LITMIR.BIZ

      “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” wrote Hannah Arendt, a friend of Kurt and Helen’s, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience), and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought), no longer exists.”

      What Arendt pays less attention to in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism is the complicity of the deceived in their own deception. Today citizens of Germany and the United States presumably have agency to inspect and sort the fruits of a free press. But under the Nazis many Germans were content to let propaganda distract and mislead them. With the help of Sebastian Haffner, the journalist who spent much of his exile trying to explain the Nazi phenomenon, it’s worth exploring why.

      My father’s first years of sentient childhood fell during the Stresemann era, Germany’s interval of calm between 1924 and 1929, which historians have named after the country’s sure-handed foreign minister. But a generation of German men born just after 1900 were maladapted to this normalcy. They had grown up treating dispatches from the front as if they were sports scores, and then—after Versailles, during the Weimar-era hyperinflation—watched their mothers and young wives fill laundry baskets with cash simply to go to market. Through the decade beginning in 1914, this cohort had been trained, Haffner explains, to have

      the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, for joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills—accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos, and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.

      This would not be the case for my father and his Bildungsbürger family. But most Germans in the half generation Niko looked up at felt wrong-footed by the postwar era, and that experience scarred and radicalized many of them. Haffner again:

      Only a certain cultured class—not particularly small, but a minority of course—used to find, and still finds, similar sustenance and pleasure in books and music, in independent thought and the creation of a personal “philosophy.” . . . Outside this cultured class, the great danger of life in Germany has always been emptiness and boredom. . . .

      The menace of monotony hangs, as it has always hung, over the great plains of northern and eastern Germany, with their colorless towns and their all too industrious, efficient, and conscientious businesses and organizations. With it comes a horror vacui and the yearning for “salvation”: through alcohol, through superstition or, best of all, through a vast, overpowering, cheap mass intoxication.

      You can apply these words to some of the same parts of Germany today. There, descendants of the people Haffner referred to find their lives subsumed once more by a menacing monotony. Fear, hate, or some other base motivation rushes in to fill the vacui in their lives, and they turn on the thin scattering of immigrants among them.

      Haffner believed he knew what accounted for this. “In animals [it] is called ‘breeding,’” he wrote. “This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in the Germans. As a nation they are soft, unreliable, and without backbone.”

      Albert Einstein also remarked on the “inborn servility” of the German people, and more than three decades before the Nazis’ rise to power described his countrymen as being under the spell of Autoritätsdusel, a foolish faith in authority that he considered “the worst enemy of truth.”

      On this, Einstein and Arendt—German exiles turned Americans, one a physicist who sounded an early warning, the other a philosopher who performed a postmortem—agreed. In the end and above all, what matters is truth.

      After Günter Demnig, the Berlin artisan who engraves and lays virtually every brass Stolperstein himself, learned that his father flew bombing missions during the war, Demnig refused to speak to him for five years.

      It never occurred to me to force so pointed a reckoning with my own father. But I find myself hunting for evidence that, given a choice, my ancestors made one I can be proud of. At the same time I’m skeptical of any story that casts some relative in a virtuous light, for each raises the question: Has it survived the years only because it’s flattered by the perspective of history?

      Maria once told me of her first inkling that something horrific was going on. One day in the late thirties, Hans Albrecht’s brother-in-law, then the director of a Munich hospital, came by Hans and Elisabeth’s home in an agitated mood. Two SS officers had just brought in a couple of ailing men and insisted on remaining in the operating room for the requisite procedures. He believed the patients were inmates at Dachau, and that the SS was afraid of what they might say under anesthesia.

      Maria shared a second story, a kind of bookend to the first. During the fall of 1944 she was driving her mother to the Tegernsee, south of Munich, on a day so warm and clear that they left the top down on the car. Hearing an air-raid siren near Sauerlach, they stopped to take cover in the shade of trees by the roadside. “Suddenly we spotted three men with shaved heads creeping around in the brush,” Maria told me. “We called out ‘Don’t be afraid’ in English and French. They told us they had escaped from Dachau.”

      Hustling the fugitives into their car, they drove off, praying they wouldn’t be pulled over. They headed for the nearby home of the widow of a Munich doctor, a woman named Uschi, whom they knew and trusted, because her anti-Nazi sympathies had surfaced during a visit several months earlier, shortly after the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life. Uschi fed the escapees and let them bathe before sending them off toward the Swiss border in civilian clothes and with a map.

      Or so goes this story passed down to me. “True heroism in such times takes place not only on the battlefields,” Helen had written Maria from New York in early 1940, “but works in those souls who still try to live as if there were some eternity, and an accountability to that eternity.”

      With

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