November 11th, 2017, is 99 years since WWI Armistice Day (Nov. 11, 1918) (see also post-242). Sometime in the past twelve months I watched the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front for the first time. Some years ago I read some of the book but misplaced it before finishing.

U.S. Veterans Day is on the day it is because of Nov. 11th, 1918. Few seem aware of this. This leads me to ask how Americans actually remember the war today.

All wars tend to be remembered differently by those who actually lived through them, or fought in them, than by later generations. This we can attribute to changing political circumstances and/or to concerted 'lobbying' efforts to remember a war in a certain way. There are many examples of this.

There is not now and I don't think ever was much of a 'lobby' to remember WWI in the USA in a certain way. The U.S. entered this war towards the end and was only involved in major combat operations for six months in 1918, though its contribution and political commitment was decisive in the German decision to give up in fall 1918. Considering the limited commitment and the return to traditional "isolationism" (the George Washington Doctrine) quickly after the armistice, American memory of the war is inevitably going to be weaker than maybe any of the belligerents', on whose land battles were fought, whose political systems were shaken and in many cases overturned by the war, and many more of whose men were killed.

A German pacifist and war veteran wrote the All Quiet on the Western Front novel in the late 1920s, inspired by his own experiences (a non-pacifist bestseller of the same era was Storm and Steel by another German veteran, Ernst Junger). All Quiet was immediately a huge international bestseller, a fact that alone tells us what war memory was like ten years after the war's end. I think these four stills from that film may capture its essence:

The film follows a group of 18-year-old students (first picture), who are encouraged to enlist by their ultrapatriotic teacher, who is presented by the film as a pompous fool. The boys join enthusiastically. They fall in with Army life and have some good but many bad experiences with characters in the Army on their own side (second picture). They fight, and begin to die (third picture), but for what gain they die (even the temporary tactical gain of a particular battle) is deliberately made completely unclear in the film. They die for nothing. By the end (the fourth picture is the very last scene, a fade-out onto the field of crosses), almost all the major characters have been killed in various ways by an unseen, mechanical enemy. A waste of human life. That is the message of the movie.

This is classic pacifism, and is really not the standard view of war, of the military, in the USA that I have known since the 1990s. Pacifist ideas as such today have been relegated to a political margin, heard sometimes but not really taken seriously. (This is an inevitability given the world political situation since about 1942.)

I understand that pacifism was once very important in U.S. culture/politics, and I don't mean that brief period around the late 1960s and 1970s that exerts a powerful cultural memory now fifty years later. I mean a much longer time ago. I discovered in my grandfather (b. 1916)'s book collection, several serious pacifist books of the late 1910s and 1920s or so, which he seems to have inherited from his father (born 1886 in Germany; in the USA from 1887) and other relatives. He also had a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, in English, published in one of its early editions.

So how do non-pacifist Americans, that is, mainstream Americans, remember the disastrous 1914-1918 in Europe? I think most Americans "write it off" as a prelude to the 1939-1945 war; that is, the 1939-1945 mythos swallows up 1914-1918, destroys it, "puppetizes it," towards the political ends of 1939-1945 which remain with us in the 2010s. Roughly: Imperial Germany in 1914 is the "bad guy," is a nationalistic-militaristic bully-state that threatens world peace, and -- though this is vaguer -- somehow maliciously orchestrated the war in summer 1914 through aggressive intent and aggressive action. A surer menace to world peace, unknown. A regime that bore all the "war guilt" for 1914.

These were the ideas churned out of the British or French propaganda ministries, ideas that at the time were widely rejected in the USA ,in which popular opinion was against the war through its first years, ideas which, in the 1920s were essentially all discredited in the vigorous historians' academic battles over "war guilt" for 1914 (the so-called Kriegsschuldfrage). In other words, this view of Imperial Germany in 1914 is wrong, at least if we trust expert consensus. Imperial Germany, the historians concluded, was not much different from any other regime in Europe at the time and acted in its interests, even if a bit sloppily, just like every other state did.

I note that the U.S.-made film All Quiet on the Western Front, released in April 1930, does not depict the German soldiers as villains at all but generals as the opposite, as sympathetic people, normal people, not unlike "us."

The problem was not 'Germany' or 'Prussianism' in any sense which singles out Germans as a people, or Berlin's Hohenzollern Dynasty, or the military, or anything else; the problem was the lack of a stable international system, and, really, the fact that 20th century Europe still had a 19th century ruling apparatus.

