Defying Hitler: A Memoir

by Sebastian Haffner

translated from the German by Oliver Pretzel

Published by Plunkett Lake Press, April 2014

© Sarah Haffner and Oliver Pretzel

Translation copyright © Oliver Pretzel

First published in Germany by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt as Geschichte

eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914-1933
 ~ Other eBooks from Plunkett Lake Press ~

Also by Sebastian Haffner

Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-1919
Germany: Jekyll and Hyde
The Ailing Empire: Germany from Bismarck to Hitler
The Meaning of Hitler
The Rise and Fall of Prussia

By Sholom Aleichem
From the Fair

By Henri Alleg
The Question

By Jean-Denis Bredin
The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus

By Carl Djerassi
The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas’ Horse: The Autobiography of
Carl Djerassi

By Alfred Döblin
Destiny’s Journey

By Helen Epstein
Children of the Holocaust
Joe Papp: An American Life
Music Talks: The Lives of Classical Musicians
Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History
 By Charles Fenyvesi
When The World Was Whole: Three Centuries of Memories

By Frederic Grunfeld
Prophets Without Honour: Freud, Kafka, Einstein, and Their World

By Anthony Heilbut
Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in
America from the 1930s to the Present

By Eva Hoffman
Lost in Translation

By Peter Stephan Jungk

Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood

By Egon Erwin Kisch

Sensation Fair: Tales of Prague

By Heda Margolius Kovály

Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968

By Peter Kurth
American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson

By Hillel Levine
In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His
Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust

By Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon

The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good
Intentions
By Jan Masaryk
Speaking to My Country

By Melita Maschmann
Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self

By Albert Memmi
Portrait of a Jew
The Colonizer and the Colonized
The Liberation of the Jew
The Pillar of Salt

By Sheldon Novick
Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

By Susan Quinn
A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney
Marie Curie: A Life

By Santha Rama Rau

East of Home

By Vlasta Schönová
Acting in Terezín

By Susan Rubin Suleiman

Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook

By Joseph Wechsberg
Homecoming
The Vienna I Knew: Memories of a European Childhood
 By Victor Weisskopf
The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist

By Chaim Weizmann
Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann

By Charlotte Wolff
Hindsight: An Autobiography

By Friderike Zweig
Married to Stefan Zweig

By Stefan Zweig
Adepts in Self-Portraiture: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy
Amerigo: A Comedy of Errors in History
Balzac
Dostoevsky by Zweig
Freud by Zweig
Joseph Fouché: Portrait of a Politician
Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund
Freud
The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche
The World of Yesterday
Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky

For more information, visit www.plunkettlakepress.com

 Contents

Introduction

Prologue
Chapters 1 to 15

The Revolution
Chapters 16 to 25

Leave-Taking
Chapters 26 to 40

Afterword
Germany is nothing, each individual German is everything.

— GOETHE, 1808

But first the most important thing:

“What are you doing in these great times?

“Great I say; for times seem great

to me, when each man, driven
half to death by the era’s hate,
and standing in the place he’s given,

“Must willy-nilly contemplate

no less a thing than his own BEING!
A little breath, a second’s wait
May well suffice — you catch my meaning?”

— PETER GAN, 1935

 INTRODUCTION

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. In his old
age, my father tended to be slightly ashamed of the early works he had
published in England. What would he have thought of this one, unfinished,
raw, and revealing so much of his inner self?
It describes his life and the political events in Germany from 1914, when
he was seven years old, until 1933. The original plan was to continue the
narrative up to the time of his emigration to England in August 1938, but
the advent of the war caused him to stop working on the book, presumably
because its theme is the question of how it was possible for the Nazis to
come to power. Instead he started another one, whose subject was the more
urgent question of how to deal with Nazi Germany.
The memoir deliberately avoids the use of my father’s real name,
Raimund Pretzel, and so it seemed reasonable to publish it under his
pseudonym, Sebastian Haffner. It is a mixture of autobiography and
political analysis. Today the very reason that caused my father to lay it
aside, together with its closeness to the events it describes, seem to me to
give it its particular interest.

OLIVER PRETZEL
LONDON, NOVEMBER 2001
PROLOGUE
 ~1~

This is the story of a duel.

It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly
powerful, formidable, and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown
private individual. The duel does not take place in what is commonly
known as the sphere of politics; the individual is by no means a politician,
still less a conspirator or an enemy of the state. Throughout, he finds
himself very much on the defensive. He only wishes to preserve what he
considers his integrity, his private life, and his personal honor. These are
under constant attack by the government of the country he lives in, and by
the most brutal, but often also clumsy, means.
With fearful menace the state demands that the individual give up his
friends, abandon his lovers, renounce his beliefs and assume new,
prescribed ones. He must use a new form of greeting, eat and drink in ways
he does not fancy, employ his leisure in occupations he abhors, make
himself available for activities he despises, and deny his past and his
individuality. For all this, he must constantly express extreme enthusiasm
and gratitude.
The individual is opposed to all of that, but he is ill prepared for the
onslaught. He was not born a hero, still less a martyr. He is just an ordinary
man with many weaknesses, having grown up in vulnerable times. He is
nevertheless stubbornly antagonistic. So he enters into the duel — without
enthusiasm, shrugging his shoulders, but with a quiet determination not to
yield. He is, of course, much weaker than his opponent, but rather more
agile. You will see him duck and weave, dodge his foe and dart back,
evading crushing blows by a whisker. You will have to admit that, for
someone who is neither a hero nor a martyr, he manages to put up a good
fight. Finally, however, you will see him compelled to abandon the struggle
or, if you will, transfer it to another plane.
The state is the German Reich and I am the individual. Our fight may be
interesting to watch, like any fight (indeed I hope it will be), but I am not
recounting it just for entertainment. There is another purpose, closer to my
heart.
 My private duel with the Third Reich is not an isolated encounter.
Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of such duels, in which an
individual tries to defend his integrity and his personal honor against a
formidably hostile state, have been fought in Germany during the last six
years. Each is waged in total isolation and out of public view. Many of the
duelists, greater heroes or martyrs by nature, have taken the fight further
than I — as far as the concentration camp or the gallows — and may
perhaps be honored by a future monument. Others were defeated much
earlier and are now silent grumblers in the ranks of SA reservists or NSV
Blockwarts (block wardens).[i]
One might well consider my case as typical. From it, you can easily
judge the chances for mankind in Germany today. You will see that they are
pretty slim. They need not have been quite so hopeless if the outside world
had intervened. It is still in the world’s interest, I believe, for these chances
to be improved. It is too late to avoid a war, but it might shorten the war by
a year or two. Those Germans of goodwill who are fighting to defend their
private peace and their private liberty are fighting, without knowing it, for
the peace and liberty of the whole world.
Thus it still seems worthwhile to me to draw the attention of the world to
the unknown events inside Germany.
The book will tell a story, not preach a sermon; but it has a moral that,
like that “other and greater theme” in Elgar’s Enigma Variations, silently
“runs through and over the whole.” I will not mind if, after reading the
book, you forget all the adventures and incidents that I recount; but I would
be pleased if you did not forget the underlying moral.
 ~2~

Even before the totalitarian state advanced on me with threats and

challenges and taught me what it meant to experience history in person, I
had already lived through a fair number of “historical events.” All
Europeans of the present generation can make that claim, and none more so
than the Germans.
Those events have naturally left their mark on me, as on all my
compatriots. If one fails to appreciate this, one will not be able to
understand what happened later. There is, however, an important difference
between what happened before 1933 and what came afterward. We watched
the earlier events unfold. They occupied and excited us, sometimes they
even killed one or another of us or ruined him; but they did not confront us
with ultimate decisions of conscience. Our innermost being remained
untouched. We gained experience, acquired convictions, but remained
basically the same people. However, no one who has, willingly or
reluctantly, been caught up in the machine of the Third Reich can honestly
say that of himself.
Clearly, historical events have varying degrees of intensity. Some may
almost fail to impinge on true reality, that is, on the central, most personal
part of a person’s life. Others can wreak such havoc there that nothing is left
standing. The usual way in which history is written fails to reveal this.
“1890: Wilhelm II dismisses Bismarck.” Certainly a key event in German
history, but scarcely an event at all in the biography of any German outside
its small circle of protagonists. Life went on as before. No family was torn
apart, no friendship broke up, no one fled their country. Not even a
rendezvous was missed or an opera performance canceled. Those in love,
whether happily or not, remained so; the poor remained poor, and the rich
rich. Now compare that with “1933: Hindenburg sends for Hitler.” An
earthquake shatters 66 million lives.
Official, academic history has, as I said, nothing to tell us about the
differences in intensity of historical occurrences. To learn about that, you
must read biographies, not those of statesmen but the all-too-rare ones of
unknown individuals. There you will see that one historical event passes
over the private (real) lives of people like a cloud over a lake. Nothing stirs,
there is only a fleeting shadow. Another event whips up the lake as in a
thunderstorm. For a while it is scarcely recognizable. A third may, perhaps,
drain the lake completely.
I believe history is misunderstood if this aspect is forgotten (and it
usually is forgotten). So before I reach my proper theme, let me tell you my
version of twenty years of German history — the history of Germany as a
part of my private story. It will not take long, and it will make what follows
easier to understand. Besides, it may help us get to know each other a little
better.
 ~3~

My conscious life started with the outbreak of the Great War. It found
me, like most Europeans, on my summer vacation. Indeed, the worst thing
the war did to me was to spoil that vacation. With what merciful suddenness
the last war began, compared with the slow, tortured approach of the one
that is now imminent! On August 1, 1914, we had just decided not to take
the matter very seriously, and to continue our vacation. We were on a farm
estate in eastern Pomerania, lost to the world, in the midst of woods that I,
as a small boy, knew and loved like nothing else in the world. The return
from those woods to town, which usually took place in the middle of
August, was the saddest and most unbearable event of the year for me;
comparable, perhaps, only to the dismantling and burning of the Christmas
tree after the New Year.
On August 1 that return was still two weeks away. A few days earlier,
some disquieting things had happened. The newspaper contained something
never seen before: headlines. My father read it longer than usual, looked
very worried, and cursed the Austrians when he put it down. On one
occasion the headline was “WAR?” I kept hearing new words that I did not
understand, but which were soon to be explained by events: ultimatum,
mobilization, alliance, entente. A major who was staying on the same
estate, and with whose daughters I was on terms of teasing conflict,
suddenly received an “order” — another of those new words — and
departed precipitately. One of our host’s sons was also called up. As he
drove off to the station in a gig, we all ran after him shouting, “Be brave!,”
“Take care of yourself!,” “Come back soon!” Someone called, “Thrash the
Serbs!” and I, remembering what my father had said after reading the
newspaper, shouted “And the Austrians!” I was very surprised when
everyone burst out laughing.
It made a far deeper impression on me to hear that the best horses on the
estate, Hanne and Wachtel, were being taken away because (what a quantity
of words to be explained!) they belonged to the “cavalry reserve.” I loved
each and every horse on the estate, and the fact that two of the finest were
suddenly leaving was a great blow.
 Most depressing of all was hearing the word “return” every now and
then. “Perhaps we shall have to return tomorrow.” That sounded to me
exactly as if someone had said “Perhaps we shall die tomorrow.” Tomorrow
— and not after an eternity of two weeks!
In those days there was no wireless, of course, and the papers arrived in
our woods with twenty-four hours’ delay. They also contained far less than
nowadays. The diplomats were much more discreet. So it came about that,
on August 1, 1914, we decided that there was not going to be a war, and
that we were going to stay put.
I shall never forget that August 1. The memory of that day will always
instill in me a profound feeling of calm, of suspense resolved, of “all’s well
again.” It was a Saturday, with all the wonderful stillness that a Saturday
produces in the country. The day’s work was done. Bells of cattle returning
home tinkled through the air. Peace and quiet reigned over the entire farm.
The farmhands and girls were in their rooms scrubbing themselves for an
evening dance.
Downstairs, in the hall, with its hunting trophies on the walls and a row
of pewter jugs and bright earthenware plates ranged along a high shelf, I
found my father and our host, the owner of the estate, seated in deep
armchairs, solemnly and weightily discussing the situation. Of course, I did
not understand much of what they were saying and I can recall no details.
But I have not forgotten how calm and consoling their voices sounded, my
father’s higher tones against the deep bass of our host; how reassuring the
sight of their leisurely manner was, the fragrant smoke of their cigars rising
above them in slender columns; and how, the longer they talked, the clearer,
the better, and the more comforting everything became. Until, finally, it was
irrefutably clear that war was quite impossible and, therefore, we would not
let panic chase us back to town. Instead, as in all previous years, we would
stay on to the end of the holidays.
Having listened this far, I walked outside, my heart swelling with relief,
contentment, and gratitude, and gazed with feelings almost of piety at the
sun setting over the woods, which had been returned to me. The day had
been cloudy but had cleared toward evening and the sun, ruddy and gold,
floated in the sheerest blue, promising a cloudless new day. Cloudless as, I
was sure, would be the entire fourteen-day eternity of that vacation which
again lay before me.
 ~~~
When I was awakened next morning, packing was in full swing. At first,
I did not understand what had happened. The word “mobilization,” which
they had sought to explain a few days previously, conveyed nothing to me.
Anyhow, there was little time to explain anything. We had to clear out, bag
and baggage, that very afternoon. It was doubtful if a train would be
available any later.
“Today,” said our efficient maid, “everything’s nought point five.” The
meaning of this expression remains obscure to me. It seemed to signify that
everything was topsy-turvy, and it was a matter of each for himself.
Because of that I was able to steal away to the woods unnoticed. There they
found me only just before we were due to depart, sitting on a tree stump,
my head buried in my hands, weeping inconsolably, and quite unresponsive
to the explanation that there was a war on and everyone had to make
sacrifices. Somehow they managed to tuck me into the carriage and off we
went, drawn at a trot by two brown horses — not Hanne and Wachtel, they
were long gone — with clouds of dust rising behind and enveloping
everything. I never saw my childhood woods again.
That was the only time I experienced an aspect of the war as reality; and
I felt the natural pain of one from whom something is snatched and
destroyed. On the journey itself things already began to change; they
became more exciting, more adventurous — more glorious. The journey by
train lasted twelve hours instead of the usual seven. There were constant
stops, and each time a train full of soldiers passed us everyone rushed to the
windows, boisterously shouting and waving. Instead of a compartment to
ourselves, as had been usual when we traveled, we stood in the corridors, or
sat on our bags, tightly squeezed in the crowd, who talked and chattered
incessantly as though they were not strangers but old acquaintances. They
talked mostly of spies. During the journey I learned all about that romantic
trade, which I had never heard of before. We crossed every bridge very
slowly and each time this gave me a pleasantly creepy sensation. Perhaps a
spy had left a bomb underneath. It was midnight when we arrived in Berlin.
I had never in my life been up so late. The house was not ready for us, the
furniture still buried under dust sheets and the beds rolled up. They put me
to bed on a sofa in my father’s tobacco-scented study. War certainly had its
pleasurable side after all.
 ~~~
In the following days I learned an incredible amount in an incredibly
short time. I, a seven-year-old boy, who a short while ago hardly knew what
war meant, let alone “ultimatum,” “mobilization,” and “cavalry reserve,”
soon knew, as if I had always known, the “hows” and “wheres” and
“wherefores” of the war, and I even knew the “why.” I knew the war was
due to France’s lust for revenge, England’s commercial envy, and Russia’s
barbarism. I could speak these words quite glibly. One day I simply started
to read the newspaper and was surprised at how extraordinarily easy it was
to understand. I asked to be shown the map of Europe, and saw at a glance
that “we” could handle France and England, but experienced dumb anxiety
at the size of Russia. I consoled myself with the thought that the terrifying
numbers of Russians were counterbalanced by their unbelievable stupidity,
depravity, and incessant vodka swilling. I also learned, as quickly as if I had
always known them, the names of the various military chiefs, the strengths
of the armies, the types of armaments and displacements of ships, the
positions of the most important fortifications, and the locations of the front
lines. In fact, I soon realized that a game was being played here that made
life more exciting and thrilling than anything before. My enthusiasm for
this game, and my interest, held to the bitter end.
Here I must say a word in defense of my family. It was not my close
relatives who turned my head. The war oppressed my father from the very
start. He looked on the enthusiasm of the first weeks with skepticism, and
on the hate propaganda that followed with profound disgust, though, as a
loyal and patriotic man, he wanted Germany to win. He belonged to the
many liberal spirits of his generation who had secretly been convinced that
war among Europeans was a thing of the past. The war found him at a loss
and, unlike many others, he refused to indulge in wishful thinking. I
occasionally heard him utter words full of bitterness and doubt — not just
about the Austrians — that offended my newly acquired enthusiastic
bellicosity. No, it was not my father’s fault, nor any of my other relatives’,
that within a few days I became a fanatical jingoist and armchair warrior.
You must blame the atmosphere, the general mood, the tug of the
masses, which produced unimagined emotions in those who surrendered
themselves (even seven-year-old boys), and left those who stayed aloof
suffocating in a vacuum of arid emptiness and isolation. For the first time I
felt, with naive delight and without a trace of doubt or misgiving, the effect
of my people’s strange talent for creating mass hysteria (it may be a
compensation for their limited talent for individual happiness). I had no
idea that one might possibly exclude oneself from this general festive
delirium. It did not occur to me that there could be anything bad or
dangerous in something that so obviously filled one with joy and provided
such delightful intoxication.
For a schoolboy in Berlin, the war was something very unreal; it was like
a game. There were no air raids and no bombs. There were the wounded,
but you saw them only at a distance, with picturesque bandages. One had
relatives at the front, of course, and now and then one heard of a death. But
being a child, one quickly got used to their absence, and the fact that this
absence sometimes became irrevocable did not seem to matter. As to the
real hardships and privations, they were of small account. Naturally, the
food was poor. Later there was too little food, and our shoes had clattering
wooden soles, our suits were turned, there were school collections for bones
and cherry pits, and surprisingly frequent illnesses. I must admit, all that
made little impression. Not that I bore it all “like a little hero.” It was just
that there was nothing very special to bear. I thought as little about food as a
soccer enthusiast at a cup final. The army bulletins interested me far more
than the menu.
The analogy with the soccer fan can be carried further. In those
childhood days, I was a war fan just as one is a soccer fan. I would be
making myself out to be worse than I was if I were to claim to have been
caught up by the hate propaganda that, from 1915 to 1918, sought to whip
up the flagging enthusiasm of the first few months of the war. I hated the
French, the English, and the Russians as little as the Portsmouth supporters
detest Wolverhampton fans. Of course, I prayed for their defeat and
humiliation, but only because these were the necessary counterparts of my
side’s victory and triumph.
What counted was the fascination of the game of war, in which,
according to certain mysterious rules, the numbers of prisoners taken, miles
advanced, fortifications seized, and ships sunk played almost the same role
as goals in soccer and points in boxing. I never wearied of keeping internal
scorecards. I was a zealous reader of the army bulletins, which I would
proceed to recalculate in my own fashion, according to my own mysterious,
irrational rules: thus, for instance, ten Russian prisoners were equivalent to
one English or French prisoner, and fifty airplanes to one cruiser. If there
had been statistics of those killed, I would certainly not have hesitated to
“recalculate” the dead. I would not have stopped to think what the objects
of my arithmetic looked like in reality. It was a dark, mysterious game and
its never-ending, wicked lure eclipsed everything else, making daily life
seem trite. It was addictive, like roulette and opium. My friends and I
played it all through the war: four long years, unpunished and undisturbed.
It is this game, and not the harmless battle games we organized in streets
and playgrounds nearby, that has left its dangerous mark on all of us.
 ~4~

