So I’m torn about how necessary it was for Britain to go to war, let alone pay such a catastrophic price that the empire was holed below the waterline and in hock to the US anyway, to prevent Germany dominating Europe. [No, Germany doesn't really dominate it now or with the same attitude it had then. This Germany isn't that Germany.] In retrospect, it seems lose-lose for Britain, although in 1920 it looked as though the empire might be salvageable and so it might have looked worth it to some.

But I’m more sympathetic to the stay out schools of thought than I once was. All of Western civilization paid a huge price we’re still paying.

I wouldn’t say German plans for Europe were wholly different from those of Hitler. The Mitteleuropa concept already envisioned some moderate direct annexations and a set of tightly controlled German vassal states, a notion that Brest-Litovsk extended into the former Russian Empire. Plus a European economic community that would bind the other continental power closely to Germany for commercial, industrial, and resource allocation purposes. And in the east, at least, Slav peasants could probably look forward to ongoing being abused peasants with no prospects.

Still, it was colonization and Germanization lite. And if they probably hoped for demographics to favour German settlement in the east with a little gentle nudging, they were not likely to accomplish that with wholesale massacre. So in important ways it would have been much better for Ukrainians, in particular, then any of the options they were actually given.

What a hell of a time and place to have been born.

Which is how you tell that this is either historical revisionism, or outright willful ignorance. You can’t discuss the abolition of German in America without discussing the crap that the Wilson Democrats got up to–It was, to my mind, a revenge committed by Wilson and his ilk for what the German-American community had done during the Civil War, which was to be staunchly anti-slavery and Union-supportive. The record for what happened to the German settlements in Texas ain’t at all pretty, when you look at it.

I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition, to look at what the Wilsonian Democrats did to the German-American community, and what later was done to the Jews. I recall reading some of the stuff that came out about then, and it was full of equivalencies between the Germans, the Jews, and the blacks. The position was that white Anglo-Saxon civilization was under attack, and that all three parties were threats. Germans didn’t just make the English nervous; the US had issues with the whole “Rise of Wilhelmine Germany”, as well.

Human stupidity and cupidity at its finest. I think we would have done well to stay the hell out of WWI, and let the Germans achieve the victory that they’d earned, as well as the post-WWI economic collapse that would have followed, almost inevitably. It would have been a salutary lesson in hubris and greed.

One does wonder how things would have turned out, had we and the UK stayed the hell out. Germany would have almost certainly torn off a huge chunk of Russia, and the Wilhelmine post-war plans looked nothing like what the Nazis had in mind. In all likelihood, it would have been better for places like the Ukraine than what happened under Lenin and Stalin…

He might want to look at the classic photograph from the 1927 Solvay Conference held at Brussels:

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/solvay-conference-probably-intelligent-picture-ever-taken-1927/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beilstein_database

The commercial information systems industry continues to impress by its scale and coverage.

It occurs, with a goal like thw writers have set out, that the Beilstein Handbook would make a good throwaway reference in fiction.

I was unaware of it before. What a resource of chemical knowledge that must be. Is it still a standard resource in chemistry?

It looks like a terrific book.

I am reminded that John Derbyshire once wrote that, to take an undergraduate degree in maths at University College London circa the 60s, one had to study either French, German or Russian.

Tangent: Supposedly Bismarck was asked what would be the salient geopolitical fact of the 20th century and he replied the fact that the North Americans speak English.

Tangent 2: I too easily forget how the publics [stirred up by their leaders] so wildly overreacted to Germany in the first war. Arguably more so than in the second, when it really should have been the other way around. Liberty Cabbage, for sauerkraut, was emblematic of a kind of patriotic reaction not seen again until freedom fries. At least the Germans were the enemy, but it was still juvenile.

Tangent 3: That contained a fascinating thesis about Americans’ having been keeping up with Europe in foreign language learning before WW1, which surprises me on one level if only because it would still have been less immediately useful in American life, but perhaps it was mainly at the elite level, where American upper class education still emphasized it, and presumably mostly French. If this thesis includes the teaching of other languages to children by immigrant communities, then perhaps America was even ahead of Europe, whose working classes weren’t that mobile then. America just included representatives of all those nations.

I am struck by the idea that the brief ban on teaching German, which I had not heard of and is far more ludicrous than fads like liberty cabbage, would have had follow-on effects on the teaching of other languages, such that Americans would so largely abandon the whole thing instead of just banning German. That’s a pretty strong argument to make.