So rather than a morality tale of "this state was a good-guy and that state a bad-guy," what is forgotten, I think, in the popular mind, is that the real lesson is one of poor statesmanship. It was so during the July 1914 crisis, during the war, and during/after the 1918-1919 peace negotiations. Too few realized that this war had no winners. It had been socially destructive and seriously destabilizing. Perhaps worst of all, it gave birth and sudden energy to the global Communist movement, starting in Russia; one hundred years ago this week, in fact, Nov. 7, 1917, armed Communists took over St. Petersburg, then the Russian capital. Russia was in peace negotiations with Germany within weeks and exited the war soon thereafter, before large numbers of Americans began arriving at the front.

In long retrospect, strong candidates for villainy may be the British and French governments, who angrily demanded their diplomats shove aside hapless President Wilson's "peace without victory," demanded Germany be punished, and saw to it that it was. The War Guilt clause demanded reparations. The results were bad for everyone.

Anyway, my impression is that the British, French, and Germans remember the 1914-1918 war, after a century, with a deep sadness, closer to the All Quiet on the Western Front view than anything. It is harder for Americans to do this.

Count me among the many fans or admirers of Martin Luther. Today is his day. Not his birthday, but the day he crossed his own Rubicon in life and began to really achieve his life's purpose.

Five hundred years ago today (Oct. 31, 1517), Luther the young monk, Luther the German dissident nobody, walked a short distance to the town center and nailed a document he'd been working on to the door of the main church. This was the church in a no-name town with a third-rate university (Wittenberg). His document called for a theological debate; he'd been mulling over the issues at hand for a few years; he was sure the authorities were wrong and equally sure there was a need for someone to take a stand. If not me, who? And the rest, as we like to say, is history.

I have been twice to this very site. The church still stands in Germany and the door has been re-created. Wittenberg is today a tourist site. The town center, preserved, is not much different, i imagine, than it was in the 1510s. It is not a bad place but not the most impressive place you'll ever see, either.

How could it be? A country-bumpkin type, not one of the important people, someone who'd stumbled his way through early life, someone who seemed adrift and obsessed over his religious uncertainties. This character rises out of nowhere to confront and defeat the Church and the entire established order of Europe?

One reason why the Luther story has inspired so many for so long is that there are many Luthers. People can see what they want to see in him; he is not a figure easily classifiable, partly because he is a bridge between historical eras. partly because he was such a trailblazer that he came before most such classifications were even roughly in place.

We have Luther the Devout Christian; Luther the Discoverer of Grace and thus Luther the Religious Revivalist. Ending it there cannot begin to capture what's going on. We have Luther the Common Man (against the 'Fatcat' or the priestly elite caste); Luther the Uncompromising Crusader for Truth and Honest-Dealing (against the slick con-men types); Luther the Optimist (following his discovery of Grace); Luther the Intellectual and Scholar; Luther the Bombastic Propagandist; Luther the Country-Bumpkin and anti-Elitist (and yet his patron is the King of Saxony); Luther the flouter of early-16th-century Political Correctness is enjoyable to watch. We have a Luther whose immediate ancestors were Late-Medieval men yet Luther is not one, thus Luther the New Man, the Early Modern Man; the latter leads us to another enduring image, Luther the German (or perhaps Luther the Northern European); Luther the modern-style Patriot or proto-Nationalist is a sure extension from that. Lest anyone accuse him of being a proto-Prussian-militarist aligning to some kind of late 19th-to-eary-20th-century stereotype, we also have Luther the Pacifist who consistently refuses and denounces any armed struggle. Lest any of this seem too serious, we cannot miss Luther the Lover of Life (following his discovery of Grace, and following his marriage); and Luther the Joke-Teller, the Dry-Humorist.

But the Luther that most endures would seem to be Luther the crusading, righteous Dissident; the (Religio-)Political Insurgent. And what of politics? We have a Luther the Conservative coexisting with a Luther the Overturner of things Conservative'; Luther the abandoner of established, inherited, dominant orthodoxies that are not defensible. Tradition itself ipso facto is no justification for Luther, after all, if it means indifference and lazy acceptance or wrong or harmful ideas. Hence, after all, Luther the Reformer.

The German press in this the 500th Reformation Year, has called Luther Der erste Wutbürger, or "the First 'Angry Citizen'." The term 'Wutbürger' [Anger/Rage+Citizen] is a recent coinage in German, voted 2010's "new word of the year." Wutbürger is defined in English by a Wiki writer as "an angry or enraged citizen, especially one who feels politically marginalized." The term was coined to describe, among others, Thilo Sarrazin, an ex-official who published a book highly critical of the German state, and also various civic movements on the scene in 2010. The seven years since have seen many more Wutbürger on the scene and many are now in the Bundestag.