It may not seem worthwhile to describe the obviously inadequate

reactions of a child to the Great War at such great length. That would
certainly be true if mine were an isolated case, but it was not. This, more or
less, was the way an entire generation of Germans experienced the war in
childhood or adolescence; and one should note that this is precisely the
generation that is today preparing its repetition.
The force and influence of these experiences are not diminished by the
fact that they were lived through by children or young boys. On the
contrary, in its reactions the mass psyche greatly resembles the child
psyche. One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir
the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child’s
understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. A childish
illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and
hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious
political ideology twenty years later.
From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily
experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations,
which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than
anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision
of Nazism. That is where it draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to
the imagination, and its zest for action; but also its intolerance and its
cruelty toward internal opponents. Anyone who does not join in the game is
regarded not as an adversary but as a spoilsport. Ultimately that is also the
source of Nazism’s belligerent attitude toward neighboring states. Other
countries are not regarded as neighbors, but must be opponents, whether
they like it or not. Otherwise the match would have to be called off!
Many things later bolstered Nazism and modified its character, but its
roots lie here: in the experience of war — not by German soldiers at the
front, but by German schoolboys at home. Indeed, the front-line generation
has produced relatively few genuine Nazis and is better known for its
“critics and carpers.” That is easy to understand. Men who have
experienced the reality of war tend to view it differently. Granted, there are
exceptions: the eternal warriors, who found their vocation in war, with all
its terrors, and continue to do so; and the eternal failures, who welcome its
horrors and its destruction as a revenge on a life that has proved too much
for them. Göring perhaps belongs to the former type; Hitler certainly to the
latter. The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade
from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were
untouched by its realities.
Quite untouched? At least, you may protest, they suffered starvation.
True enough; but hunger scarcely interfered with the game. It may even
have enhanced it. Well-fed, satisfied men are not given to visions and
imaginings. At any rate, hunger alone did not bring disillusion. It was, one
could say, digested. Its final result has merely been a certain indifference to
undernourishment — one of the more admirable traits of this generation.
We were early accustomed to make do with a minimum of food. Most
Germans alive today have lived through three periods of malnutrition: first
during the Great War, then during the peak of the inflation in 1923, and
now, for the third time, under the slogan of “guns before butter.” The
German people have been well trained in this respect, and are not very
demanding.
I think the widespread opinion that the Germans lost the war because of
hunger is quite mistaken. By 1918 they had already gone hungry for three
years, and food had been scarcer in 1917 than in 1918. In my opinion, the
Germans abandoned their war effort not because they were starving, but
because they thought the war militarily lost and politically without prospect.
Be that as it may, the Germans will scarcely give up Nazism or a second
world war out of hunger. Today they consider hunger almost as a moral
duty and anyhow, it is not so hard to bear. They have become rather
ashamed of their natural needs. Paradoxically, the Nazis have acquired a
new, indirect propaganda weapon by giving the people too little to eat.
Anyone who grumbles is alleged to be doing so because they cannot get
butter or coffee. There is, of course, a great deal of grumbling in Germany,
but most people complain for very different, and generally far more
honorable, reasons than food shortages. They would be ashamed of
complaining because of those. People grumble far less about the scarcity of
food than one would assume from the Nazi newspapers; but these journals
know perfectly well what they are doing when they imply the contrary. For
rather than be thought to be complaining out of mere greed, most Germans
prefer to suffer in silence.
As I said above, that is one of their more likable traits.
 ~5~

In the course of the four war years from 1914 to 1918 I gradually lost all
sense of what peace might be like. The memory of prewar times slowly
paled. I could not imagine a day without the army bulletins. Such a day
would have been without its chief attraction. What else did life have to
offer? One went to school, learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, and
later Latin and history; one played with friends, one went out with one’s
parents — but was that a life? Life gained its thrill, the day its color, from
the current military events. If a great offensive was on, with the number of
prisoners running to five figures, fortifications captured, and “immeasurable
gains of war material,” it felt like the holiday season. There was an endless
supply of food for the imagination, and life was grand; just as later when
one was in love. If there were only tedious defensive operations, “All quiet
on the Western front” or “a strategic retreat, carried out according to plan,”
then life was all gray, the battle games with one’s friends lacked excitement
and school-work became twice as boring.
Every day I went to a police station a few blocks from our house. There
the army bulletin was posted several hours before it appeared in the
newspapers: a narrow sheet of white paper on a notice board, sometimes
long, sometimes short, covered with dancing capital letters, obviously
produced by a very worn duplicating machine. I had to stand on tiptoe and
strain my neck to decipher it. I did that every day, patiently and reverently.
 Sebastian Haffner’s family in 1918. He is seated between his parents; his two brothers and sister
stand behind them. (Oliver Pretzel)

As I said, I no longer had any clear conception of peace, though I had

some idea of the “Final Victory.” The Final Victory — the grand total that
would one day be the inevitable result of all the many partial victories
mentioned in the military bulletins — was for me what the Last Day and the
Resurrection are for a pious Christian, or the coming of the Messiah for a
religious Jew. It was the stupendous climax of all those triumphant bulletins
in which the numbers of prisoners, size of territory gained, and quantity of
booty outdid one another. What would follow was beyond imagining. I
waited for the Final Victory with eager but timorous trepidation. That it
would come was inevitable. The only question was what life could possibly
offer afterward.
Even in the months from July to October 1918 I still confidently
expected victory, although I was not so stupid as to fail to notice that the
army bulletins were getting gloomier and gloomier, and that my expectation
defied reason. Well, had not Russia been defeated? Did “we” not possess
the Ukraine, which would provide all that was needed to win the war? Were
our armies not still deep in France?
I could not fail to notice also that many, very many people, and indeed
finally almost everyone, began to take a different view of the war from
mine. Yet mine had originally been the common view. Indeed, it had
become mine only because it was the common view. It was most
exasperating that almost everyone seemed to have lost their taste for the
war just then — when only a little extra effort was all that was needed to
raise the army bulletins out of the mournful depression of “enemy attempt
to overrun our lines defeated” and “orderly withdrawal into prepared
positions” and bring them into the brilliant sunshine of “thirty-mile
advance,” “break through enemy lines,” and “thirty thousand prisoners”!
Outside the shops where I queued up for artificial honey or skimmed
milk (my mother and the maid could not always spare the time, and I
sometimes had to help out) I used to hear the women grumble and utter
ugly words that showed their total lack of comprehension. I was not always
content to listen. Sometimes I would speak out fearlessly in my rather high-
pitched voice and lecture them on the need to “hold out.” The women
would laugh at first, then begin to wonder, and sometimes become
touchingly diffident and subdued. I would leave the field of verbal battle
victorious, unself-consciously swinging a quarter liter of skimmed milk...
But the army bulletins refused to improve.
From October onward the revolution drew near. Like the war, it
approached with a flurry of new words and ideas; and yet, like it, too, it
finally came almost as a surprise. There the comparison ceases. The war,
whatever one might say about it, was something complete in itself,
something that came off, a success in its way — at least at first. One cannot
say that of the revolution.[ii]
It has been of ominous significance for the later history of Germany that
in spite of all the terrible misfortunes that the war brought, its outbreak was
associated in almost everyone’s memories with a number of unforgettable
days of great exaltation and intensity, while the revolution of 1918, though
it finally produced peace and freedom, only awakens dark memories in the
minds of most Germans. The very fact that the war began in brilliant
summer weather and the revolution in cold, wet November fog was a severe
handicap for the latter. That may sound ridiculous, but it is nevertheless
true. The republicans felt it later themselves. They never really wished to be
reminded of November 9 and have never celebrated it. The Nazis who
countered November 1918 with August 1914 always had an easy victory.
Though November 1918 meant the end of the war, husbands restored to
wives, and life restored to men, it recalls no sense of joy, only a bad mood,
defeat, anxiety, senseless gunfights, confusion, and bad weather.
I myself saw little of the actual revolution. On Saturday the papers
announced that the Kaiser had abdicated. I felt somehow surprised that
there was so little fuss. It was just another newspaper headline, and I had
seen bolder ones during the war. Incidentally, he had not yet abdicated
when the headlines appeared, but as he soon did so that was not very
important.
The fact that the very next day, on Sunday the tenth, our newspaper was
suddenly called Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) instead of Tägliche
Rundschau (Daily Review) gave me a much greater shock than the headline
“Kaiser Abdicates.” A group of revolutionary printers had apparently
demanded the new name. The contents were, however, little changed. A few
days later, it reverted to Tägliche Rundschau. This small detail is
emblematic of the revolution of 1918 as a whole.
That Sunday I heard shots fired for the first time. During the whole of
the war I had not heard a single shot. Yet now, when it was over, they began
shooting in Berlin. We stood by the open windows in one of our back rooms
and heard the faint but distinct sounds of spasmodic machine-gun fire. I felt
uneasy. Someone explained the difference between the sounds of heavy and
light machine guns. We tried to guess where the fighting was taking place.
The shooting sounded as if it came from the neighborhood of the palace.
Was the Berlin garrison defending itself after all? Was the revolution
perhaps not going so smoothly?
If I had indulged in such hopes — for it will scarcely surprise the reader
to hear that I was wholeheartedly against the revolution — they were
disappointed the next day. It turned out to have been a rather pointless
brawl between rival revolutionary groups, each claiming possession of the
royal stables. There was no sign of resistance. The revolution had clearly
triumphed.
What did that mean? Glorious mayhem perhaps, everything topsy-turvy,
adventure and colorful anarchy? Nothing of the sort. That same Monday
morning, our most feared master, a choleric tyrant with wicked, rolling little
eyes, declared that at least “here,” at school, no revolution had taken place,
and discipline would continue to prevail. Doubtless in pursuance of this
edict, those boys who had especially distinguished themselves playing
revolution during the break were made to bend over and receive a
demonstrative beating. All of us who witnessed the punishment felt it as an
evil omen. There was something not quite right about a revolution when the
next day schoolboys were beaten for playing at it. Nothing could come of
such a revolution. Nothing did.
Meanwhile the war was still not quite over. It was clear to me, as to
everyone, that the revolution was synonymous with the end of the war; an
end that was obviously not the Final Victory because the necessary little
extra effort had inexplicably not been made. I had no idea what the end
without victory would look like. I would have to see it to comprehend it.
As the war took place somewhere in distant France, in an unreal world,
from which the army bulletins appeared like messages from “the beyond,”
its end also had no reality for me. Nothing changed in my immediate,
physical surroundings. The event belonged exclusively to the dream world
of the great game, in which I had lived the last four years; a world that had
become far more important to me than the real one.
On November 9 and 10 army bulletins of the usual kind still appeared:
“enemy breakthrough attempts repulsed,” “after courageous resistance, our
troops withdrew into previously prepared positions.” On the eleventh there
was no army bulletin on the notice board at my local police station when I
appeared there at the usual time. Empty and black, the board yawned at me.
Horror overcame me to think that the board, which had sustained my spirit
and nourished my dreams every day for years, would remain empty and
black forevermore. I walked on. There must be some news from the front
somewhere. If the war was over (and one had to reckon with that
possibility) there must at least have been some sort of end worth reporting,
something like the final whistle at a soccer match. A few streets away there
was another police station. Perhaps there was a bulletin there.
There was none there either. The police had obviously also been infected
by the revolution, and the old order had collapsed. I could not come to
terms with it. I wandered on through the streets in the fine November
drizzle, looking for news. The neighborhood became less familiar.
Somewhere, I saw a bunch of people gazing into the window of a
newsagent’s shop. I joined them and carefully edged my way to the front.
There I could read what they were all reading in silence and gloom. It was
an early edition of a newspaper and it bore the headline “Armistice Signed.”
Underneath were the terms, a long list. I read them. As I read, I turned to
stone.
How shall I describe my feelings — the feelings of an eleven-year-old
boy whose entire inner world has collapsed? However much I try, I find it
difficult to find an equivalent in ordinary, everyday life. Certain fantastic
catastrophes are possible only in dream worlds. Maybe one could imagine
someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his
bank, and when one day he asks for a statement, discovers a gigantic
overdraft instead of a fortune; but that happens only in dreams.
The terms no longer spoke the careful language of the army bulletins.
They spoke the merciless language of defeat; as merciless as the bulletins
had been, when they spoke of enemy defeats. The fact that such a thing
could happen to “us,” not as an isolated incident but as the final result of
victory upon victory, just would not fit in my head.
I read the terms again and again, craning my neck, as I had done for the
last four years. At length I withdrew from the crowd and wandered off, not
knowing where. My search for news had brought me into a neighborhood
that was almost unknown to me, and soon I found myself in one even less
familiar. I drifted through streets I had never seen before. The thin
November rain was still falling.
Like these streets, the whole world had become strange and unsettling.
Apart from the fascinating rules I knew, the great game had clearly had
other secret rules that I had failed to grasp. There must have been
something deceitful and false about it. Where could one find stability and
security, faith and confidence, if world events could be so deceptive? If
triumph upon triumph led to ultimate disaster, and the true rules of history
were revealed only retrospectively in a shattering outcome? I stared into the
abyss. I felt a horror for life.
I do not think the German defeat could have come as a greater shock to
anyone than to the eleven-year-old boy wandering through those unfamiliar,
wet November streets, not seeing where he went or feeling the drizzle
gradually drenching him. I certainly do not think it was a greater shock to
Corporal Hitler, who at about the same time could not bear to listen to the
announcement of the defeat at the military hospital in Pasewalk. He reacted
far more dramatically than I. “It became impossible for me,” he writes, “to
stay on and listen. While all went black again about my eyes, I groped and
tumbled my way back to the dormitory, flung myself on my bed, and buried
my burning head in the sheets and pillows.” Whereupon he decided to
become a politician.
His gesture was far more childish and self-willed than mine, and not
only on the surface. When I compare the deeper conclusions that Hitler and
I drew from the same painful experience — the one fury, defiance, and the
resolve to become a politician, the other doubt as to the validity of the rules
of the game, and a horrified foreboding of the unpredictability of life —
then I cannot help thinking that the reaction of the eleven-year-old child
was more mature than that of the twenty-nine-year-old adult.
Undoubtedly, at that moment it was written in the stars that I could never
be on friendly terms with Hitler’s Reich.
 ~6~

