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41 " given the startling superiority of much of the Red Army’s weaponry, the Wehrmacht needed an entire new generation of tanks and infantry weapons. "
― Adam Tooze , The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
42 " Barbarossa can legitimately claim to be the end point of a European tradition of operational warfare that stretches back at least to the eighteenth century. "
43 " It is this epic of globalization that we should have in mind when we turn to the analysis of National Socialism and in particular its agrarian politics. Too often the preoccupation of Hitler and his followers with problems of Lebensraum, food and agriculture is seen as prima facie evidence of their atavism and backwardness. This could not be more wrong. The search for greater territory and natural resources was not the outlandish obsession of racist ideologues. These had been common European preoccupations for at least the last two hundred years. "
44 " Despite the disaster unleashed by Bismarck’s creation of 1871, an integral and sovereign German nation state was taken for granted as a basic element in the new order. For Bainville this assumption was the hallmark of sentimental nineteenth-century liberalism.5 The bizarre mixture of cruelty and kindness that characterized the peace was the direct result of Clemenceau’s effort to reconcile the security needs of France with his romantic attachment to the principle of nationality. Whatever we may think of Bainville’s politics, the force of his point can hardly be denied. Across the sweep of modern history since the emergence of the modern nation state system in Europe in the seventeenth century, the assumption of German national sovereignty marks the treaty of 1919 as unique. Most, if not all, of the problems peculiar to the Versailles Treaty system arose from it. "
― Adam Tooze , The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
45 " The basic and possibly most radical contention of this book is that these interrelated shifts in our historical perception require a reframing of the history of the Third Reich, a reframing which has the disturbing effect both of rendering the history of Nazism more intelligible, indeed eerily contemporary, and at the same time bringing into even sharper relief its fundamental ideological irrationality. "
46 " What has made central bankers into the exemplar of modern crisis-fighting is the vacuum created by the evisceration of organized labor, the absence of inflationary pressure, and more broadly, the lack of antisystemic challenge. "
― Adam Tooze , Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy
47 " Despite the successful suppression campaign in February, the coronavirus crisis of 2020 could easily have been a major liability for Xi's regime. Instead, it became an occasion for what has been aptly termed "disaster nationalism," an opportunity to demonstrate collective resilience under the leadership of the party. "
48 " What we went through on interminable conference calls in fancy office buildings obviously did not compare with the horrors of war, but ten minutes into the movie I knew I had finally found something that captured what the crisis felt like: the overwhelming burden of responsibility combined with the paralyzing risk of catastrophic failure; the frustration about the stuff out of your control; the uncertainty about what would help; the knowledge that even good decisions might turn out badly; the pain and guilt of neglecting your family; the loneliness and the numbness.”82 "
― Adam Tooze , Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
49 " The spectacular escalation of violence unleashed in the 1930s and the 1940s was a testament to the kind of force that the insurgents believed themselves to be up against. It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action. "
50 " The calculations of RNS agronomists suggested that to achieve full self-sufficiency with current technology and at the current standard of living, the Third Reich would need to add 7–8 million empty hectares of farmland to the 34 million hectares currently within its borders.77 It may seem far-fetched to suggest that it was the difficulties of German agriculture that drove the progressive radicalization of Hitler’s regime. But when Hitler did attempt to give concrete meaning to his concept of Lebensraum it was to agriculture that he turned. "
51 " What Darré said next was rather more specific and rather more startling: The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people. "
52 " In 2005 joblessness would peak at 10.6 percent. To combat this scourge, between 2003 and 2005 the Schroeder government announced a national restructuring program titled Agenda 2010. Its main thrust was a multiphase program of labor market liberalization and benefit cuts, designed by a committee headed by VW’s head of human resources, Peter Hartz. The fourth and final phase of cuts, Hartz IV, became synonymous with a new German “reform” narrative. The unemployed were returned to work. Wage restraint restored German competitiveness. The reward came already in 2003 when Germany could boast of being the world export champion (Exportweltmeister).Agenda 2010 would come to define a new bipartisan self-understanding of Germany’s political class. Having accomplished the enormous task of reunification, Germany had overcome its internal difficulties and “reformed” its way back to economic health. It is a narrative that is superficially compelling and it would have significant implications for how Berlin approached the crisis of the eurozone, but it does not withstand close scrutiny. Hartz IV certainly drove millions of people more or less willingly off long-term unemployment benefits into a range of insecure jobs. This helped to hold down wages for unskilled workers, such as cashiers and cleaning workers. In the first ten years of the euro, despite soaring productivity, half of German households experienced no wage growth at all. This shortened unemployment rolls. It also increased pretax inequality and lowered Germany’s wages relative to its European neighbors. But as to the competitiveness of German exporters, the significance of Hartz IV is far less obvious. German companies do not win export orders by shaving the wages of unskilled workers. A far more important source of competitive advantage came from outsourcing production to Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. Added to which there was the boost from the global recovery of the early 2000s.While its economic impact has been exaggerated, what Hartz IV did transform was German politics. The blue-collar electorate and the left wing of the SPD never forgave Schroeder for Hartz IV. "
