchives/v04/v04p380_Weber.html --154.69.29.10 (talk) 00:45, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

National Bolshivist ideas Ernst Niekisch

What kind of pidgin is this? And the left-wing "intellectual", but groundless arrogance here (is this a machine-translation from german WP?) towards Haffner is laughable. And he was right about Spain, too. And the ETA people are now - at least since Franco's dead - murderous scum pure and simple.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 05:11, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

"National Bolshevism" was the term adopted by Niekisch's followers (under the slogan of "Sparta-Potsdam-Moscow"). Nothing in the aritcle suggests that Haffner embraced Niekisch's ideas, he merely suggested they might exert an influence on the future development of the GDR. Whether Haffner was "right about Spain" or whether the Stern editors and readers were "arrogant" in their response to Haffner's commentary is not something on which the article can, or should, take a position.ManfredHugh (talk)

But the string of words "to the National B ideas E N" is not English. So I couldn't resist to link this linguistic pidgin to the intellectual left-wing pidgin I see (perhaps wrongly) in parts of the article. What the article got right and it's very interesting is Haffner's complete over-reaction to the state-oppression 1968ff. Alfred Andersch completely freaked out in or around 1973 and thought he smelled poison-gas in the streets (at the time of the biggest RAF-panic).--Ralfdetlef (talk) 08:55, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

I don't understand. That Haffner (as per Preußische Profile) "speculated on the future of the GDR as a 'Prussian Free State' giving play, perhaps, to the National Bolshevist ideas Ernst Niekisch" is English--and I would say rather plain English. But perhaps there is a better of phrasing it.ManfredHugh (talk)

No, it's your show. And Ernst Niekisch is an interesting guy, much much more interesting than a lot of the other "leftists on the right" in Weimar Republic. Which doesn't mean one has to agree with him. As far as I can see he also changed his views somewhat later on, although perhaps not on Prussia. I don't know, if Schüddekopf's work on the radical right in Weimar has been translated into English (or if you have German, of course), but it is so packed with facts and names that it might be interesting even without much german. I don't know if you are familiar with Haffner's essay/book on Hitler or with his memoirs written at the time, but not published much later. There isn't much better writing on Hitler and the 1930s in German.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 14:58, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, and with regard to Haffner's diagnosis of Hitler, I agree.ManfredHugh (talk)