A book and a challenge

Defying Hitler: A Memoir is haunting, horrifying, and mesmerizing. Its author, who assumed and then retained the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, came to adulthood observing -- and then unwillingly participating in -- the Nazi takeover and corruption of German civilization.

The book begins with a charming narrative of the life Haffner was born into in Berlin in 1907. His earliest memories were of martial excitement reading telegraphic reports of the battles of the World War I and his astonishment when the Kaiser's armies were defeated. How was that possible he wondered? The Weimar Republic, the government and political system which succeeded the old German empire after the shocking defeat was not very exciting, but it offered this economically comfortable, artistic young man the promise of a living in the law profession and a pleasant private life. Democratic politics were ugly and ineffectual; the emerging National Socialists (Nazis) were inept, uncouth, and scary. It was all background noise to be ignored as much as possible. And then Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor in 1933, the Nazi Party took all power in Germany, and the young Haffner had to find his inner compass in a world gone mad.

Haffner's son writes in an afterward:

... the book offers direct answers to two questions that Germans of my generation had been asking their parents since the war: “How were the Nazis possible?” and “Why didn’t you stop them?” The usual replies had been evasive. Frequently those questioned declared that they had known nothing until it was too late. My father’s vivid account makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible, and it shows how difficult resistance was, but it also demonstrates that it was plain from the outset what they stood for.

This compelling memoir of Haffner's life under the Nazis was never finished. He emigrated (illegally) to Britain in 1938 and through various twists and turns learned to write English so well that he edited major English newspapers, returning to Germany only in the 1950s. He then became a well-known political commentator. This memoir only came to light after his death. On publication in 2001, it became a bestseller in Germany.

The author's son explains:

My father, Sebastian Haffner, might not have been pleased to see this book published. He died in 1999 at the age of ninety-one, a celebrated German author and historical journalist with a reputation for books containing highly original, coolly and lucidly argued insights into the history of Germany in the twentieth century. This book, the first political book he wrote, was started in exile in England early in 1939. Abandoned in the autumn of that year, it may be original and lucid, but it is not cool. It is the passionate outburst of a young man whose career has been cut off and whose life has been turned inside out by his own countrymen, following a leader and an ideology he views only with contempt and disgust.

... With the outbreak of the war, understanding why the Germans had become Nazis became a somewhat academic question.

But what it is like to have the political system and aspirations of one's country overturned by empowered thugs cannot today, in the United States, be an academic concern. 

I have mapped out several additonal posts about aspects of Defying Hitler. There's all too much in it. For all the difference in time and history from this country, it cuts close to the bone as we watch the transformation of a conventional bourgeois party of rich white men into something far more evil.

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These reflections seem to demand a kind of postlude or coda. Here's one to start the series:

Political activist Brian Beutler: The only nice thing about staring doom in the face is it focuses the mind.