For the moment, however, I did not have to deal with Hitler’s Reich, but
with the revolution of 1918, and the German Republic.
The effect of the revolution on me and my contemporaries was exactly
the reverse of that of the war. The war had left our actual everyday lives
unaltered, often to the point of boredom, while it supplied an inexhaustible
fund of raw material for our imaginations. The revolution brought many
changes to our daily lives, and the novelty was vivid and exciting enough
— I shall soon be going into that — yet it failed to engage our
imaginations. Unlike the war, it did not provide a simple, plausible narrative
to explain events. Its crises, strikes, gunfights, coups, and demonstrations
remained contradictory and confusing. It never became clear what was
going on. We felt no enthusiasm for it. We did not even understand it.
The revolution of 1918 was not planned or premeditated. It was a by-
product of the military collapse. Feeling betrayed by their military and
political leaders, the people themselves — there was virtually no leadership
— chased them away. Rather, they shooed them away. At the first
threatening, alarming gesture all those in authority, from the Kaiser
downward, disappeared without a squeak and without a trace; just as the
leaders of the republic disappeared in 1932-33. German politicians, from
the right to the left, have no skill in the art of losing.
Power lay in the streets. Among those who seized it there were very few
true revolutionaries; and even they seem in retrospect to have had no clear
conception of what they wanted and how they were going to get it. It was
not just bad luck, but a sign of lack of talent, that they were almost all
disposed of within six months.
Most of the leaders were embarrassed, respectable men, grown old and
comfortable in the habit of loyal opposition, quite overcome to find power
suddenly thrust into their hands and eager to be rid of it as soon as decently
possible. Among them there were a number of saboteurs who were resolved
to “tame” the revolution, that is to say, betray it. The most notorious of
these was the monstrous Noske.[iii]
The game was soon under way. While the real revolutionaries attempted
a number of badly organized and amateurish coups, the saboteurs organized
the counterrevolution, with the help of the Free Corps who, in the guise of
government troops, proceeded to mop up the revolution with bloody
thoroughness.
With the best will in the world one could find nothing inspiring in the
spectacle. As middle-class boys, who moreover had only just been roughly
jolted out of a four-year-long patriotic intoxication with war, we were
naturally against the Red revolutionaries; against Karl Liebknecht, Rosa
Luxemburg, and their Spartacus League.[iv] Although we only vaguely
knew that they would “rob us of everything,” probably liquidate those of
our parents who were well-off, and altogether make life frightful and
“Russian,” we had thus to be in favor of Ebert[v] and Noske and their Free
Corps. But, alas, it was impossible to work up any enthusiasm for these
figures. The spectacle they offered was too obviously repellent, the stench
of treachery that clung to them was too pervasive; it was plain even to the
nose of an eleven-year-old boy. (I reiterate that we should take note of the
political reactions of children. What “every child knows” is generally the
last irrefutable quintessence of a political development.) There was
something loathsome about the way the brutal, martial Free Corps — whom
we would perhaps have liked to restore the Kaiser and Hindenburg[vi] —
fought so emphatically for “the government”; that is, for Ebert and Noske,
people who had obviously betrayed their own cause and who, incidentally,
even looked like traitors.
What is more, as events impinged on us more closely, they became much
more obscure and less intelligible than before, when they had taken place in
distant France and had been placed in their proper perspective by the daily
army bulletin. At times one heard shots fired every day, but one rarely
found out why.
Some days there was no electricity, on others no trams, but it was never
clear whether it was because of the Spartacists or the government that we
had to use oil lamps or go on foot. Leaflets were thrust into one’s hands or
one saw posters proclaiming “The Hour of Reckoning Is Near.” But to find
out whether expressions such as “traitors,” “murderers of the workers,” or
“unscrupulous demagogues” meant Ebert and Scheidemann[vii] or
Liebknecht and Eichhorn[viii] one had to wade through paragraphs of
vituperation and tangled denunciations. Demonstrations were a daily event.
A slogan would be shouted by one of the demonstrators, and the rest would
yell “Hoch” (“Up”) or “Nieder” (“Down”) as the case may be. From afar
one could only hear the chorus of “Hoch” or “Nieder”; the solo voice that
had provided the cue was inaudible, so one did not know what it was about.
This went on, at intervals, for six months. Then it began to die down. By
then it had long lost all meaning. For the fate of the revolution had been
sealed — though naturally I did not know this at the time — when on
December 24, 1918, after a victorious street battle in front of the palace, the
workers and sailors dispersed and went home to celebrate Christmas. After
the holidays, they were on the warpath again, but in the meantime the
government had amassed their Free Corps in sufficient numbers. For two
weeks there were no newspapers in Berlin, only gunfights near and far —
and rumors. Then the newspapers appeared again. The government had
won. Next day came the news that Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
had been shot, both “while attempting to escape.” As far as I know, that was
the origin of “shooting while attempting to escape,” which has since
become the conventional manner of dealing with political opponents east of
the Rhine. At that time people were so unused to it that the words were
taken literally and believed. Civilized times indeed!
After that the revolution was doomed, but there was no respite. On the
contrary, the fiercest street battles did not take place in Berlin until March
1919 (and April in Munich), when it was only a matter of, so to speak,
burying the corpse of the revolution. In Berlin they broke out when Noske
disbanded the “People’s Naval Division,” the original regiment of the
revolution, formally and without ceremony. Its members refused to be
disbanded and put up resistance, joined by workers from the northeast of
Berlin. For a week, the “misguided masses,” who could not understand how
their own government could lead their enemies against them, engaged in a
desperate, hopeless, and bitter struggle. The outcome was certain from the
start and the vengeance of the victors was frightful. It is interesting to note
that, even then, in the spring of 1919, when the revolution of the left tried in
vain to establish itself, the Nazi revolution was already fully formed and
potent. It lacked only Hitler. The Free Corps, who had rescued Noske and
Ebert, resembled the later Nazi storm troopers, which most of them later
joined. They certainly had the same outlook, behavior, and fighting
methods. They had already invented the device of “shooting while
attempting to escape,” and had made significant advances in the science of
torture. They also anticipated the events of June 30, 1934,[ix] with their
bold habit of lining less important opponents up against a wall, without
many questions or distinctions. All that was lacking was the theory to
justify the practice. That would be provided by Hitler.
 ~7~

When I think about it, I have to say that by 1919 even the Hitler Youth
had almost been formed. For example, in our school class we had started a
club called the Rennbund Altpreussen (Old Prussia Athletics Club), and
took as its motto “Anti-Spartacus, for Sport and Politics.” The politics
consisted in occasionally beating up a few unfortunates, who were in favor
of the revolution, on the way to school. Sports were the main occupation.
We organized athletics championships in the school grounds or public
stadia. These gave us the pleasurable sensation of being decidedly anti-
Spartacist. We felt very important and patriotic, and ran races for the
fatherland. What was that, if not an embryonic Hitler Youth? In truth,
certain characteristics later added by Hitler’s personal idiosyncrasies were
lacking, anti-Semitism for one. Our Jewish schoolmates ran with the same
anti-Spartacist and patriotic zeal as everyone else. Indeed, our best runner
was Jewish. I can testify that they did nothing to undermine national unity.
During the fighting in March 1919, the Rennbund’s activities were
temporarily interrupted while our sports grounds were used as battlefields.
Our neighborhood became the main area of street fighting. Our school was
the headquarters of the government troops, and the adjacent elementary
school was used as a base by the Reds. The German name for elementary
school is Volksschule, people’s school. How apt! For days the battle raged
for possession of these two buildings. Our headmaster, who had remained
in his school quarters, was shot dead. When we saw it again, the façade of
the building was pockmarked with bullet holes. A large bloodstain that
could not be removed remained under my desk for many weeks. We had
unscheduled vacations for weeks on end, and experienced our baptism of
fire. Whenever we could, we stole away and headed for the fighting in order
“to see something.”
There was not much to be seen. Even the street fighting demonstrated
“the emptiness of the modern battlefield.” There was all the more to be
heard. We were soon quite hardened to the sound of ordinary machine guns,
light artillery, and even trench fire and got excited only by mortars or heavy
artillery.
 It became a sport to enter blockaded streets. We would steal through
houses, yards, and basements and suddenly appear behind the blockading
troops, well beyond the notices saying “Halt! Anyone Found Beyond This
Point Will Be Shot.” We were not shot.
The barricades did not always function very well. Normal civilian life
often mingled grotesquely with military operations. I remember a particular
beautiful Sunday, one of the first warm Sundays of the year, with crowds of
people strolling down a broad tree-lined street. It was utterly peaceful, not a
shot to be heard anywhere. Suddenly the people dived left and right into the
doorways of the houses. Armored cars came rattling by. We heard
earsplitting detonations frighteningly close by. Machine guns sprang to life.
All hell was let loose for five minutes. Then the armored cars rattled off and
disappeared. The machine guns subsided. We boys were the first to emerge.
We saw a strange sight. The long avenue was deserted, but piled in front of
each house were heaps of broken glass of varying sizes: all the windows
had been blown out by the explosions. Then, as nothing more seemed to be
happening, the strollers timidly reappeared. A few minutes later the street
was again bathed in the atmosphere of a spring Sunday, as though nothing
had happened.
It was all eerily unreal, and the details remained unexplained. I never
found out, for instance, what this gunfight had actually been about. The
newspapers did not mention it. They did reveal, however, that on this very
Sunday, while we were strolling under the blue spring sky, a few kilometers
away, in the suburb of Lichtenberg, several hundred (perhaps several
thousand — the figure fluctuated)[x] captured workers had been rounded up
and “disposed of” in batches by firing squads. That frightened us. It was so
much closer and more real than anything that had happened far away in
France.
However, nothing followed after the massacre. None of us knew any of
the dead. The newspapers ran other news the next day. So the fright soon
passed. The year advanced, spring merged into a beautiful summer. School
began again, and the Rennbund Altpreussen resumed its beneficent,
patriotic activities.
 ~8~

