Why Jordan Peterson is wrong on the "German Problem"

and what to read for some better history

A Jordan Peterson YouTube video on the “German Problem” explains the public intellectual’s passionate inquiry into how one advanced civilization collapsed into evil. This is the “German Problem”, that refers to events in the 1930s and 1940s. The video has garnered more than 1.5 million views; but is it any good?

No. If you are curious about this central problem of human history, you can do much better, dear reader, with some recommendations from the Burning Archive.

To his credit, Peterson did not try, on this occasion, to answer the question alone with his blend of Jungian psychology and conservative politics. He asked historian Niall Ferguson to help him answer his psychological question. Unfortunately, despite the popularity of the video, the pair revert to tired Anglo-American Cold War tropes with little historical insight.

Peterson has long been troubled by authoritarian tyranny, which for him is represented by Nazi Germany, the Soviet ‘Empire’, and, in contemporary times, radical identitarian politics or the progressive Left. Oddly, he sees the same roaming evil in the American students who protest what they believe to be a genocide in Gaza.

Since the cursed success of 12 Rules for Life, Peterson endured personal tragedy, addiction, and a deep struggle to find a lasting voice in the public realm. He has lost his sparkle and become fixated on the many shrill opponents who hounded him to a personal breakdown. I watched his video with open curiosity because I recall the genuine insights of Peterson in his 12 Rules phase. But those days are gone. He has stared too long into the fierce eyes of those hounds, and become a monster himself. His interview show is produced by a conservative media outlet associated with interests that shrilly defend American and Israeli foreign policy. Peterson has become just another North American talking head shouting from his lawn at the rest of the world.

There is no doubt Peterson comes from a sincere place. But he relies on narrow understanding, and a tendency to see only what he is looking for: loss of religious faith, the errors of the Marxists, denigrators of Western (aka American “Judaeo-Christian”) civilization. These biases prevent him seeing the true tragedy of German experience in the 20th century and how its evils did not live in that nation alone.

To some degree, Ferguson set him straight on the history. He described the context of the Weimar Republic, and highlighted Hitler’s dark charisma. But Ferguson played over-simplified the historiography by claiming that historians have tried to explain the German problem solely in terms of economic conditions. Peterson lapped up this jibe against the ‘Marxists’, which he associates with his opponents in the contemporary academy.

Crucially, Ferguson claimed Germany was different to America. It took a different path. Even though America suffered in the Depression, the indispensable nation was not tempted, so Ferguson claimed, down the path of authoritarianism and racialist thought. Ferguson favoured instead the argument put in The German Catastrophe by Friedrich Meinecke: the German elite lost its way in technocratic, moral collapse.

Here is the implied lesson for today’s times. The Western elite risk a similar moral collapse and may squib the fight for liberal democracy against authoritarianism in its modern guise: ‘woke’ politics, protests against Israel, Russia and, of course, China. Ferguson and Peterson’s conversation is not an authentic inquiry into the German problem. It is a call to arms issued to Western intellectuals to fight the next American crusading Cold War. It is no accident (as the Marxist historians always used to say) that Ferguson revives Meinecke’s book that was eagerly taken up by Anglo-American historiography in the early years of the Cold War.

Ferguson presented himself as a long student of this German question, which I found surprising since I thought he was more an historian of banks, finance and Henry Kissinger. Like his subject and mentor, Ferguson runs a consultancy and presents his slides at many conferences sponsored by oligarchic foundations. He is a talented, charming and canny man; but also a very good bluffer.

His conversation with Peterson is one long bluff. He ignores major writing on this issue since 1950 and misleads the audience on the deeper questions of tragedy, history and human experience suffered by Germany and other nations in the 20th century.

It is a pity. There are many ways to learn about the troubling German question, including autobiographical reflections on the “broken lives” of ordinary Germans during the 20th century. There are finer histories than Meinecke’s dated reflections, in which already by 1950, Gertude Himmelfarb, Peterson and Ferguson’s greater conservative predecessor, could see the weaknesses. There are deep dramatisations in films (e.g. Downfall) and television (e.g. Babylon Berlin).

