Here come the Nazis

I recently read The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans, which is the first of a three volume history on the Nazis.

Evans covers a lot of ground in this book, beginning with the Second Reich (1871--1919) and Bismarck, who was its Chancellor from 1871 to 1890. Bismarck was a dynamic political leader, whose legend loomed over the German psyche during and after WWI. The Germans were a bit upset about losing the war, and humiliated about the war reparations they had to pay after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The postwar government was democratic, weak, and chaotic. Many longed for a strong central government with a dynamic leader.

Enter the Nazis in the early 20s. They were just one among many small political groups in the country. The "National Socialist German Workers' Party" were actually on the right side of the political spectrum, although they criticized capitalism as well (hence the Socialist Workers part). They were basically a hate party--they hated capitalism, communism, foreigners, Slavs, Jews, homosexuals, and basically anyone who disagreed with them.

I had read in the past that the Nazis persecuted communists, but I had always assumed that that was because of the national face-off between Stalin and Hitler in the late 30s. But communism had always been a target of the Nazis. There was a real fear that there would be a communist revolution in Germany, like the one in Russia in 1917. The various communist groups all had their paramilitary units, as did most other political groups. The Nazi paramilitaries were called the Brown Shirts, and they would often get into brawls with communist groups. German politics in the 20s and early 30s was almost like gang warfare, where political speeches and rallies ended in fisticuffs, and small-time political assassinations were not uncommon.

The ascension of the Nazis and Hitler in the early 30s was only possible because of the Great Depression. Germans were unhappy with high unemployment and were ready for a change in government. Nazi representatives were voted into the Reichstag (German parliament) in 1932 in large numbers, and in what turned out to be a huge miscalculation, Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933. It was understood by those who did the appointing that he would be kept in check by Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, President Hindenburg, and the military. Obviously, that didn't work out so well.

The incident that sparked the Nazis takeover of government was the fire in the Reichstag. On February 27th, 1933 a crazed unemployed communist "insurrectionist" single handedly set fire to the German seat of parliament in the hopes that it was incite a communist revolution. He acted alone. But Hitler and the Nazis proclaimed this to be the planned action of a vast communist conspiracy, and took advantage of the opportunity to purge Germany of communists. This was the beginning of Hitler's dictatorship and the first step in a larger purging that would take on cultural and racial dimensions.

Leaven Life: Salt

For Christmas dinner, I baked these rolls:

I used this recipe at The Fresh Loaf, which looked promising enough. I wanted an even richer dough, so I added an egg. But I should have also followed my instincts and added more salt than it called for. I didn't, and the flavor of the bread was noticeably weak. Salt not only gives you that good old salty taste, it draws out the other flavors as well. As a rule of thumb, I usually use a teaspoon of salt for every 1/2 to 3/4 cup of liquid called for in the recipe.

Leaven Life: Baking Tip

Don't try to bake while taking care of a baby. Baking and baby do not mix. I've attempted to bake bread several times since becoming a parent, and I usually end up with dough in trash and flour on baby.

These are two loaves of Stollen bread I baked recently while Lucy was in the care of someone else:

  

And what do you get when you make Christmas goodies while watching a 4 month old? Chocolate on baby:

William James

I’m always comforted when I read a biography of someone famous, someone I respect, and find out that they were pretty much like most mortals: indecisive, insecure, and often depressed.

I just read a biography of William James by Robert Richardson. When James was younger, he couldn’t make up his mind on what he wanted to do. He was a talented painter and had a considerable amount of artistic training during his teens. He also wanted to be a scientist and accompanied one of the most famous biologists of the day, Louis Agassiz, on an expedition to South America to study the fish of the Amazon.

But he ended up settling for an MD from Harvard University. Now that sounds impressive to us, but in the mid 19th century it wasn’t impressive. At all. James was always insecure about the fact that he just had an MD, because at that time it wasn’t a graduate degree. You didn’t have to have a bachelor’s degree to get in. And Harvard wasn’t an elite school. The medical school in Cambridge was particularly easy to get into, and it was incredibly easy to obtain the degree. You just had to attend the lectures, pay 30 dollars, and there was no test until the very end. One oral comprehensive exam. It covered nine subjects, and if you passed five of them you got the degree (i.e., you could get a 55% and pass). The whole thing could be done in one year.

Once James got this medical degree, he decided he didn’t want to practice medicine. He would teach physiology instead. And over time he drifted into other fields, eventually making huge contributions to psychology and philosophy. But he often got depressed and questioned the value of his contributions to science and philosophy. He was never really content with the path that he was on. His direction was always changing.

He and his brother Henry were a bit competitive, as you can imagine. Especially considering the fact that Henry was younger than William, but Henry enjoyed literary success many years before William made a name for himself as the author of The Principles of Psychology. It’s often said that William wrote philosophy like a novelist and Henry wrote novels like a philosopher. William also thought of himself as a competent literary critic, and was quick to give Henry advise on how to write fiction. Henry, on the other hand, tended to accept William’s psychology and philosophy immediately and wholeheartedly. But he felt very comfortable criticising William’s family life. William was married for 32 years and had 5 children. Henry never married.

Another famous phrase about the James family is that they were “a nation unto themselves.” Their father, Henry James Sr., dragged his family all over Europe when the James boys were young. He thought they could only get a good education in Europe, but didn’t keep them in one spot for very long. They were constantly being uprooted and planted in the next supposedly excellent continental school. As a result, the James children felt rootless and resented their father’s wandering ways.