Oddly enough, the republic held up. Oddly — seeing that, from the
spring of 1919 at the latest, its defense was placed exclusively in the hands
of its enemies. All the militant revolutionary organizations had been
destroyed, their leaders killed, their rank and file decimated. Only the Free
Corps carried arms — the Free Corps, who were already good Nazis in all
but name. Why did they not overthrow their weak masters and set up the
Third Reich there and then? It would hardly have been difficult.
What stopped them? Why did they disappoint the hopes of so many, not
only us members of the Rennbund Altpreussen? Probably for the same
highly irrational reason that later led the army to disappoint the many who,
during the first years of the Third Reich, thought it would soon put an end
to Hitler’s monstrous corruption of its ideals and aspirations. It was because
the German military lacked the moral courage to make its own decisions
and take responsibility for them.
As Bismarck once remarked in a famous speech, moral courage is, in
any case, a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserts a German completely the
moment he puts on a uniform. As soldier and officer, he is indisputably and
outstandingly courageous on the field of battle. He is usually even prepared
to open fire on his own compatriots if ordered to do so. Yet he is as timid as
a lamb at the thought of opposing authority. The suggestion of such a
confrontation always conjures up the nightmare of a firing squad and he is
immediately paralyzed. It is not death he fears, but this particular death,
which scares him out of his wits. That makes any idea of insubordination or
a coup d’état altogether impossible for the German military — whoever
happens to be in power.
The only apparent counterexample actually corroborates my assertion. It
is the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, an attempted coup d’état by
antirepublican political outsiders. Though they had the wholehearted
support of half the republican army leadership, and the sympathy of the
rest; though the government immediately revealed its weakness, and offered
no resistance; though men with the military magnetism of Ludendorff
belonged to its party, only a single body of soldiers, the so-called Ehrhardt
Brigade, finally joined the undertaking. All the other Free Corps remained
“loyal to the government” — but they afterward saw to it that this attempted
putsch of the right ended with reprisals against the left.
It is a dismal story, quickly told. One Saturday morning, the Ehrhardt
Brigade marched through the Brandenburg Gate. The government fled and
sought safety, having quickly proclaimed a general strike and called out the
workers.
Wolfgang Kapp, the leader of the putsch, announced the national
republic under the black, white, and red flag of the old Reich. The workers
went on strike. The army remained “loyal to the government.” The new
administration never got started, and five days later Kapp abdicated.
The government returned and ordered the workers back to work. Now
they demanded their reward. At least some of the most obviously
compromised ministers should be dismissed, first and foremost the
notorious Noske. Thereupon the government marched its loyal troops
against the workers. The troops once more carried out their bold and bloody
deeds, particularly in western Germany, where veritable battles were fought.
Many years later, I heard a former member of the Free Corps, who had
been there, talk about it. He spoke, not without a certain good-natured
sympathy, of the victims who had fallen or been “shot while attempting to
escape” in their hundreds. “That was the cream of the working-class youth,”
he observed thoughtfully and sadly. This was simply how his mind had filed
away these memories. “Brave lads, some of them,” he declared, continuing,
“not like 1919 in Munich. Those were ne’er-do-wells, loafers, and Jews. I
didn’t have a spark of sympathy for them. But 1920, in the Ruhr, that was
really the cream of the working-class youth. I felt really sorry for many of
them. But they were so pigheaded. They left us no choice but to shoot them.
When we wanted to give them a chance, and during the interrogation kept
asking them, ‘So you’ve only been led astray, haven’t you?’ they would
yell, ‘No!’ and ‘Down with the murderers of the working class and the
traitors to the people!’ Well, there was nothing for it but to shoot them, a
dozen at a time. In the evening our colonel said he had never felt so sad at
heart in all his life. Yes, that was the cream of the working-class youth that
fell there in the Ruhr in 1920.”[xi]
Of course, I knew nothing of this at the time. The Ruhr was far away. In
Berlin, life was less dramatic. There was not much bloodshed or barbarity.
After the savage affrays of 1919, this March of 1920 seemed eerily quiet. It
was uncanny because nothing happened. Everything just came to a
complete halt. A peculiar revolution.
This is how I experienced it. It started one Saturday. At midday at the
grocer’s, people were saying that now “the Kaiser would come back.” In the
afternoon there were no lessons at school — we often used to have school
only during the afternoons. Half the school building had been closed on
account of the coal shortage and two schools shared the same building, one
in the morning, the other in the afternoon. In the playground we played
“Nationalists and Reds” in the fine weather, though this was difficult
because no one wanted to be a Red. It was all quite satisfactory, just a little
unbelievable. It had happened so suddenly, and no one knew any details.
These were not forthcoming, for by that evening there were no
newspapers and, as we soon discovered, no electricity. Next morning, for
the first time, there was no water. The mail did not arrive. There was no
public transport. The shops were closed. There was, in a word, nothing.
At certain street corners in our neighborhood there were some old wells,
independent of the waterworks. They now came into their own. People
queued up in hundreds, carrying cans and jugs to fetch their ration of water.
A couple of strong young men operated the hand pump. On the way back,
the full jugs were carefully balanced to avoid spilling a drop of the precious
liquid.
Otherwise, as I said, nothing happened. Indeed, in a way, less than
nothing. Even the usual everyday occurrences ceased. There were no shots,
no demonstrations and processions, no mob gatherings, and no street
debates. Nothing.
On Monday there was no school. An air of satisfaction still prevailed
there, mingled with a slight anxiety because things seemed to be proceeding
oddly. Our sports teacher, who was a great nationalist (all our masters were
nationalists, but none more than he), declared several times with conviction,
“You can tell at once there’s another hand at the helm.” In truth one could
tell no such thing. He spoke that way to console himself for the absence of
anything observable.
From school we went off to Unter den Linden, the broad avenue in
central Berlin. We felt darkly that one ought to be in Unter den Linden on
such momentous days in the fatherland’s history, and also we hoped we
might see or find out something. There was nothing to see or find out. Here
and there a few bored soldiers stood behind superfluously posted machine
guns. No one came to attack them. It felt strangely like a Sunday, quiet and
peaceful. That was the effect of the general strike.
The following days were merely boring. Queuing for water at the wells,
which had at first had the charm of novelty, soon became as great a
nuisance as did the refusal of the WC to function, the lack of news of any
kind and even of letters, the difficulty of procuring food, the total blackout
every night, and the fact that every day seemed like Sunday. Besides, there
was nothing to arouse our nationalist enthusiasm, no parades, no appeals “to
my people.” Nothing. If only there had been the wireless then! Just once
there were posters on the walls: “The outside world will not intervene.” So
there was not even going to be that!
Then suddenly one day we learned that Kapp had stood down. There
were no more particulars to be had, but as we heard occasional shots next
day, we realized that the good old government was back. Soon the water
pipes began to wheeze and gurgle. A little later school reopened. The
atmosphere there was somewhat dampened. Then even the newspapers
reappeared.
After the Kapp Putsch, interest in politics flagged among us boys. All
parties had been compromised and the entire topic lost its attraction. The
Rennbund Altpreussen was dissolved. Many of us sought new interests:
stamp collecting, for example, piano playing, or the theater. Only a few
remained true to politics, and it struck me for the first time that, strangely
enough, those were the more stupid, coarse, and unpleasant among my
schoolfellows. They proceeded to enter the “right sort” of leagues, the
German National Youth Association or the Bismarck League (there was still
no Hitler Youth), and soon they showed off knuckledusters, truncheons, and
even blackjacks in school. They boasted of dangerous nocturnal poster-
pasting or poster-removing expeditions and began to speak a certain jargon
that distinguished them from the rest of us. They also began to behave in an
unfriendly way toward the Jewish boys.
About this time, not long after the Kapp Putsch, I saw one of them
scribble a strange design in his notebook during a tedious lesson. Again and
again the same pattern was repeated. A few strokes combined in an
unexpected, pleasing way to form a symmetrical, boxlike ornament. I was
immediately tempted to copy him. “What is that?” I asked in a whisper, as it
was during a lesson, boring though that was. “Anti-Semitic sign,” he
whispered back in telegraphic staccato. “The Ehrhardt Brigade wore it on
their helmets. Means ‘Out with the Jews.’ You ought to know it.” He went
on scribbling.
It was my first acquaintance with the swastika. It was the only legacy of
the Kapp Putsch. One saw it quite frequently in the following months.
 ~9~

It was another two years before politics became interesting again, and
that was due to the appearance of one man — Walther Rathenau.
Never before or afterward did the German Republic produce a politician
who so deeply stirred the imagination of young people and the masses.
Gustav Stresemann and Heinrich Brüning, who enjoyed longer periods of
power and whose policies could be said to have molded two brief periods of
history, never radiated the same personal charisma. Hitler alone can be
compared to Rathenau, and that also with a reservation: so much publicity
has been deliberately focused on him that it is impossible to distinguish the
genuine appeal of the man from the fabrication.
Political stardom was unknown in Rathenau’s day, and he never did
anything to attract the limelight. He is the most striking example I have
experienced of the mysterious developments that mark a “great” man’s
appearance in public life: the immediate contact with the masses across all
barriers; the general sense of something in the air; the excitement, and the
way even boring events become interesting; the impression that there is “no
getting away from the man”; the inevitable passionate partisanship; the
sudden growth of legends and a personality cult; love and hate; all this
involuntarily and unavoidably, almost subconsciously. It is like the effect of
a magnet on a heap of iron filings — just as irrational, just as inevitable,
just as inexplicable.
Rathenau[xii] became minister of reconstruction, then foreign minister
— and immediately one sensed that politics were on the move again. When
he attended an international conference, one felt for the first time that
Germany was being properly represented. He concluded an agreement for
reparation deliveries in kind with France’s Loucheur, and a treaty of
friendship with Russia’s Chicherin.
Though scarcely anyone had previously had any idea what “deliveries in
kind” meant, and the text of the Treaty of Rapallo, with its formal,
diplomatic phraseology, conveyed nothing to the nonexpert, both
achievements were animatedly discussed at the grocer’s and the baker’s,
and at the newspaper kiosks; while we of the eleventh grade exchanged
blows because some called the treaties “a work of genius,” while the others
spoke of a “Jewish betrayal of the nation.”
It was not just politics. Rathenau’s face appeared in the illustrated
papers, like that of all the other politicians. The others were soon forgotten,
but his face seemed to look straight at you and was difficult to forget, with
its dark eyes full of intelligence and sadness. One read his speeches and
behind the words one heard an unmistakable tone of reproach, challenge,
and promise: the tone of a prophet. Many sought his books (I, for one). In
them, one again sensed that dark emotional appeal, something both
compelling and persuasive, challenging and seductive. This mixture was
their greatest charm. They were at once restrained and fantastic, sobering
and stirring, skeptical and enthusiastic. They spoke the bravest words in the
most hesitant and gentle voice.
Strange to say, Rathenau has not yet found the great biography he
deserves. He belongs, without doubt, to the five or six great personalities of
this century. He was an aristocratic revolutionary, an idealistic economic
planner, a Jew who was a German patriot, a German patriot who was a
liberal citizen of the world, and a citizen of the world who was a believer in
a coming Messiah and a strict observer of the Law (that is, a Jew in the only
true sense of the word). He was cultured enough to be above culture, rich
enough to be above riches, man of the world enough to be above the world.
One felt that if he had not been the German foreign minister in 1922, he
might equally well have been a German philosopher in 1800, an
international monarch of finance in 1850, a great rabbi, or an anchorite. He
combined within himself qualities that in another person would have been
dangerously incompatible. In him, the synthesis of a whole sheaf of cultures
and philosophies became not thought, not deed, but a person.
Can such a man, you ask, be a leader of the masses? Surprisingly, the
answer is yes. The masses — by which I mean not the proletariat, but the
anonymous collective body into which all of us, high and low, amalgamate
at certain moments — react most strongly to someone who least resembles
them. Normality coupled with talent may make a politician popular. But to
provoke extremes of love and hate, to be worshipped like a god or loathed
like the devil, is given only to a truly exceptional person who is poles apart
from the masses, be it far above or far below them. If my experience of
Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two
men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the
one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness. Both, and
this is decisive, came from inaccessible regions, from some sort of
“beyond.” The one from a sphere of sublime spirituality where the cultures
of three millennia and two continents hold a symposium; the other from a
jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls, from an
underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench of petty-bourgeois
back rooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines, and the hangman’s yard. From
their different “beyonds” they both drew a spellbinding power, quite
irrespective of their politics.
It is difficult to say where Rathenau’s policy would have led Germany
and Europe if he had been granted time to carry it out. He was not. He was
murdered after just six months in office.
I have mentioned that he provoked love or hate. Both were genuine. The
hate was savage, irrational, elemental, and brooked no discussion. Only one
other German politician has since aroused such feeling: Hitler.
The Rathenau haters differed from the Hitler haters as widely as the one
leader differed from the other. “The swine should be bumped off!” was the
language of Rathenau’s opponents. Nevertheless, it came as a surprise when
one day the lunchtime editions carried the blunt, stark headline “Foreign
Minister Rathenau Murdered.” One felt the ground shift under one’s feet,
and the feeling intensified when one read of the simplicity and
straightforwardness with which the crime had been committed.
Every morning, at a fixed hour, Rathenau drove in an open car from his
house in Grunewald to Wilhelmstrasse. One morning another car stood
waiting in the quiet street lined with villas. It followed the minister’s car
and overtook it. At that moment, its three occupants simultaneously fired
their revolvers point-blank at their victim’s head and chest. Then they sped
off at full throttle (today a monument marks the spot and celebrates their
deed).
How surprisingly easy! It happened here, in Berlin’s Grunewald, not in
Caracas or Montevideo, in a suburban street like any other. One could go
and look at the spot. The perpetrators, as we soon learned, were young
fellows like ourselves, one of them a high school junior. Could it not just as
easily have been one of my schoolmates who only the other day had
declared that Rathenau should be “bumped off”? Aside from the
indignation, the fury, and the grief, there was something almost laughable
about this impudent coup that had been pulled off. It was so simple, too
simple for anyone to have anticipated: it was a truly uncanny way of
making history. Obviously, the future belonged not to the Rathenaus who
took infinite pains to become exceptional personages, but to the Techows
and Fischers who learned to drive a car and shoot a pistol.
For the moment this uneasy feeling was washed away by an
overwhelming flood of wrath and mourning. Even the massacre of the
thousand workers in Lichtenberg in 1919 had not inflamed the masses as
much as the murder of this one man, capitalist though he was. The wizardry
of his personality survived his death. For some days there prevailed what I
have never since experienced — a genuine atmosphere of revolution.
Without threat or compulsion, people attended his funeral in hundreds of
thousands. Afterward they did not disperse, but paraded for hours through
the streets, in endless processions, silent, wrathful, and challenging. One
felt that if they had been invited to finish off those who still passed for
“reactionaries” but were in fact Nazis, they would have done the job with
swift and energetic thoroughness.
The invitation was not forthcoming. Instead, they were told to maintain
discipline and order. For weeks, the government deliberated about a “Bill
for the Defense of the Republic,” which imposed light sentences of
imprisonment on those who insulted ministers, and soon incurred general
ridicule. A few months later the government sadly and silently collapsed,
and was replaced by a ministry of the right.
What the short-lived Rathenau epoch left behind was the confirmation of
the lesson already learned in the years 1918 and 1919: nothing the left did
ever came off.
 ~ 10 ~