Indeed, there is an information overload on the topic, which is heavily skewed towards an Anglo-American perspective. If you visit your local library, you will see dozens of books on Hitler, and next to none on Germany. In this overload, Peterson and Ferguson’s trite little video serves a need. Two over-confident Anglo-Americans deliver a confident message that cuts through. They tell the Anglo-American audience just what they want to hear: America, good; rest of the world, bad.

So, what can you do to gain some insight into the German case?

I prefer to describe this national problem as a case because the German experience was not their unique national path, but rather one of too many cases of human destructiveness in human history. It is not a unique problem, a fated destiny or a special path. People thought and acted in Germany in the 1930s in similar ways to how they have thought and acted elsewhere, even in America.

Adam Hochschild American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis (2024) punctures Ferguson’s smugness about America. His book described instead America in the 1920s as an “appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own.” The human tendency to destruction and overbearing thought haunted Max Sebald, who reflected more deeply than Jordan Peterson or Niall Ferguson on this universal question, as I discussed in this piece. Reading Sebald or Hochschild will make clear that the “German Problem” is not solely a German problem.

To gain insight into the German case, you will also need to gain perspective on the character of Hitler. I would recommend avoiding the cottage industry of Anglo-American biographies, although of them I understand the book by Ian Kershaw is the best. Rather I would recommend the German historian Volker Ullrich’s two-volume biography Hitler: Ascent: 1889-1939 (2017) and Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945 (2021). If you want the shorter, poignant story of the final collapse, portrayed in the iconic film Downfall, you can read Ullrich’s Eight Days in May - The Final Collapse of the Third Reich (2023).

However, the best way to cure yourself of Peterson’s and Ferguson’s bad history is to pull the lens back and look at the broader tragic experience of Germany in the twentieth century, as part of a broader European experience. This experience was not just Hitler and not just National Socialism. It was a long, difficult encounter with modernism in culture, history and politics. Babylon Berlin dramatizes that encounter fictionally. Two books by the American-German historian, Konrad Jarausch present its complex reality in first-class histories.

Broken Lives: how ordinary Germans experienced the 20th century (2018) presents the autobiographies of the cohorts of Germans who experienced defeat in two wars, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, division in the Cold War, American and Soviet occupation, and ultimately reunification. It explores the complexity of memory, trauma, hate, guilt, and moral experience.

Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century reframes the “German problem” as a European history, indeed a transatlantic history of the twentieth century. It is a Faustian drama of high hopes for Western civilization, descent into blood and ruin and ashes, and then redemption into a new European model of greater civility and moderation. Out of the Ashes frames this complex narrative against the “peculiar dialectic of European dynamism” and especially how Europe, not just Germany, wrestled with the tiger of modernity in culture, politics and war.

Together these two books will provide you a deeper understanding of the “German Problem” and a broader empathy for the experiences of the twentieth century. It will shatter the complacency of the American Century. In Broken Lives, Jarausch concluded:

“The horrific experiences and troubling memories of the twentieth century have transformed the majority of Germans, making them profoundly different from their European neighbours… Heeding the lessons of experience and memory has transformed many Germans into sincere democrats and pacifists who want to prevent a recurrence of earlier horrors.”

One of many tragedies of the conflict in Ukraine is that it is Americans, like Ferguson and Peterson, who urge these Germans to throw away those lessons to repeat, against new opponents, Operation Barbarossa, and to blind themselves again to the forced displacement of civilians in Palestine. Towards the end of Out of Ashes Jarausch makes the point that:

“The bloody course of the twentieth century taught the Europeans a chastened outlook on modernity - a lesson some overconfident Americans have yet to learn.”

This lesson remains in America, so convinced of its own impunity and exceptional destiny. Jordan Peterson’s videos and Niall Ferguson’s applied history obscure this lesson too. They do not reflect on the complex 20th century past. They are just more North American crusaders in the latest information war.

The world has more to learn about the real threats to world peace from German and Modern History than is dreamt of in America.

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