Usually, political anger is a flash in the pan and by its nature cannot sustain itself, or in some cases it is crushed by force. In other words, very few Luther-type figures ever achieve anything. He quickly became

The early days of mass printing allowed his writings to spread widely, quickly, cheaply and for him to become a symbol for the aspirations of millions. (I learned from the new Luther movie that 100% of his writings were 100% 'pirated' by early printers; he never received one cent of royalties for any of the millions of copies of his many writings; he didn't mind.)

If words can be printed, so could pictures. Some of the pro-Reformation artwork that took off with the Luther movement is very clever and like nothing we see today. They must be among the earliest political cartoons. They range from "agitation propaganda," to serious lionization of Luther and the reformers ("Luther's Triumph"), to mockery, belittlement or demonization of the detractors ("papists"), to the satirical, like this:

This pro-Lutheran cartoon (1524) makes me laugh: "The Devil proclaims the opening of his feud with Luther." The And how else does one inform one of one's intention to open a feud but to write as much in a letter and hand deliver it? Naturally!

I found this Reformation cartoon in a Luther biography I found at the library which I have tried reading during spare moments but failed to get through before the 500th has finally come:

.I was briefly (a few days) in Germany again in early 2017, on the way to and from Korea. I recall that commemorations and excitement about the Reformation anniversary were around. I understand the whole country, by special proclamation, has October 31st off this year for the anniversary, and many have Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday all off. A Luther Vacation.

I commemorated the great man in multiple ways, one of which you are now reading, i.e. my attempt to write something of some meaning on him that hasn't already been said a hundred times (in this perhaps I have not succeeded; my insights on him cannot be said to be novel). There was also the new Luther movie in early October (I went with M. who was in town that week; a great time).

Another commemoration was a last-minute decision on Sunday October 29th (Reformation Sunday). I snuck in a visit to the Washington, D.C., National Cathedral, which, for the occasion, was full of thousands of Lutherans (and others, I presume). Every one of the thousands of seats was full and there were people crowding all along the sides and in the back, myself included. I have never seen so many Lutherans in one place. "Jubilant" is how I'd describe the atmosphere. As if a war had just been won. I'm glad I went, despite rainy/windy conditions and my having an exam in International Trade the next day.

Then there was the hugely successful Reformation Party / Luther Party at the church, some moments from which I include here:

I created (below) a shorter version of the above exposition by Luther, using a few props:

Below: The dining room stood ready for the Luther Party. Above: some of the Luther-related books on the rear bookshelf visible in the picture below.

The food was great and all-you-can-eat. There were over a hundred attendees, among whom was me. It was I who took all these pictures. I brought a friend, G.S., and he enjoyed it very much, especially given how long (5+ years) he spent in Germany. Many of the rest of the attendees are people I know now a little bit, or used to know. There were also many guests I had never seen before.

A fitting tribute, one of countless thousands of tributes to 1517 across the world in 2017.

Oh! And the Luther impersonator. How can there be a Luther Party without a Luther impersonator?

Here he is. "Luther enters the building":

Luther preaches! The people listen:

Lots else happened as well. There was one guest, who may be related to me, who seemed to be heckling or teasing Luther, all in good fun: I am quite sure Luther didn't mind.

Oh, and an "indulgence peddler" was also active before dinner, wandering around selling them in a big basket. I managed to procure one which gives me "Permission to not attend one meeting you really don't want to attend."

Among many others, told E.S., an Australian I know who is in Korea for the year, about the Luther party. E.S. was impressed and replied that if there is one thing the world needs more of, it is "more Luther impersonators."

An ATM at a 7-11 gave me a one-hundred-dollar bill today, a first-ever experience for me.

It did not give me the option of what denomination bill I wanted but just thrust the hundred-dollar bill at me. It then beeped in annoyance that I wasn't quicker on the draw, and then was done with me.

Since when have ATMs stocked hundreds? I ask.

As any true American knows, only criminals (drug dealers) and ignorant foreign tourists ever carry hundred dollar bills. Cashiers are known to reject them; even when accepted, he who pays with a hundred-dollar bill is viewed with suspicion. I have always understood/felt this stigma against hundreds. In fact, growing up I recall never even seeing a hundred-dollar bill, with one exception.

I remember the hundred-dollar bill as a reference point in the distant and mysterious world described by the rap music of the late 1990s, music we were all exposed to. Rappers used the word 'Benjamin' to refer to hundreds ("It's All About the Benjamins," circa 1997-1998; they were implicitly bragging about dealing drugs, which fueled a high-life with hundred-dollar bills, drug earnings, flowing freely).

