In "
The Weimar Touch," A.J. Goldmann explores the German influence on American film culture when Jews and others fled Germany starting in 1933.
Ed Driscoll goes further, and posits a broad intellectual American takeover by the Weimar Republic:
[T]o respond to the query by Thomas Friedman last year in the New York Times, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’
Well, 50 years ago, we did, didn’t we?
He quotes Alan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind":
I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier. . . .
Hidden levers. These are good questions. I suggest everyone watch the Driscoll video for a quick overview, and then let's talk about the First Things article. It really gets to the core of the issue, I think.
ReplyDelete