Then came 1923. That extraordinary year is probably what has marked
today’s Germans with those characteristics that are so strange and
incomprehensible in the eyes of the world, and so different from what used
to be thought of as the German character: the uncurbed, cynical
imagination, the nihilistic pleasure in the impossible for its own sake, and
the energy that has become an end in itself. In that year an entire generation
of Germans 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. A whole generation learned then — or thought
it learned — to do without such ballast. The preceding years served as a
novitiate in nihilism, but in 1923 its high priests were ordained.
No other nation has experienced anything comparable to the events of
1923 in Germany. All nations went through the Great War, and most of
them have also experienced revolutions, social crises, strikes, redistribution
of wealth, and currency devaluation. None but Germany has undergone the
fantastic, grotesque extreme of all these together; none has experienced the
gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending, bloody Saturnalia, in which
not only money but all standards lost their value. The year 1923 prepared
Germany, not specifically for Nazism, but for any fantastic adventure. The
psychological and political roots of Nazism reach further back, as we have
seen, but that year gave birth to its lunatic aspects: the cool madness, the
arrogant, unscrupulous, blind resolve to achieve the impossible, the
principle that “might is right” and “‘impossible’ is not in our vocabulary.”
Nations, it seems, cannot go through such experiences without spiritual
damage. I shudder to think that after the next war the whole of Europe will
probably experience a magnified 1923 — that is, unless very wise men
make the peace.
The year began with an atmosphere of patriotic fervor. It was almost a
repeat of 1914. The French under Poincaré occupied the Ruhr, the
government announced passive resistance, and among the German masses
the feeling of national humiliation and danger (probably more genuine and
more serious than in 1914) once more overcame their weariness and
disappointment. They “rose up,” and with strenuous emotion declared their
readiness — but for what? For sacrifice? For struggle? It was not clear.
Nothing was demanded of them. The “Ruhr War” was not a war. No one
was called up. There were no bulletins. With no outlet, the fury subsided,
but for days crowds solemnly intoned the Rütli oath from Wilhelm Tell:
[xiii] “We shall be a united nation of brothers.”
Gradually the gesture became slightly ridiculous and absurd because it
was being made in such a void. Outside the Ruhr, nothing at all happened.
In the Ruhr itself, there was a sort of subsidized strike. Not only were the
workers paid, but also the manufacturers — and these only too well, as it
soon became widely known. Was this patriotism — or compensation for
lost profit? Some months later, the Ruhr War, which had begun so well with
the Rütli oath, began to smell unmistakably of corruption. Soon the public
lost all interest. Far stranger things were happening nearer home.
That year newspaper readers could again play a variation of the exciting
numbers game they had enjoyed during the war, when counts of prisoners
and size of booty had dominated the headlines. This time the figures did not
refer to military events, in spite of the warlike way the year had begun, but
to an otherwise quite uninteresting, everyday item in the financial pages:
the exchange rate of the dollar. The fluctuation of the dollar was the
barometer by which, with a mixture of anxiety and excitement, we
measured the fall of the mark. The higher the dollar went, the more
extravagant became our flights into the realms of fancy.
There was nothing really new in the devaluation of the mark. Even in
1920, the first cigarette I had secretly smoked had already cost fifty
pfennigs. By the end of 1922, prices had gradually risen to between ten and
a hundred times the prewar peacetime level, and the dollar stood at about
five hundred marks. This, however, had happened gradually. Wages,
salaries, and prices in general had risen at the same pace. It was a bit
inconvenient to work with the large numbers, but not overly difficult. Many
people still spoke of it as a “rise in prices.” There were more exciting things
to think about.
But the mark now went on the rampage. Soon after the beginning of the
Ruhr War, the dollar shot to twenty thousand marks, rested there for a time,
jumped to forty thousand, paused again, and then, with small periodic
fluctuations, coursed through the ten thousands and then the hundred
thousands. No one quite knew how it happened. Rubbing our eyes, we
followed its progress like some astonishing natural phenomenon. It became
the topic of the day. Then suddenly, looking around, we discovered that this
phenomenon had devastated the fabric of our daily lives.
Anyone who had savings in a bank or bonds saw their value disappear
overnight. Soon it did not matter whether it was a penny put away for a
rainy day or a vast fortune. Everything was obliterated. Many people
quickly moved their investments only to find that it made no difference.
Very soon it became clear that something had happened that forced
everyone to forget about their savings and attend to a far more urgent
matter.
The cost of living had begun to spiral out of control. Traders followed
hard on the heels of the dollar. A pound of potatoes which yesterday had
cost fifty thousand marks now cost a hundred thousand. The salary of sixty-
five thousand marks brought home the previous Friday was no longer
sufficient to buy a packet of cigarettes on Tuesday.
What was to be done? Casting around, people found a life raft: shares.
They were the only form of investment that kept pace — not all the time,
and not all shares, yet on the whole they managed to keep up. So everyone
dealt in shares. Every minor official, every employee, every shift worker
became a shareholder. Day-to-day purchases were paid for by selling
shares. On wage days there was a general stampede to the banks, and share
prices shot up like rockets. The banks were bloated with wealth. Obscure
new ones sprouted up like mushrooms and did a roaring trade. Every day
the entire population studied the stock-market listings. Sometimes some
shares collapsed and thousands of people hurtled toward the abyss. In every
shop, every factory, every school, share tips were whispered in one’s ear.
The old and unworldly had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging,
many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well. Overnight they
became free, rich, and independent. It was a situation in which mental
inertia and reliance on past experience were punished by starvation and
death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction were
rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director
appeared on the scene, and also the high school senior who earned his
living from the stock-market tips of his slightly older friends. He wore
Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties, and supported his
embarrassed father.
 Amid all the misery, despair, and poverty there was an air of light-
headed youthfulness, licentiousness, and carnival. Now, for once, the young
had money and the old did not. Moreover, its nature had changed. Its value
lasted only a few hours. It was spent as never before or since; and not on the
things old people spend their money on.
Bars and nightclubs opened in large numbers. Young couples whirled
about the streets of the amusement quarters. It was like a Hollywood movie.
Everyone was hectically, feverishly searching for love and seizing it
without a second thought. Indeed, even love had assumed an inflationary
character.
Unromantic love was the fashion: carefree, restless, light-hearted
promiscuity. Typically, love affairs followed an extremely rapid course,
without detours. The young who learned to love in those years eschewed
romance and embraced cynicism. I myself and those of my age were not
among them. At fifteen or sixteen we were a few years too young. In later
years, when we had to entertain our girlfriends with twenty-odd marks’
pocket money, we often secretly envied the older boys who had had their
chance at this time. We only caught a glimpse through the keyhole, just
enough to preserve a whiff of the perfume of the time forever in our
nostrils. To us, it was thrilling to be taken by chance to a wild party; to
experience a precocious, exhausting abandon and a slight hangover next
day from too many cocktails; to listen to the older boys with their worn
faces showing the traces of their dissolute nights; to experience the sudden
transporting kiss of a girl in daring makeup...
 A party in the late 1920s. Sebastian is on the right. (Oliver Pretzel)