William ended up spending most of his career at Harvard, but was given to sudden departures across the Atlantic, usually without his family. His fame grew over the years, and he gave many lectures in Europe to large crowds. Henry ended up spending most of his life in England, and was something of a celebrity there. They both were among the first modern American cultural ambassadors to Europe (modern in the sense that they embodied the ideas and principles of what came to be called modernism). But in many ways, they hardly felt American themselves. William was vehemently and publicly critical of American imperialism and arrogance at the turn of the century. Henry eventually became a British citizen in 1915. To a large extent, they rejected nationalism and maintained the cosmopolitanism of their youth.

The James family was close, but that closeness was through the written word. Their correspondence was constant, playful, and honest. What the James gang lost in proximity they made up for in letters that revealed the true condition of their hearts and minds. Their doubts and fears and regrets. We read about their ideals and their views on how to live life, and observe them coming up short, doing their best to cope with disappointment and loss.

In the past, I’ve had the ambition to read the essays and novels of William and Henry James, based on their philosophical and literary reputation. But now I have a feeling that reading their correspondence would be just as rewarding. Maybe even more so.

Henry and William, left to right.



Lucy

...And I'm back.

Since the last post, I have been forced to finally grow up and keep another human being alive 24 hours a day. My wife and I were going to start with a pet, like a hamster, and maybe move up to a dog or a tiger. But we decided to skip all that and went straight for the infant homo sapiens sapiens.

This is a digital 2D representation of a real 3D beeby named Lucy Anne Byers:

I know she's mine because she has my receding hairline and she often cries when a stranger holds her.

Why Love Matters

I would put this book, written by Sue Gerhardt, in the overkill category. The point she wants to make is this: pay attention to your baby when she cries.

It is full of interesting information from developmental psychology and neurology, so you know at the biochemical level why it's important to "regulate their emotions" by being at their beck and call for the first 6 months of life. If parents don't do this there are "attachment" issues, which could lead to behavioral and other psychological problems. And there's also the cortisol thing. When you get stressed, a hormone called cortisol is released. It's produced by the adrenal glands, and it gives you energy to make it through the crisis. It also basically tells all of your other body systems, like the immune system, to put things on hold until the crisis is over. Short crises are handled well. Long crises are not handled well by the body. An adult can get sick, for instance, because of an impaired immune system. An infant can have her brain development affected by high levels of cortisol.

But...I found this article in Slate that calls all this into question. Which makes me think, yeah it's good to read some books like this,  but it's got to be taken with some hefty granules of salt. If they cite one recent study that "suggests" blah, blah, blah, there's no need to freak out and think you're a horrible parent. This is what I'm telling myself, anyway. I still have no idea what being a parent is like.

Today is D minus 3, by the way...

Leaven Life: Bakers' Yeast

Whenever you have aficionados you have snobbery. It’s inevitable. Artisan bread baking aficionados are snobby about their leavening. They think natural leavening (sourdough) is the shit. Bakers yeast is not.

Bakers yeast is what most people bake with. It’s the stuff you find in the baking aisle at the grocery store. Most people use the dried kind, which either comes in packets or small jars. The yeast looks like tiny-tiny tan twigs. You can also sometimes find little cakes of yeast in the refrigerated section. They usually come in one ounce cubes.

This yeast is domesticated. Domestication is what we do to genetically modify our food, and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.

Take dogs. We can breed dogs to look a certain way. If we're looking at a group of, say, Cockerspaniels, we might decide that we like the ones with longer hair. And if we want the next litter of puppies to have longer hair, we pick a long haired male and longhaired female to breed. It’s more likely that the litter from this couple will have longer hair than the litter from two shorter haired spaniels. Inheritance. Genes. DNA.

We’ve been intentionally doing this with plants for more than ten thousand years. Wheat was just a prairie grass that looked nothing like today’s domesticated grain. We've coaxed bitter, meager wild fruit into the buxom market variety we eat today. By picking and planting the individuals we like, nature has obliged and given us protein rich grains, sweet fruits, and starchy vegetables.

Bakers domesticated yeast by selecting for a strain that eats quickly and farts a lot. (Brewers have done the same thing to get lots of alcohol out of their yeast.) When you catch yeast out of the air and first start using it in your sourdough recipes, you have to wait a long time for it to inflate your bread.

Typically when you make bread, you mix your dough, knead it, and let it sit for a while before you form the loaf. While it sits, it inflates to about twice its original size. With your recently captured wild yeast, this will take maybe 4 to 6 hours, or longer. With bakers yeast, and a warm temperature, it'll take as little as 30 minutes. Obviously this makes things a lot easier, since bakers' yeast speeds up the process and has a fairly consistent rate.

So why use natural leavening? For one thing, you get a more interesting pattern of bubbles in the dough. And by "interesting", artisan bakers mean non-uniform bubbles. They really like big bubbles. Cut a good sourdough loaf in half and you should get a few huge holes, some medium sized ones, as well as the more uniform smaller holes. Bakers yeast will give you pretty much just uniform smaller holes.

Another thing is the taste. Sour dough is a bit sour, though it shouldn't be overwhelmingly so. Sometimes it's described as tangy and maybe a bit "nuttier" than breads made with bakers' yeast. But as a sourdough starter matures, it becomes less tangy and tart. It shouldn't really be all that sour, but the taste is distinct.

Sourdough also gives a thicker, crispier crust to breads. If you're into that.

I end up using bakers' yeast much more often than natural leavening, just because I don't always have 6 to 10 hours to baby-sit a slowly bloating lump of dough. But when I have the time, it's worth it.