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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
A newly discovered memoir by a German classified as "Aryan" describes the insidious early spread of Nazism and how hard it was to resist.
Sep 3, 2002 | The vast majority of memoirs that have come out of Hitler's Germany have been written by Jews or others who were actively persecuted under Nazi rule. The oddity and the value of "Defying Hitler," a memoir by the late German historian Raimund Pretzel (who wrote under the name Sebastian Haffner), is that Haffner was what the Nazis classified as Aryan. A non-Nazi who despised the regime but was not immediately in danger from it, Haffner was able to write with the clarity that comes from being removed from the threat going on around him.
Haffner began this memoir after he emigrated to England in 1939. It was never finished or even known to exist until, following Haffner's death in 1999, his son Oliver Pretzel (who prepared the English translation), found it while going through his father's papers. In his introduction, Pretzel says that his father would not have been pleased by the book's publication, that the cool, lucid historical journalist his father became was often embarrassed by the rawness of his early work.
I'm not familiar with Haffner's later work (which includes such books as "From Bismarck to Hitler" and "The Meaning of Hitler") but "Defying Hitler" is not an embarrassment to anyone who values lucidity and reason. The book is carried forward by waves of contempt and disgust -- for the Nazis; for the people who believed them; for those who didn't, yet failed to do anything to stop them; and for the German character itself -- but reason is the source of its passion.
In a digression that comes about two-thirds of the way through "Defying Hitler," Haffner asks the reader why anyone should be interested in him, what possible significance his individual story could have given the magnitude of the events he's describing. He imagines a typical reader's reaction as "We should not be fobbed off with the private experiences of a young man who was not much better informed than we are, even if he was closer to the scene of these events and had no influence on them, who was not even a particularly well-placed witness."
His answer is that "if you read ordinary history books ... you get the impression that no more than a few dozen people are involved, who happen to be 'at the helm of the ship of state' and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history ... We anonymous others seem at best to be the objects of history ... who may be pushed forward or left standing, sacrificed or captured, but whose lives, for what they are worth, take place in a totally different world, unrelated to what is happening on the chessboard, of which they are quite unaware."
By not limiting his definition of history to the stories of the powerful (who are often presumed to be the only ones to make it), Haffner is, I think, committing an act of resistance. It isn't just that Haffner is acknowledging political and historical reality ("The most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large"), but that he is insisting on the democratic idea that people are not merely "objects of history." Writing in the midst of a crushing dictatorship, Haffner is saying that defiance can come even from an individual who simply refuses to accept the "truth" of the political rhetoric that is put before him.
The question that always springs from accounts of Hitler's Germany is "Why didn't the Germans resist?" Some of the reasons have long been obvious. There is a natural human instinct for survival, however odious the forms it takes or the lengths it may go to. And there is also the understandable refusal to believe that the worst will come to pass. Again and again in "Defying Hitler" Haffner's acquaintances talk of the Nazis as clowns who, because they cannot help revealing their true natures, are destined to fall out of power.
Haffner's endorsement of the idea that even dictators are powerless without the consent (or at least the passivity) of the masses means that "Defying Hitler" has no time for quibbling about how much the Germans knew and when; he was there shortly before World War II broke out, after all. Haffner takes it for granted that Germans knew about the brutality of Nazi rule -- brutality that, logically, would only increase as the state consolidated its power -- and that they lacked the will to resist it.
A thumbnail sketch of the book's theory of how Hitler was allowed to flourish goes something like this: Haffner writes of his fellow Germans as a country of people who "had a spiritual organ removed: the organ that gives men steadfastness and balance, but also a certain inertia and stolidity. It may variously appear as conscience, reason, experience, respect for the law, morality, or the fear of God." In Haffner's view, the German character that flourished in the '30s was formed in the years 1914 to 1923, during World War I and during the monetary and political chaos that followed. The uncertainty of the times, the changing governments, the periodic revolutionary outbursts, the escalating value of the mark to the point that the very idea of value was negated -- all of these combined to create a freedom from stability that was experienced by the populace, particularly the young, as thrilling.