There was another side to the picture. There were beggars everywhere
and many reports of suicides in the papers. The poster columns were full of
police “Wanted” notices for burglars. Robbery and burglary occurred on a
grand scale. Once I saw an old woman — perhaps I should say an old lady
— seated on a bench in a park looking strangely blank and stiff. A little
crowd gathered around her. “Dead,” said someone. “Of starvation,” said
another. It did not surprise me particularly. At home, we also often went
hungry.
Indeed, my father was one of those who did not, or did not wish to,
understand the times, just as he had already refused to understand the war.
He entrenched himself behind the maxim “A Prussian official does not
speculate,” and bought no shares. At the time I regarded that as
extraordinarily narrow-minded and out of character, for he was one of the
cleverest men I have known. Today I understand him better. In retrospect, I
can sympathize with the disgust with which he rejected the “monstrous
scandal” and with the impatient contempt that lay behind the attitude that
“what ought not to be, cannot be.” Alas, the practical result of such high-
mindedness could degenerate into farce, and the farce would have turned to
tragedy if it had not been for my mother, who adapted to the situation in her
own way.
 This is how the family of a high Prussian official lived from day to day.
On the thirty-first or first of the month my father would receive his monthly
salary, on which we depended for our survival. Bank balances and securities
had long since become worthless. What the salary was worth was difficult
to estimate; its value changed from month to month. One month 100 million
marks could be quite a substantial sum; a little while later 500 milliards
would be small change.[xiv] In any case my father would first try to
purchase a monthly pass for the subway as quickly as possible. That would
at least enable him to get to his office and back, even though the subway
involved considerable detours and waste of time. Then checks would be
written out for the rent and school fees, and in the afternoon the whole
family went to the hairdresser’s. What was left was handed to my mother.
Next day the entire family except for my father, but including the maid,
would get up at four or five in the morning and go to the wholesale market
by taxi. There, in a giant shopping spree, an Oberregierungsrat’s[xv]
monthly salary would be spent on nonperishable foodstuffs in an hour.
Giant cheeses, whole hams, stacks of tinned food, and hundreds of pounds
of potatoes were piled into our taxi. If there was not enough room, the maid,
with one of us to help, would get hold of a handcart. At about eight o’clock,
before school began, we would return home, more or less provisioned for a
month’s siege. And that was it. There was no more money for the rest of the
month. A friendly baker gave us bread on credit. Otherwise we lived on
potatoes, smoked or tinned food, and soup cubes. Now and then there might
be an unexpected supplementary payment, but it was quite common for us
to be as poverty-stricken as the poorest of the poor for four weeks, not even
able to afford a tram ride or a newspaper. Putting aside money for such
purposes would have been quite senseless. Within a few days the whole
month’s salary would not have paid for a single tram ride. I cannot say what
would have happened if some misfortune such as a serious illness had
befallen us.
For my parents it must have been an evil, trying time. For me it was
peculiar rather than unpleasant. Privation was balanced by adventure. The
fact that my father had to travel to his office by an excessively circuitous
route kept him away from the house most of the day and gave me many
hours of absolute freedom. I had no pocket money but my older
schoolfriends were literally rich, and one deprived them of nothing by
getting oneself invited to their wild parties. I managed to remain indifferent
both to the poverty of our home and to the wealth of my friends. I neither
regretted the one nor envied the other, but found them both merely strange
and remarkable. In fact, in those days only part of me lived in the real
world, exciting though it was. More thrilling was the world of books in
which I had buried myself and that had captivated the greater part of my
being. I read Buddenbrooks and Tonio Kröger, Niels Lyhne, Malte Laurids
Brigge and the poems of Verlaine, the early Rilke, George and
Hofmannsthal, Flaubert’s November, Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Heinrich
Mann’s Flutes and Daggers.
I became something like the heroes of these books, a weary, fin-de-siècle
aesthete in search of beauty, a shabby, rather wild-looking sixteen-year-old
who had outgrown his suits and was badly in need of a haircut. I would go
through the feverish streets of inflationary Berlin with the manner and
feelings of one of Mann’s patricians or Wilde’s dandies. These fantasies
were not seriously impeded by the fact that at five in the morning I might
have been packing rounds of cheese and sacks of potatoes into a handcart
with the maid.
Was this attitude quite unfounded? Was it only the result of reading?
Apart from the fact that from autumn to spring young men of sixteen are
easily affected by world-weariness, tedium, and melancholy, had I and my
generation not gone through enough to justify our looking on life with a
tired, skeptical, blasé, scornful gaze, finding in ourselves something of
Thomas Buddenbrooks and Tonio Kröger?
We had the great war game behind us and the shock of defeat, the
disillusionment of the revolution that had followed, and now the daily
spectacle of the failure of all the rules of life and the bankruptcy of age and
experience. We had lived through a series of contradictory creeds: pacifism,
nationalism, and then Marxism. (This last has much in common with sexual
infatuation: both are unofficial, slightly illicit, both use shock tactics, both
mistake an important though officially taboo part for the whole, sex in the
one case and economics in the other.) Rathenau’s murder had taught us that
even a great man is merely mortal, the Ruhr War that noble feelings and
shady business deals could go hand in hand. Was there anything left to fill
us with enthusiasm (for the young need enthusiasm like life’s blood)? Only
the idea of ageless beauty as it glowed in the poetry of George and
Hofmannsthal, or the arrogance of skepticism and, of course, dreams of
love.
 No girl had yet aroused my passions, but there was a boy with whom I
shared my ideals and my taste in books. It was one of those slightly morbid,
ethereal, reticently passionate relationships that young boys engage in
before girls have fully entered their lives. The capacity for them soon
withers. After school, we would wander through the streets for hours, look
up the rate of the dollar somewhere or other, agree, with a condescending
minimum of thought and words, on the political situation, and begin to talk
about books. We had agreed to make a thorough analysis of a new book on
each walk, and we did. Shyly, anxiously, we felt our way into each other’s
souls. Meanwhile, fever raged around us, society crumbled almost visibly,
the German Reich collapsed in ruins — only to provide a background for
profound dissertations on, say, the nature of genius and whether it was
compatible with moral weakness and decadence.
But what a background! Unimaginable and unforgettable.
~~~
In August 1923 the dollar reached a million. We read it with a slight
gasp, as if it were the announcement of some spectacular record. A
fortnight later, that had become insignificant. For, as if it had drawn new
energy at the million mark, the dollar increased its pace tenfold, and began
to mount by hundreds of millions and milliards at a time. In September, a
million marks no longer had any practical value, and a milliard became the
unit of payment. At the end of October, it was a billion. By then terrible
things had happened. The Reichsbank stopped printing notes. Its notes —
10 million? 100 million? — had not kept up with events. The dollar and
price levels in general had anticipated them. There was no longer any
usable currency. For some days trade came to a standstill, and in the poorer
parts of the city the people resorted to force and plundered the groceries.
The atmosphere became revolutionary once again.
In mid-August, the government fell amid fierce fighting in the streets. A
little later, the Ruhr War was abandoned. We gave no more thought to it.
How long ago had it been since the Ruhr occupation had made us swear to
be a united nation of brothers? Now we began to expect the downfall of the
state, even the dissolution of the Reich — some terrible political event
corresponding to the events in our private lives. There had never been so
many rumors: the Rhineland had seceded; Bavaria had seceded; the Kaiser
had come back; the French had marched in. The political “leagues,” both
right-wing and left-wing, which had lain dormant for years, suddenly
became feverishly active. They held rifle-training sessions in the woods
around Berlin; rumors of a “Black Army” circulated, and a good deal was
heard about the “Day of Reckoning.”
It was difficult to distinguish the possible from the impossible. A
Rhenish republic did in fact come into being for a few days. In Saxony for
some weeks there was a Communist government, against which the Reich
government dispatched the army. One morning the newspapers declared
that the garrison of Küstrin, a few kilometers away, had begun a “march on
Berlin.”
About this time, too, the phrase “traitors will be dealt with summarily”
gained currency. The police notices on the poster columns now concerned
not just burglaries, but also missing persons and murders. People
disappeared by the dozens. Almost always it was people who had
something to do with the leagues. Years later, their skeletons might be dug
up in some nearby wood. Within the leagues, it had become the practice to
dispose of unreliable and suspicious comrades without ceremony.
When we heard rumors of this, it did not seem as incredible as it would
have done in normal, civilized days. Indeed, the atmosphere had gradually
become apocalyptic. Saviors appeared everywhere, people with long hair
and hair shirts, declaring that they had been sent by God to save the world.
The most successful in Berlin was a certain Häusser, who used posters and
mass meetings and had many followers. His Munich counterpart, according
to the press, was a certain Hitler who, however, differed from his Berlin
rival by the exciting coarseness of his speeches, which reached new levels
of vulgarity in the extravagance of their threats and their unconcealed
sadism. While Hitler wanted to bring about the millennium by a massacre
of all the Jews, there was a certain Lamberty in Thuringia who wanted to do
it by folk dancing, singing, and frolicking. Each savior had a style of his
own. No one and nothing was surprising; surprise had become a long-
forgotten sensation.
 Bavaria, September 1923. Hitler and henchmen on the way to a demonstration. Note the swastika
on the car door. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

The Munich savior, Hitler, filled the headlines for two days in November
with a ridiculous attempt to stage a revolution in a beer cellar. In fact, the
revolutionaries had been dispersed by a salvo of police fire as they left the
cellar, and that was the end of the matter. Yet for a whole day people
seriously thought this was the expected revolution. Our classics master,
hearing the news, joyfully informed us that within a few years we would all
be soldiers again. His instincts were quite accurate. Indeed, the fact that
such an adventure could take place at all was far more interesting than its
failure. The saviors obviously had a chance. Nothing was impossible. The
dollar stood at a billion. Paradise had just been missed by a hair’s breadth.
Then something really unexpected did happen. The incredible fairy story
began to circulate that there would soon be stable money again, and a little
later, it materialized. Small, ugly, gray-green notes with “One Rentenmark”
written on them. When you offered them in payment for the first time, you
waited in suspense to see what would happen. Nothing did. They were
actually accepted, and you were handed your goods — goods worth a
billion marks. The same thing happened the next day and the day after.
Incredible.
 The dollar stopped climbing; so did shares. And when one converted
shares into rentenmarks, they were reduced to nothing, like everything else.
So no one was left with anything. But wages and salaries were paid out in
rentenmarks, and sometime later, wonder upon wonder, small change also
appeared, solid bright coins. You could jingle them in your pockets and they
even kept their value. On Thursday, you could still buy something for the
money received on the previous Friday. The world was, after all, full of
surprises.
A few weeks earlier, Stresemann had become chancellor.[xvi] Politics
became much quieter. No one spoke anymore of the decay of the Reich.
Grumbling, the leagues returned to their hibernation. Many members
deserted. One scarcely heard of any more missing persons. The saviors
disappeared from the cities. Politics seemed to consist solely of a dispute
among the parties as to who had discovered the rentenmark. The
nationalists said it was Karl Helfferich, a conservative deputy and former
minister of the Kaiser. The left hotly contradicted this: it was, they claimed,
a stalwart democrat and staunch republican, a certain Dr. Schacht. This was
a time after the flood. Everything had been lost, but the waters were
receding. The older generation did not yet dare to harp upon the value of
experience. The young were a bit put out. Twenty-one-year-old bank
directors began to look around for clerking jobs again, and high school
seniors had to adjust to having twenty marks’ pocket money. Of course, a
few “victims of stabilization” committed suicide, but many more people
peered timidly out of their holes and asked themselves if life was possible
once more.
There was a feeling of “the morning after” in the air, but also of relief.
At Christmas, the whole of Berlin became a vast fair. Everything cost ten
pfennigs, and everyone bought rattles, marzipan animals, and other such
things just to show that one could really buy something for ten pfennigs
again, and perhaps also to forget the past year, indeed the past ten years, and
feel like a child once more.
All the shops had notices: “Peacetime Prices.” For the first time since the
war, it really felt like peace.
 ~ 11 ~

So it was. The “Stresemann era” — the only genuine period of peace that
my generation in Germany has experienced — had begun: a period of six
years, from 1924 to 1929, during which Stresemann directed German policy
from the foreign office.
Perhaps one can say the same of policy as of women — the best are the
least talked about. If that is right, then Stresemann’s policy was outstanding.
Politics were hardly discussed during his time. There was still some
argument in the first two or three years: clearing up the ravages of inflation,
the Dawes Plan, Locarno, Thoiry, and the entry into the League of Nations
were events that were still talked about, but no more than that. All of a
sudden politics ceased to be something worth breaking plates for.
After 1926 or thereabouts there was almost nothing worth discussing
anymore. The newspapers had to find their headlines in foreign countries.
In Germany all was quiet, all was orderly; events took a tranquil course.
There were occasional changes of government. Sometimes the parties of the
right were in power and sometimes those of the left. It made no great
difference. The foreign minister was always Gustav Stresemann. That
meant peace, no risk of a crisis, and business as usual.
Money came into the country, the currency maintained its value, and
business was good. The older generation began to retrieve its store of
experience from the attic, burnish it bright, and show it off, as if it had
never been invalidated. The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream.
The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for
saviors or revolutionaries. The public sector required only competent
officials, and the private sector only hardworking businessmen. There was
an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-
meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food, and a little political
boredom. Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal
lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own tastes, and to find their
own paths to happiness.
Now something strange happened — and with this I believe I am about
to reveal one of the most fundamental political events of our time,
something that was not reported in any newspaper: by and large that
invitation was declined. It was not what was wanted. A whole generation
was, it seemed, at a loss as to how to cope with the offer of an unfettered
private life.
A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having 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, 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. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and
they began to sulk. In the end they waited eagerly for the first disturbance,
the first setback or incident, so that they could put this period of peace
behind them and set out on some new collective adventure.
To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it
provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the
entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in
this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and
a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. They began to enjoy their own
lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war
and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this
time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later
became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.
I have already remarked in passing that the capacity for individual life
and happiness is, in any case, less developed among the Germans than
among other peoples. Later, in France and England, I observed with
astonishment and envy, but also learned to appreciate, what a wealth of
simple joy and what an inexhaustible source of lifelong pleasure the
Frenchman finds in eating and drinking, intellectual debate, and the artistic
pursuit of love; and the Englishman in the cultivation of gardens, the
companionship of animals, and the sports and hobbies he pursues with such
childlike gravity. The average German knows nothing of the sort. 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.”
For this class the ideals and joys of life were the exchange of ideas, a
contemplative conversation over a glass of wine, a few faithfully and rather
sentimentally maintained and nurtured friendships, and, last but not least, an
intense, intimate family life. Almost all of this had fallen into ruin and
decay in the decade from 1914 to 1924 and the younger generation had
grown up without fixed customs and traditions.
Outside this cultured class, the great danger of life in Germany has
always been emptiness and boredom (with the exception perhaps of certain
geographical border regions such as Bavaria and the Rhineland, where a
whiff of the south, some romance, and a sense of humor enter the picture).
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.
The basic fact that in Germany only a minority (not necessarily from the
aristocracy or the moneyed class) understands anything of life and knows
how to lead it — a fact that, incidentally, makes the country inherently
unsuitable for democratic government — had been dangerously exacerbated
by the events of the years from 1914 to 1924. The older generation had
become uncertain and timid in its ideals and convictions and began to focus
on “youth,” with thoughts of abdication, flattery, and high expectations.
Young people themselves were familiar with nothing but political clamor,
sensation, anarchy, and the dangerous lure of irresponsible numbers games.
They were only waiting to put what they had witnessed into practice
themselves, but on a far larger scale. Meanwhile, they viewed private life as
“boring,” “bourgeois,” and “old-fashioned.” The masses, too, were
accustomed to all the varied sensations of disorder. Moreover, they had
become weak and doubtful about their most recent great superstition: the
creed, celebrated with pedantic, orthodox fervor, of the magical powers of
the omniscient Saint Marx and the inevitability of the automatic course of
history prophesied by him.
Thus, under the surface, all was ready for a vast catastrophe.
 Meanwhile, golden peace, serenity, benevolence, and goodwill reigned
in the tangible world of public affairs. Even the heralds of the coming
calamity seemed to fit seamlessly into the peaceable scene.
 ~ 12 ~

One of these heralds, quite misunderstood, indeed openly promoted and

praised, was the sports craze that took possession of the youth of Germany.
In the years 1924, 1925, and 1926, Germany suddenly blossomed into a
great sporting nation. Never before had it been a land of games. Never had
it been creative and inventive in sports, like England and America. In fact,
the true spirit of sport, the self-effacing, playful absorption in a fantasy
world with its own rules and regulations, is altogether foreign to the
German mentality. Nevertheless, in those years the membership of sports
clubs and the numbers of spectators at sports meetings multiplied tenfold at
a stroke. Boxers and sprinters became national heroes, and the twenty-year-
olds had their heads full of athletics results, the names of winners, and all
those numerical hieroglyphs into which feats of speed and skill are
translated by the press.
It was the last German mass mania to which I myself succumbed. For
two years my mental life stood still. I trained doggedly as a medium- and
long-distance runner and would have sold my soul to the devil without
hesitation if I could once have run 800 meters in under two minutes. I went
