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He's replying to everyone who replied to him, I guess, about the Dollhouse cancellation, but still, it feels good to know I got to tell him he'll always be one of my favorite mad scientists and he saw it. Stay classy, Mr. Kranz.

(This is why I love the internet, by the way.)

Dollhouse news bummed me out, not that I didn't see it coming. :\

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So today for class we read The Prince of Homburg by Heinrich von Kleist and it was an awesome play, sort of like Life is a Dream meets The Robbers, and I wish I'd had time to read it more than once. Kleist seems to take everything to extremes and -- well, that includes nationalism.

I'm saying this because Jackie (the other history major in our group) got excited about it with me. In the presentation it was noted that Kleist was in the very beginning of this fervent nationalism sparked by the Napoleonic wars -- particularly in Spain and Germany, which were taken over by Napoleon. It was all part of the Romantic movement, but the nationalism reached a fever pitch by WWI and of course, in the wake of that war, it only got worse with the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party.

Kleist, of course, could not foresee this anymore than Schiller, another favorite playwright of the Nazis, could. The Nazis latched on to the Prince of Homburg, with Frederick the Elector as the Fuhrer and the Prince as the German people -- those called to die for the greater good, in service of the state. They grabbed on to The Robbers in such a way, which has a similar kind of frenetic nationalism to it. As you can imagine, this has done some serious damage to the plays' reputations for the last sixty years or so. (That's where the quote on my Twitter came from. "This is Hitler's favorite play. This is Hitler's favorite play. Did you know this is Hitler's favorite play?" which is, according to my classmate who presented on it today, pretty much all that's been written about it since then.)

Anyway. Jackie said this would be a great play to assign in a history class to understand the kind of crazy nationalism feelings that allowed for the rise of Hitler. And I went !!!! because it is pretty brilliant. There's no good answer for the question, "Why?" or "How could this happen?" when you're talking about the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, about the best you can do is describe the conditions. And that fervent nationalism that Nazi Germany latched onto is very, very present in that play.

So I agreed with her, and then "understanding how German nationalism fed into the rise of Nazi Germany" somehow became "justifying the Holocaust/Hitler/Nazis," which um. It isn't. I in NO WAY condone mass genocide and invading other countries for funsies and all that. But if you don't understand the conditions in which a history took place, then you are never going to be able to recognize them in your own time. And this is why I'm wary of rampant nationalism/patriotism, no matter what party is in control. And it frustrates me when people don't appreciate history in that way.

It just bums me out that even people with advanced degrees don't manage to see why we bother to study history. :'(

Well that took up a lot of my time. I made up my mind to go see some of the other students who took part in a devised performance for our class tonight, since they came to see mine. It's at 7:30 but I knew that if I went back to the apartment that I wouldn't come back out, so I hung out in the office and did some reading, and then I left to eat dinner, and now I'm hanging out in Starbucks in the union. I have about an hour. :\ *bored*