This puts the hundred-dollar bill way outside any mainstream use for people of my generation or older. Getting this hundred-dollar bill at the ATM leads me to ask whether this social prejudice has changed; are people born in the 2000s, now in K-12 schooling, going to be much less prone to this prejudice against the 'Benjamin'? Or will an emergent anti-cash prejudice reinforce the anti-hundred prejudice?

The first time I ever saw a hundred-dollar bill.
An anecdote. An eight-year-old me: enthusiastic about doing well in 2nd grade, involved in speculation with others about whether ghosts inhabited the boys' bathroom at school, keen to play soccer at 'recess' after lunch, and a daily rider of the school bus with many peers. A character called Hosmann, a friend at the time, rode the same bus. Hosmann, on the bus one day, produced a hundred-dollar bill out of his backpack. He proudly showed the bill off to other students, including me.

Second-grade students, of course, don't even carry cash beyond something like a dollar and a few coins for school cafeteria lunch money. Hosmann was of Bolivian origin. He had odd turns-of-phrase in English (he would say "twist" instead of "turn"). How did he procure this hundred-dollar bill? I presume he pilfered it from  home, from his mom, to show off to his peers. Why did he think it a great idea to flash it around on the school bus? A bad sign for where he was headed in later years. I recall his tendency to giggle at everything. I recall him giggling whenever a student saw the hundred that day, which he kept half-concealed in his backpack.

This little experience, around the middle 1990s, made such an impression on the eight-year-old me that I still remember it. A hundred-dollar bill! It may as well have been an artifact from the lost city of Atlantis. I remember criticizing Hosmann to other students at the time for this recklessness.

I cannot remember much else about the school-bus experience from that year. This experience stands out. (Side anecdote: The only other thing I can now clearly pull out of my memory about that year's school bus is Oscar the Bus Driver, Hispanic, perhaps Salvadorean, a fat man always keen to joke around with students. He acquired the endearing nickname "the Garbage Man" among the student-passengers, which he didn't mind. This came from a game he would play in which he or students would point to someone outside on the sidewalk or street and say "That is you in the future!" He would give as good as he got. It must have been that once a student was playing this game when a garbage truck came around at an (in)opportune time; the nickname stuck.)

So what of the origin of the American anti-hundred-dollar-bill prejudice? I am guessing that it was probably considered too risky due to its high value, especially when street crime rose from the mid-1960s. Before that, it was probably also stigmatized as an unnecessarily-high-value bill. However! Both of these factors (street robbery, as of the 2010s, and the real value of the $100 bill today, accounting for inflation) have declined:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator,

• $100 in October 1957 equals $870 today (October 2017).
• $100 in October 1977 equals $400 today.
• $100 in October 1997 equals $150 today.
• $100 in October 2017 equals less than four hours of work (gross pay) for the average worker ($25/hour in 2015).

So maybe our anti-hundred-dollar-bill prejudice should be discarded as an anachronism.

Austria's 2017 general election has come and gone, following Germany's a month ago. The key issue in both elections was the 2015-2016 Migrant Crisis, disgruntlement over which appears to have energized large numbers and shifted the political discourse to the right; turnout was high. In Austria's case, parties of the right will have over two-thirds of the seats in the new legislature, and that is with proportional representation.

The age of the new Austrian Chancellor has been the main coverage of the election I have seen. It is amazing, actually, that he is so young. The German press has called this character a 'Young Metternich' ever since he became Foreign Minister, at age 27, a few years ago. He is now 31.

The original Metternich (1773-1859) is characterized as a political genius who dominated Austrian politics from the 1810s to the 1840s, starting, as Kurz has, as Foreign Minister.

Metternich's great achievement is the preservation of Austrian power. At that time, Austria was a true power, a major power, but could have disappeared after the Napoleonic disruption. Metternich gave the Austrian Empire another century of life, for better of worse. The Austria of that era was a multi-national, pan-central-European empire with a German ruling minority and a long-established royal family (the Hapsburgs). It era represented a Catholic, multi-ethnic, 'multicultural' alternative model to north-German Protestant 'Prussianism' based in Berlin. (Having long since lost the struggle against Berlin, Austrian/Hapsburg power ended forever in 1918, after the loss of legitimacy caused by its poor performance in the war and an embarrassing-and-obvious dependence on Germany from summer 1914 onward (actually earlier). With Vienna discredited and totally unable to suppress ethnic secession movements, the pan-central-European 'Austria' fell apart and this new German-Austria, as we know it today, was born.)