to every athletics meet, and I knew every runner and his best times, not to
mention the list of German and world records which I would have been able
to reel off in my sleep. The sports news played the same role as the army
bulletins ten years before, athletics records and race times replacing the
numbers of prisoners and quantity of booty. The headline “Houben Runs
100 Meters in 10.6” evoked the same feelings as, in its day, “20,000
Russians Taken Prisoner”; and “Peltzer Wins English Championship and
Breaks World Record” corresponded to events that the war, alas, had failed
to produce: “Paris Falls,” perhaps, or “England Sues for Peace.” Day and
night I dreamed of vying with Peltzer and Houben. I missed no sports meet.
I trained three times a week, stopped smoking, and performed exercises
before going to bed. I felt the utter joy of being in complete harmony with
thousands, tens of thousands of people, yes, even with the entire world.
There was no one of my age, however alien, uneducated, or unpleasant,
with whom I could not at first meeting engage in prolonged, animated
conversation — about sports, of course. Everyone had the same figures in
their heads. Without the need to say a word, everyone had the same feelings
about them. It was almost as grand as the war. It was the same sort of great
game again. We all understood one another. Our spiritual nourishment was
statistics, our souls perpetually aquiver with excitement: Would Peltzer beat
Nurmi, too? Would Körnig do it in 10.3? Would one of our German 400-
meter runners finally manage 48? We trained and ran our little races, our
thoughts always with our “German champions” at the international athletics
meet, just as we had fought our own little battles with small Tesching rifles
and wooden swords in the streets and playgrounds during the war, our
thoughts with Hindenburg and Ludendorff. What a simple, exciting life!
Strange to say, politicians from right to left outdid themselves in praise
of the remarkable fit of imbecility to which the youth of Germany had
fallen prey. Not only were we once again able to indulge our old vice, the
narcotic of the cold, unreal numbers game, this time we did it with the full
attention and the unanimous approval of our mentors. The nationalists,
stupid and crass as ever, felt that our healthy instincts had found a practical
substitute for military service, which had been abolished. As if any of us
were interested in military drill! The left, overclever and therefore, as usual,
even more stupid than the nationalists, regarded sport as a splendid
invention by which we would henceforth be able to vent our warlike
instincts harmlessly and peacefully. The peace of the world was, they felt,
assured. It did not strike them that the “German champions,” without
exception, wore little black, white, and red ribbons in their buttonholes, the
colors of the prewar Reich, while the colors of the republic were black, red,
and gold. It did not occur to them that through sport, the lure of the war
game, the old thrilling magic of national rivalry, was being exercised and
maintained and that this was not some harmless venting of bellicose
instincts. They failed to see any connection. They were blind to Germany’s
relapse.
The only man who seemed to realize that the forces he had released were
taking a false and dangerous path was Stresemann himself. He occasionally
made hostile references to the “new aristocracy of the biceps,” which added
to his unpopularity. He seems to have been aware of what was afoot: that
the blind forces and passions, whose entry into politics he had barred, were
by no means dead, and were merely seeking an outlet; that the new
generation refused to learn to live in an honorable, civilized way and that
they would use their freedom only for collective mischief.
 In any case, as a mass phenomenon the sports craze lasted just three
years. (I, personally, overcame it even earlier.) To last longer, it would have
needed something comparable to the concept of the Final Victory in the
war: a goal as well as an end. It remained always the same: the same names,
the same numbers, the same sensations. It could go on indefinitely, but it
could not occupy our imaginations indefinitely. Although Germany had
come in second at the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, a marked disillusion
and cooling of interest followed immediately. The sports news disappeared
from the front pages and returned to its own section of the newspaper.
Sports grounds were less full, and it was no longer certain that every
twenty-year-old had the latest “time” of every 100-meters runner at his
fingertips. There were even some who did not know the world records by
heart.
At the same time, the leagues and parties, which treated politics as a
sport and had seemed for a few years to have almost died, returned slowly
to life.
 ~ 13 ~

The Stresemann era was not a great epoch. It was not a complete
success, even while it lasted. Too much trouble rumbled below the surface.
Too many evil, diabolic forces stirred perceptibly in the wings, bound and
gagged for the moment, but not really destroyed. No great symbol was
raised that might exorcise the demons. The period remained one without
passion, without greatness, without full conviction in its own cause. The old
patriotic, bourgeois, peace-loving, liberal views returned to favor — but
they had the unmistakable air of stopgaps, of being there faute de mieux
and “until further notice.” It was not a time that could later be recalled as
the “great past” in contrast to a dark present, but as a modest epoch of
restoration.
And yet...
Talleyrand said that those who had not lived before 1789 had never
known the sweetness of life. Elderly Germans have made similar claims for
the days before 1914. It would sound a little ridiculous to say anything so
extravagant about the Stresemann era. For all that, it was, despite its
failings, for us young Germans the best period of our lives. All that we have
experienced of the sweetness of life is associated with it. It was the only
time when life was set in a major and not a minor key, even though it was a
somewhat pale and hesitant major. It was the only time when we were
really able to live. Most young Germans, as has already been said, could not
cope with it, or were defeated by it. For the rest of us, this is a period from
which we still draw sustenance.
It is difficult to speak of things that have never materialized, of
beginnings that never got beyond a “maybe” or an “almost.” Yet it seems to
me that, amid all that dark peril and inhuman evil, something rare and
precious did begin to flower in Germany during the Stresemann era. The
greater part of the younger generation had been ruined beyond saving, but
the remaining minority was perhaps more promising than any generation of
the last hundred years. The wild decade of 1914 to 1923 had thrown aside
all balance and tradition; but it had also blown away the cobwebs and
mental clutter. Most of us emerged as nihilistic cynics. Those who did learn
to live again enrolled in an advanced course, as it were — free of the fads
and illusions that occupy a sheltered youth. We had not been sheltered, but
exposed to raw winds; we were poor, even in traditional spiritual values, but
also free from inherited prejudices; we were hard-boiled, and tough. If we
did not become callous, we were in no danger of becoming soft. If we
avoided cynicism, we were not likely to become dreamy Parsifals.
Something very fine and auspicious was silently ripening among the best of
German youth from 1925 to 1930: a new idealism beyond doubt and
disappointment, a new liberalism broader, more comprehensive, and more
mature than the political liberalism of the nineteenth century; indeed,
perhaps the basis of a new nobility of spirit, a new excellence, a new
aesthetic of life. It was as yet a long way from realization and influence.
Hardly had it been thought of and put into words than the quadrupeds
arrived and trampled it all underfoot.
Despite everything, one could find a fresh atmosphere in Germany at this
time, and there was a remarkable absence of insincere convention. The
barriers between the classes had become thin and permeable — perhaps a
fortunate by-product of the universal impoverishment. There were many
students who were laborers, and many young laborers who were students.
Class prejudice and the starched-collar mentality were simply out of
fashion. The relations between the sexes were freer and franker than ever —
perhaps a fortunate by-product of the lack of discipline of the past years.
Instead of a contemptuous superiority, we felt a bewildered sympathy for
previous generations who had, in their youth, had the choice between
unapproachable virgins for adoration and harlots for relaxation. Finally, a
new hope even began to dawn in international relations; there was less
prejudice and more understanding of the other side, and an unmistakable
pleasure in the vivid variety that the world derives from its many peoples.
Berlin became quite an international city. Admittedly, the sinister Nazi
types already lurked in the wings, as “we” could not fail to notice with deep
disgust. They spoke of “Eastern vermin” with murder in their eyes and
sneeringly of “Americanization.” Whereas “we,” a segment of the younger
generation difficult to define but instantly and mutually recognizable, were
not only friendly toward foreigners, but enthusiastic about them. How much
more interesting, more beautiful, and richer it made life that the world was
not peopled exclusively by Germans! Our guests were all welcome, whether
they came voluntarily, like the Americans and the Chinese, or as refugees,
like the Russians. Our doors were flung open, the strangers were received
with a friendly, curious goodwill and with a conscious determination to
understand and learn to appreciate even what was most foreign to us. In
those days many a friendship, many a love linked the far west and far east.
My most treasured and tender memories are associated with just such a
local international circle, a bit of the globe in the middle of Berlin. It was a
small academic tennis club, in which we Germans were scarcely more
strongly represented than the other nations. Strangely enough, Frenchmen
and Englishmen were rare, but otherwise the entire universe seemed to have
sent its envoys: Americans and Scandinavians, Balts and Russians, Chinese
and Japanese, Hungarians and people from the Balkans, even a melancholy
wag of a Turk. I never found the same free-and-easy youthful atmosphere
again — except perhaps as a casual visitor to the Latin Quarter in Paris.
Deep nostalgia overcomes me when I recall the summer evenings we spent
after matches in our clubhouse, often far into the night, seated in wicker
chairs still in our tennis whites, sipping wine and cracking jokes, engaging
in long and eager conversations that had nothing in common with the
oppressive political discussions of earlier and later years, and which we
sometimes interrupted to play a game of Ping-Pong or to put on the
gramophone and dance. When I think of those nights today, so full of
innocent fun and youthful gravity, of dreams of the future and of universal
fellowship and trust, I stop and wonder. I cannot decide whether it is more
incredible that all that could have existed in Germany scarcely ten years
ago, or that it has been so thoroughly and completely obliterated in just ten
years.
 The tennis club at the Heidelberger Platz, c. 1929. (Oliver Pretzel)

It is to this club, too, that I owe my deepest and most enduring love
affair. I think it will not be out of place to mention it here, for it has a
generic aspect. It is most certainly a romantic lie — yet one that enjoyed the
widest popularity in the last century — that one really loves only once in a
lifetime. It is rather futile to seek to compare amorous experiences, which
are in essence incomparable, and try to classify them in some order, and
declare, “I loved this or that woman most of all.” It is true, however, that at
a certain stage in life, about the age of twenty, a love affair and the choice
of partner affect one’s destiny and character more than at others. For the
woman one loves stands for more than just herself; a whole view of the
world, a notion of life, an ideal, if you will, but one come alive, made flesh
and blood. It is the privilege of some youths of twenty to love in a woman
what later, as men, they will look upon as their guiding star.
Today I must cast around for abstract expressions to describe what I love
in the world, what I want to see preserved at all costs, and what must never
be betrayed on pain of everlasting fire: freedom and human wisdom,
courage, grace, wit, and music. Even then, I am not sure of being
understood. Then, all that was needed was a single name, a mere nickname,
“Teddy,” and I could be sure that, at least in our circle, everyone would
know what I meant. We all loved her, the bearer of this name, an Austrian
girl, slight, honey-blond, freckled, lithe as a flame. For her sake we learned
and unlearned jealousy, acted out comedies and little tragedies, felt like
singing hymns and dithyrambs; and we discovered that life is grand when
lived with courage and wisdom, with grace and freedom, and with an ear
for its humor and its music. Our circle had a goddess in its midst. The
woman who was once Teddy may now be older and more earthbound, and
none of us may still live life at the same emotional pitch as then; but that
there was once a Teddy and that we experienced those raptures cannot be
taken from us. It formed us more powerfully and more enduringly than any
“historical event.”
Teddy soon vanished from our midst, as goddesses do. She left for Paris
in 1930, already resolved not to return. She was perhaps the first emigrant.
More far-seeing and sensitive than us, she sensed the growth of stupidity
and evil long before the advent of Hitler. Once, each summer, she would
return to pay us a visit, and each time she found the air more stifling. The
last time she came was 1933. Never afterward.
By then “we” — that indefinite we, with no name, no party, no
organization, and no power — had long become a minority; and we knew it.
That instinctive feeling of universal comprehension that had accompanied
the numbers games one had indulged in, both of war and sport, had long
turned into its opposite. We knew we could not talk with many of our
contemporaries because we spoke a different language. We felt the tide of a
new “brown German” rise around us — words such as Einsatz (strike
force), Garant (pledge), fanatisch (fanatical), Volksgenosse (racial
comrade), Scholle (soil), artfremd (racially alien), Untermensch (subhuman)
— a revolting jargon, every syllable of which implied a world of violent
stupidity. We also had a secret dialect. Among ourselves we summed up
people in a word. If they were “clever” — which did not mean that they
were particularly intelligent, but that they had some sense of an individual
life — they were one of “us.” We knew the morons were in the
overwhelming majority. But as long as Stresemann was there, we felt more
or less sure that they would be held in check. We moved among them with
the same unconcern with which visitors to a modern cageless zoo walk past
the beasts of prey, confident that its ditches and hedges have been carefully
calculated. The beasts for their part probably reciprocated this sentiment.
With deep hatred they coined the word “system” for the impalpable force
that held them within bounds while it left them their freedom. For the
moment, at least, they were held within bounds.
In all those years, they never once attempted to assassinate Stresemann,
though it would have been quite easy. He had no bodyguard, and did not
entrench himself behind high walls. We often saw him strolling in Unter
den Linden, an unremarkable, stocky man in a Derby hat. “Isn’t that
Stresemann over there?” someone would ask, and indeed it was. Sometimes
we might see him in Pariser Platz, standing in front of a flower bed,
nudging a blossom with the end of his walking stick and contemplating it
with his protruding eyes. Perhaps he was trying to remember its botanical
name.
Remarkable: nowadays Hitler never shows himself except in a speeding
car surrounded by ten or twelve cars full of heavily armed SS guards. It is
probably just as well. Rathenau in 1922 refused to have armed guards and
was consequently promptly murdered. Stresemann, on the other hand, could
gaze at the flowers in Pariser Platz unattended and unarmed. Perhaps he
was a magician after all, that broad, unprepossessing, unhandsome,
unpopular man, with the bull neck and bulging eyes. Or was it just his
unpopularity and insignificant looks that saved him?
From afar, we followed him with our eyes as he walked slowly and
pensively down Unter den Linden into Wilhelmstrasse. Many did not even
recognize or notice him. Others greeted him and he returned the greeting
politely, quietly raising his hat, not shooting out an arm; and to each person
in turn, not to a vast concourse. We would ask ourselves whether he, too,
was “clever,” and whatever the answer, we felt quietly confident and full of
respectful gratitude toward the unprepossessing man. Nothing more. He
was not one to kindle a flame.
The strongest feeling he ever roused was by dying: sudden, cold horror.
He had been ill for a long time, but it was not known how gravely. Indeed,
one later remembered that the last time he had been seen, four weeks
previously in Unter den Linden, he had looked paler and more bloated than
usual. But he was so unobtrusive, we had not noticed anything special. He
died, too, most unobtrusively; in the evening, after a strenuous day, while
he was brushing his teeth before going to bed, like the most ordinary
citizen. Suddenly, as one read later, he staggered and the glass fell out of his
hand. Next day the newspapers carried the headline “Stresemann Dead.”
As we read it we were seized with icy terror. Who was there now to tame
the beasts? They had, in fact, just begun to stir with their mad “plebiscite,”
the first of many of its kind: in future it should be a criminal offense for any
minister to conclude a treaty “on the basis of the war-guilt lie.” That was
the right stuff for the morons! Placards and processions, mass meetings,
marches, and a gunfight here and there. The era of peace was at an end. So
long as Stresemann had been there, we had not quite believed it. Now we
knew.
October 1929. A vile autumn after a magnificent summer; rain and raw
weather, but also something oppressive in the air that had nothing to do
with the weather. Angry words on the poster columns; and on the streets for
the first time, mud-brown uniforms and unpleasant physiognomies above
them; the rat-tat-tat and piping of an unfamiliar, shrill, vulgar march music.
Dismay in bureaucratic circles, violent scenes in the Reichstag, and the
newspapers full of a creeping, never-ending government crisis. It was
depressingly familiar, had the smell of 1919 or 1920. Was not poor
Hermann Müller, who had been chancellor in that dreary period, once again
at the helm? As long as Stresemann had been foreign minister, no one had
worried much about the chancellor. His death was the beginning of the end.
 ~ 14 ~

Early in 1930 Müller was succeeded as chancellor by Heinrich Brüning.

For the first time within memory, Germany had a strong master. From 1914
to 1923 all governments had been weak. Stresemann had ruled ably and
energetically, but with a gentle hand, not hurting a soul. Brüning constantly
hurt a lot of people. It was his way. He was rather proud to be “unpopular.”
He was a hard, bony man, with severe, narrowed eyes peering through
rimless spectacles. Anything obliging and polished went against his nature.
His successes — and he undoubtedly had some — could always be
described by the catchphrase “Operation successful, patient dead,” or
“Position held, ranks decimated.” To prove the absurdity of reparation
payments, he took them to the extreme and thereby brought Germany’s
economy to the verge of collapse, causing banks to close their doors and the
unemployment figures to reach 6 million. To keep the budget balanced
nevertheless, his grim, steely spirit imposed the precept of the strict
paterfamilias: “Tighten your belts.”
In a regular sequence, new “emergency decrees” appeared every six
months, each yet again reducing salaries, pensions, social benefits, and
finally even private wages and rates of interest. Each was the logical
consequence of the last one, and each time Brüning, clenching his teeth,
imposed the painful logic. Many of Hitler’s most effective instruments of
torture were first introduced by Brüning — such as “safeguarding foreign
reserves,” which made travel abroad impossible, and the “Reich flight tax,”
which did the same for emigration. Even the beginnings of the restriction of
the freedom of the press and the gagging of parliament can be traced to
Brüning. Yet, paradoxically, his actions were rooted in the conviction that
he was defending the republic. Understandably, the republicans began to
ask themselves whether there was anything left to defend.
To my knowledge, the Brüning regime was the first essay and model of a
form of government that has since been copied in many European countries:
the semidictatorship in the name, and in defense, of democracy against fully
fledged dictatorship. Anyone who takes the trouble to study Brüning’s rule
in depth will find all those factors that make this sort of government the
inevitable forerunner of the very thing it is supposed to prevent: its
discouragement of its own supporters; the way it undermines its own
position; its acceptance of a loss of freedom; its lack of ideological weapons
against enemy propaganda; the way it surrenders the initiative; and its
collapse at the final moment when the issue is reduced to a simple question
of power.
Brüning had no real following. He was “tolerated.” He was the lesser
evil: the strict schoolmaster who accompanied the chastisement of his
pupils with the words “This will hurt me more than you,” rather than a
