It’s been a while since I wrote about a book (really it’s been a while since I wrote about anything other than high school swimming and the cluttered inside of my own brain). It’s the day after the Trump indictment and I’m reading Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir. It seems appropriate.
Defying Hitler is very much unlike any other first-person account of life in Nazi Germany that I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of them. Haffner (born Raimund Pretzel) was just one of many educated, middle-class Germans who were first disgusted and then horrified by the Nazis; but unlike many of his compatriots, he not only left Germany, but spent much of his life afterward thinking and writing and speaking about what happened in Germany, and why, and what could and should have been done to stop the Nazis.
*****
Jumping ahead a bit, Haffner escaped the Nazis and went to England, where he was promptly clapped into an enemy alien internment camp in Devon. He was eventually moved to the Isle of Man. In England, Haffner wrote about Nazi Germany, emphasizing not just crimes against Jews and political opponents, but what he saw as flaws in the German character that made Germans particularly susceptible to Nazism. Not just the things that we usually associate with “German-ness,” like discipline and organization and hyper-competence, but attraction to what Haffner calls “comradeship.”
You would think that “comradeship” would be a good thing, wouldn’t you? But it’s not, not as Haffner describes it. Writing about his experience in a compulsory training camp for aspiring lawyers, he explains that by militarizing everything (including preparing for the German equivalent of the bar exam), the Nazis exploited the feeling of ride-or-die camaraderie experienced only by soldiers in battle. He further asserts that this experience - this comradeship under fire that exempts individuals from all individual responsibility and independence - is good and in fact indispensable in war, but inherently evil and corrupting in all other circumstances. Reflecting on his own experience in a Nazi training camp, Haffner writes that after a few weeks of training in quasi-military conditions, he and his comrades were no longer educated young men, but an “unthinking, indifferent, irresponsible mass.”
I’d never heard of Haffner until I found this book but according to the afterword written by his son, Oliver Pretzel, he was very prolific and very well known in both England and Germany, especially in the immediate post-war years. The manuscript for Defying Hitler was found among Haffner’s papers after his death, and his son published it, minus two missing sections, in 2000. It became an immediate best seller, much to Pretzel’s surprise. As Pretzel suggests, its success was partly attributable to its focus on answering, and not just asking the question “How could this have happened?” Haffner breaks it down in practical and philosophical terms, explaining exactly how and why a movement that was not universally popular and that was in fact repellent to many Germans, could still completely upend and destroy the country in practically no time. It is instructive and maddening and terrifying.
*****
In less than 24 hours, the former President of the United States will face arraignment in a courtroom in New York City. As much as I loathe him and as much as I hated everything about his misbegotten presidency, I’m not looking forward to this, neither the arraignment itself nor the likely chaotic and violent aftermath. I think that Donald Trump is more than willing to upend and destroy the country to save himself or to enrich himself at the expense of his foolish supporters.
*****
No, Trump isn’t Hitler, and 2023 America is not 1933 Germany. But it feels like everything could change in an instant, and if feels like we could all, a year from now, be asking ourselves how it happened, how it could possibly have happened, and so fast, too.
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