History

The peripatetic German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine presciently foresaw the emergence of something like Nazism a century before it actually emerged in Germany. He also somehow knew that Communism would play a major role in the world to come at the time it was a fringe belief.

(From “The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch by Amos Elon)

It’s always interesting to see reasonable people who emerge to be wildly prophetic.

Whenever I see such cases, I wonder if their other predictions were equally accurate or equally wild.

But above all, I’m interested in the principles that Heine used to arrive at his conclusions. How would you make predictions about this next century? Heine’s approach is to look at centuries of the past.

Be specific.    
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It seems that those principles are based on the idea that new ideas (communism) are a repetition of existing concepts (absolutism) and thus can be analysed the same way, and we also encounter yet another god is dead figure, a very early one, who looked to the past to understand what aspects of life would repeat in a future with less common Christianity.

I think it’s mostly luck and long time horizon. Europe was constantly in flux and at war so saying something along the lines of Germans will go crazy someday! And having it happen 100 years later is not that prophetic to me.