The 'Young Metternich' appellation for Kurz doesn't make much sense, to me. The Austria of today is, unlike its imperial predecessor namesake, a very small state (7.5 million citizens in a Europe of 750 million). Also critically for this comparison, modern Austria is, by tradition, not a player in international politics. It is not now and never has been a NATO member, and, for a Western country, was quite a late entrant into the EU (1995, about forty years late).

Kurz and Metternich might be compared in broader terms. Metternich is credited not just with preserving/restoring Austrian power after the Napoleonic crisis, but with being a/the central figure in doing the same for the whole of Europe's quasi-aristocratic order which was seriously threatened, discredited, and injured during Napoleonic period. A lot of 'centrists' around today's Europe dream of a figure to play this role of defending the European post-1945 order of social-democractic liberal democracy in a time it is (widely believed to be) "under threat."

Skeptics would say that Kurz is not such a figure, even discounting the small size and disengagement of Austria, as he led his party to a 7.5% popular vote gain using, many have said, a watered-down version of the rhetoric of the insurgent Austrian Freedom Party (FPO). The latter is a party of the populist-nationalist right, whose campaign was based on slogans like "Stop the Islamization of Austria."

Who will be Kurz's coalition partner?

He can form a 'coalition of the Center' with the Social Democrats (SPO), or he can rule in a right-wing coalition with the FPO. If the latter coalition governs, Austria will seem to have entered the 'Viktor Orban' Wing of European politics.

There is a sense among economists, I would propose, that they constitute a latter-day priestly class ruling over the destiny of civilization regardless of who sits on the throne of overt political power, thus that the priestly (economist) class is above the political class. This priestly economist class sees itself as responsible for the steering of society in the right direction, as responsible for pleasing the gods, for performing the proper rituals, for overseeing that the holy teachings be obeyed to a sufficient degree that the good times go on and the wrath of the gods be averted.

This priestly class has its own debates over theological specifics. The long-dominant faction within the priestly class holds to the doctrine of salvation through "unlimited growth through free markets and technology." Different subfactions propose different paths for how this exactly works.

In the dominant view today, as I understand it, salvation comes through the noble efforts of that chosen few who "work in the field of ideas." It is this special group that increases economic growth forever and delivers us from the evil of Malthus' imagination. Economists propose that a society can (through policy) allocate workers into one of two fields: "creation of objects" ('doers') versus "creation of ideas" ('thinkers'). The "ideas people" actually do not create any wealth/output at all for the time being, but spend their time thinking of new ideas. Their continual thinking of ideas constitutes, in effect, a spiritual exercise akin to monks praying on a mountaintop. The ideas people produce a certain small number of good ideas which take hold. These lay the groundwork for growth in the future, years or decades later. The fewer people "working in ideas," the lower the long-term growth. Thus society needs to encourage more people to work in the field of ideas.

Another faction, out of fashion among the high priestly class, rejects the tenet of maximization of growth as the animating civilizational goal in the first place. They say that economies tending towards a "steady state" may be inevitable, and may not even be a bad thing.

When allegorized as a priestly ruling elite's efforts to steer the course of civilization and internal debates about how to do it, economics sounds exciting, The study of economics as I have known it is rather not like this. I have known it as a drab muddling through of a series of manipulations of highly abstract equations and graphs. One must memorize them.

I can't help but think economics (as I have known it, September 2016 to Present) amounts to the learning of a little code language that one will never use again (i.e., inevitably forgotten soon after the final exam), something like learning a foreign or dead language to read one's religion's holy scriptures (to touch back on the allegory). The kind of equation-manipulations I mean look like this:

That is pure gibberish to most of us. Perhaps a foreign language in some unknown script...

As for unlimited growth forever: It does seem to be the way we see the world. It does seem to inform everything else we think, we 'modern' (and 'postmodern') people. It seems to have been so for generations, even centuries. Since when? I suppose since the Industrial Revolution in earnest, maybe with origins in the Enlightenment. It is tempting to believe it, too, for one thing because it seems true from empirical data for more than two centuries now in the West.

I perceive that more have been questioning this model in recent decades, for various reasons: Unlimited growth forever? What does that mean? Are we sure it's true? Is it not folly to assume that trends in the age of cheap fossil-fuel energy will hold true forever? Are we sure we even want unlimited growth forever?

But this "dissident faction" still remains on the margins (really it is several factions united by some kind of opposition to, or skepticism of, the long-reigning Unlimited Growth Forever idea). The dissident voices are just more conspicuous than before. A quip from the 1970s, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," captures a main current of this dissident view.