sadistic torturer. One supported Brüning because he seemed to be the only
bulwark against Hitler. Knowing that he owed his own political life to the
threat posed by Hitler, Brüning had to fight against him, but at all costs
refrain from destroying him. Hitler must not be allowed to come to power,
but must remain a continual danger. Brüning kept up this difficult balancing
act with a poker face and clenched teeth for two years. That was his greatest
achievement. The moment would come when he would lose his balance. It
could not be indefinitely postponed. What then? This question
overshadowed the entire Brüning era — a period in which the gloomy
present was lightened only by comparison with the prospect of a ghastly
future.
Brüning had nothing to offer the country but poverty, the curtailment of
liberty, and the assurance that there was no alternative. At best it was a call
to austerity. His nature was too bleak even to make this call in stirring
tones. He gave the country no purpose, no inspiring leadership; he only
covered it in joyless shade.
Meanwhile, the forces that had lain low for so long gathered noisily.
On September 14, 1930, there were Reichstag elections. At a bound, the
Nazis, hitherto a ridiculous splinter party, became the second-largest faction
in the house; they jumped from 12 seats to 107. From that day, the central
figure of Brüning’s period was no longer Brüning but Hitler. The question
was no longer whether Brüning would remain in power, but whether Hitler
would come to power. The most passionate and embittered political
arguments ensued, for and against not Brüning, but Hitler. In the suburbs
where the gunfights began again, it was not Brüning’s supporters who shot
his opponents, but Hitler’s supporters who killed Hitler’s enemies.
Hitler himself, his past, his character, and his speeches were still rather a
handicap for the movement that gathered around him. In 1930, he was still
widely regarded as a somewhat embarrassing figure with a dismal past: the
Munich savior of 1923, the man of the grotesque beer-cellar putsch.
Besides, for ordinary (and not only “clever”) Germans, his personal
appearance was thoroughly repellent — the pimp’s forelock, the hoodlum’s
elegance, the Viennese suburban accent, the interminable speechifying, the
epileptic behavior with its wild gesticulations and foaming at the mouth,
and the alternately shifty and staring eyes. And then there were the contents
of those speeches: the delight in threats and in cruelty, the bloodthirsty
execution fantasies. Most of those who began to acclaim Hitler at the
Sportpalast[xvii] in 1930 would probably have avoided asking him for a
light if they had met him in the street. That was the strange thing: their
fascination with the boggy, dripping cesspool he represented, repulsiveness
taken to extremes. No one would have been surprised if a policeman had
taken him by the scruff of the neck in the middle of his first speech and
removed him to some place from which he would never have emerged
again, and where he doubtless belonged. As nothing of the sort happened
and, on the contrary, the man surpassed himself, becoming ever more
deranged and monstrous, and also ever more notorious, more impossible to
ignore, the effect was reversed. It was then that the real mystery of the
Hitler phenomenon began to show itself: the strange befuddlement and
numbness of his opponents, who could not cope with his behavior and
found themselves transfixed by the gaze of the basilisk, unable to see that it
was hell personified that challenged them.
 A Nazi parade in Berlin in 1930. (Oliver Pretzel)

Summoned as a witness before the highest German court, Hitler

bellowed at the judges that he would one day come to power by strictly
constitutional means and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The
white-haired president of the supreme court did not think of ordering the
witness to be taken into custody for contempt. In the presidential elections
against Hindenburg, Hitler declared that victory was his, in any case. His
opponent was eighty-five, he was forty-three; he could wait. Nothing
happened. When he said it again at his next meeting, the audience tittered,
as if it had been tickled. One night, six storm troopers fell on a “dissident”
in his bed and literally trampled him to death, for which they were
sentenced to death. Hitler sent them a telegram of praise and
acknowledgment. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the
murderers were pardoned.
It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that
of the other: the savage impudence that gradually made it possible for the
unpleasant little apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the
bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what it
was he was up to — namely, when he capped it with something even more
outrageous and monstrous; then, also, the hypnotic trance into which his
public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of
depravity and the ecstasy of evil.
Besides, he promised everything to everybody, which naturally brought
him a vast, loose army of followers and voters from among the ignorant, the
disappointed, and the dispossessed. That, however, was not decisive.
Beyond demagogy and the details of his election manifesto, he made two
promises with obvious honesty: the revival of the great war game of 1914 to
1918 and a repetition of the triumphal anarchic looting of 1923. In other
words, his subsequent foreign policy and economic policy. He did not
promise these things in so many words. Sometimes he even pretended to
deny them (as he did in his later “peace speeches”). He was understood all
the same. It won him his true disciples, the kernel of the Nazi Party. He
appealed to the two great experiences that had marked the younger
generation. It was a spark that electrified all those who secretly hankered
after these experiences. It excluded those who had written them off and
mentally marked them with a minus sign; that is to say, “us.”
“We,” however, had no alternative party, no banner to carry, no program,
and no battle cry. Whom could we follow? Apart from the Nazis, who were
the favorites, there were the civilized bourgeois reactionaries who clustered
round the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets),[xviii] people who rather vaguely
enthused over “front-line experiences” and “German soil,” and who may
not have had the glaring vulgarity of the Nazis but certainly shared their
resentful dimness and their innate hatred of life. Then there were the Social
Democrats, beaten even before the battle had started, so frequently had they
been discredited. Finally there were the Communists, with their sectarian
dogma trailing a comet’s tail of defeat. (Strange: whatever they undertook,
the Communists were always beaten in the end and “shot while attempting
to escape.” That seemed to be a law of nature.)
Aside from this was the sphinxlike German army, led by a scheming
backroom general;[xix] and also the Prussian police, of whom it was said
they were a well-trained, reliable, republican force. We heard it, but after
everything we had been through, we did not really believe it.
Those were the forces in play. The game dragged on, tedious and
gloomy, without high spots, without drama, without obvious decisive
moments. In many respects the atmosphere in Germany resembled that
which prevails today in Europe as a whole: a passive waiting for the
inevitable, still hoping to avoid it up to the last moment. Today, in Europe,
it is the war that has so long threatened. Then, in Germany, it was Hitler’s
seizure of power, and the “night of the long knives” of which the Nazis
spoke in anticipation. Even the details are similar: the slow approach of the
dreaded event; the confusion of the forces opposed to it and their hopeless
adherence to the rules of the game, which the enemy daily infringes; the
one-sidedness of the contest; the sense of hovering between “peace and
stability” and “civil war” (there were no barricades, but every day there
were meaningless and childish brawls and gunfights, attacks on party
offices, and regularly also killings). The mind-set of “appeasement” was
also apparent. Powerful groups were in favor of rendering Hitler “harmless”
by giving him “responsibility.” There were constant political arguments,
fruitless and bitter, in cafés and bars, in shops, schools, and in family
homes. I should also not forget to mention a new series of numbers games.
More or less important elections were always taking place, and now
everyone had election results and numbers of seats in their heads. The Nazis
constantly gained ground. What was no longer to be found was pleasure in
life, amiability, fun, understanding, goodwill, generosity, and a sense of
humor. There were few good books being published anymore, and certainly
no readers. The air in Germany had rapidly become suffocating.
It became more and more suffocating until the summer of 1932. Then
Brüning fell, overnight and for no reason, and there was the strange Papen-
Schleicher interlude:[xx] a government of unknown aristocrats and six
months of a wild political chase. The republic was liquidated, the
constitution suspended, the Reichstag dissolved, reelected, dissolved again,
and again reelected. Newspapers were banned, the Prussian regional
government was illegally dismissed, and higher civil servants were replaced
— and all this took place in the almost cheerful atmosphere of a final
supreme fling. The year 1939, in Europe, has much the same feeling as that
German summer of 1932. We really were only a hair’s breadth from the
end. The worst could happen any day. The Nazis already filled the streets
with their uniforms, which they were at last officially permitted to wear,
already hurled bombs, already drew up their blacklists.
In August, the government was already negotiating with Hitler, offering
him the vice-chancellorship, and in November, after Papen and Schleicher
had quarreled, the chancellorship itself. All that stood between Hitler and
power was the luck of a few aristocratic political gamblers. All serious
obstacles had been removed; there was no constitution anymore, no legal
guarantees, no republic, nothing, not even the Prussian police. Just so today:
the League of Nations lies moribund, there is no collective security any
longer, and treaties and conferences have no value; Spain has fallen, as have
Austria and Czechoslovakia. Yet, then as now, at the very last and most
dangerous hour, when all was about to be lost, a pathological, unreasonable
optimism seized us, a gambler’s optimism, a blithe confidence that we
would yet escape the catastrophe by the skin of our teeth. Were not Hitler’s
coffers empty, then as today? Were not his former friends at last resolved to
put up a fight, as they are today? Had life not returned to the frozen political
scene — just as it has in Europe in 1939?
Then, as now, we began to toy with the idea that the worst was over.
 ~ 15 ~

We have arrived. The journey has ended. We enter the lists. The duel is
about to begin.
THE REVOLUTION
 ~ 16 ~

This was me at the beginning of 1933: a young man of twenty-five, well

fed, well turned out, well educated, friendly and polite, past the awkward,
gangling student phase with some corners already rubbed off, but basically
untried — a typical example of the German educated bourgeois class in
general but otherwise an unknown quantity. There was nothing particularly
interesting or startling to say about my life so far, except that it had been
lived against an arrestingly dramatic backdrop. The only experiences that
had gone a bit deeper and left some marks, scars and character traits, were
the delights and pains of the experiments in love that every young person of
this age encounters. At that time they interested me more than anything
else; they were the essence of my life. Incidentally — like all young people
of my age and class — I still lived at home. I was well looked after and well
dressed, but kept short of pocket money as a matter of principle, by a
distinguished, aging, interesting, uncomfortable father, whom I secretly
loved. My father was the most important person in my life, though I was
sometimes less than happy about it. If I wanted to undertake something
serious or make an important decision, I had no choice but to consult my
father. To describe myself as I then was — or, rather, potentially was — I
still have no choice but to describe my father.
He was by conviction a liberal and by stance and disposition a Prussian
puritan.
 Sebastian Haffner’s father, C.L.A. Pretzel, c. 1932. (Oliver Pretzel)

There is a specifically Prussian variant of puritanism that was one of the

most important spiritual forces in German life before 1933 and still plays a
certain role beneath the surface. It is related to classical English puritanism
but has some characteristic differences. Its prophet is Kant rather than
Calvin; its greatest standard-bearer, Frederick the Great rather than
Cromwell. Like English puritanism it demands severity, dignity, abstinence
from the pleasures of life, attention to one’s duty, loyalty, honesty, indeed
self-denial, and a somber scorn for the world. Just like his English
counterpart, the Prussian puritan keeps his sons short of pocket money and
frowns at their youthful experiments with love. Prussian puritanism is,
however, secular. It serves and owes allegiance to, not Jehovah, but the roi
de Prusse. Its distinctions and earthly rewards are not private wealth, but
promotion in the civil service. Perhaps the most important difference is that
Prussian puritanism has a back door into unsupervised freedom. It is
marked “private.”
 It is well known that in private the dark, ascetic King Frederick the
Great, the exemplar of Prussian puritanism, played the flute, wrote verses,
was a free thinker and friend of Voltaire. Through two centuries the
majority of his disciples, senior Prussian civil servants and officers, with
their severe, pinched faces, followed similar inclinations in private.
Prussian puritanism echoes the motto “Hard outside, soft inside.” The
Prussian puritan is the inventor of the curious construct that says, “As a
human being I tell you..., but as an official I say...” This accounts for the
fact, so difficult for foreigners to understand, that while Prussia as a whole
— and also Prussian Germany — always seems and acts like an inhuman,
cruelly voracious machine, when you visit it and get to know Prussians and
Germans as “private” individuals they make an altogether attractive,
humane, harmless, and amiable impression. As a nation, Germany leads a
double life because almost every German leads a double life.
In “private” my father was a passionate lover of literature. He had a
library of some ten thousand volumes that he added to right up until his
death. What is more, he did not just own all these books, he had actually
read them. The great names of nineteenth-century European literature —
Dickens and Thackeray, Balzac and Hugo, Turgenev and Tolstoy, Raabe
and Keller, to mention only his favorites — were not just names to him, but
intimate friends, with whom he had held long, silent, passionate
discussions. His conversation blossomed when he met someone with whom
he could continue these discussions out loud.
Now, literature is an awkward hobby. You can keep a love of collecting
or cultivating flowers “private,” and that may also go for a love of art or
music, but the daily occupation with the living spirit cannot be kept entirely
“private.” One can easily imagine that a man who for years had surveyed all
the heights and depths of European thought and literature would one day
find it impossible to be a narrow, pedantic, dutiful Prussian civil servant.
Not so my father. He remained just that. However, without ever breaking
the mold, he developed a skeptically wise, liberal attitude within himself,
which reduced the civil servant’s persona to a mere mask. The glue by
which he held both together was a secret, silent, sublime irony. That seems
to me the only means to ennoble and legitimize the highly problematical
figure of the bureaucrat in human terms; never for a moment to forget that
the powerful dignitary behind the desk and the puny supplicant in front of it
are both just humans and nothing more. They both have their parts in the
play, and that of the official requires strictness and coolness but also
sensitivity, benevolence, and care. Writing an order in a critical matter in
the coldest formal terms may require more delicacy of touch than a lyric
poem, more wisdom and fairness than the denouement of a novel. During
the walks that my father liked to take with me at this time he gently tried to
introduce me to these mysteries of the higher civil service.
It was important to him that I should become a civil servant. He had
observed, not without a certain disquiet, that what in him had been confined
to reading and discussion showed a tendency in me to degenerate into
writing. He had not particularly encouraged this tendency. Of course he had
not used clumsy prohibitions; certainly not. That was out of the question. I
could write as many novels, short stories, and essays in my free time as I
liked. If they contributed to my income, so much the better, but I should
first study something “sensible” and pass my exams. At bottom, his
puritanical soul mistrusted a life that consisted of visiting cafés and
scribbling at irregular hours. His liberal spirit was, moreover, disinclined to
leave the administration of the state in the hands of philistines, lovers of
power and chicanery, who would squander the precious capital of state
authority in meaningless decrees and regulations. There were, in his
opinion, too many of these already. He did his best to make me into what he
had been: a civilized administrator. He probably thought that in that way he
was doing the best for me and the German state.
So I had studied law and become a Referendar. In contrast to the Anglo-
Saxon countries, a future judge or administrator in Germany is introduced
to the exercise of power immediately after graduation at the age of twenty-
two or twenty-three. As a Referendar (roughly like an articled clerk, the
word literally means someone who reports to a mentor) he participates in
the work of the courts or the civil service like a judge or administrator, but
without responsibility or the power to make decisions (and also without
pay). Even so, many judgments are written by Referendars, though they are
signed by judges, and in the deliberations of the courts the Referendar has
the right to be heard even though he has no vote. This sometimes gives him
real influence. At two of the courts where I worked, the judge even let me
run the proceedings. This sudden power has a profound effect on a young
man who is still living with his parents, and it inevitably influences him
deeply. It had two principal effects on me. The first was composure, an
attitude of cool, calm, benevolent dryness, perhaps only to be learned
behind an official’s desk. The second was a certain facility in following
official thought processes and legal abstractions. As things turned out, I had
little opportunity to exercise either as they were intended. However, the
second facility was literally to save the lives of my wife and myself a few
years later. My father could not have foreseen that when he ensured that I
undertook a course of study preparing me to be a civil servant.
Apart from that, I can only smile ruefully when I consider how prepared
I was for the adventure that awaited me. I was not prepared at all. I had no
skills in boxing or jujitsu, not to mention smuggling, crossing borders
illegally, using secret codes, and so on; skills that would have stood me in
good stead in the coming years. My spiritual preparation for what was
ahead was almost equally inadequate. Is it not said that in peacetime the
chiefs of staff always prepare their armies as well as possible — for the
previous war? I cannot judge the truth of that, but it is certainly true that
conscientious parents always educate their sons for the era that is just over.
I had all the intellectual endowments to play a decent part in the bourgeois
world of the period before 1914. I had an uneasy feeling, based on what I
had experienced, that it would not be much help to me. That was all. At best
I smelled a warning whiff of what was about to confront me, but I did not
have an intellectual system that would help me deal with it.
True, that was not just my situation but that of my whole generation, and
even more the situation of the older generation. (It is still the situation of
most foreigners, who know about Nazism only from the newspapers and
newsreels.) Our thinking is usually constrained by a certain civilization in
our outlook, in which the basics are unquestioned — and so implicit that
they are almost forgotten. When we argued about certain opposites —
freedom and slavery, for example, or nationalism and humanism, or
individualism and socialism — the discussion always respected certain
Christian, humanistic, civilized principles as axiomatic. Even some of those
who became Nazis at this time did not fully realize what they were doing.
They might think that they stood for nationalism and socialism, were
against the Jews and for the pre-1914-18 status quo, and many of them
secretly looked forward to a new public adventure, a repeat of 1923. Still,
they expected all that to take the humane forms usual in a civilized nation.
Most of them would have been deeply shocked if one had suggested that
what they really stood for were torture chambers and officially decreed
pogroms (to name but two of the most obvious things, and these are
certainly not yet the final horrific culmination). Even today there are Nazis
who are shocked and alarmed if this is pointed out to them.
At that time I had no strong political views. I even found it difficult to
decide whether I was “right” or “left,” to use the most general political
categories. When I was asked this once in 1932, I answered, hesitantly,
“Well, probably right...” In day-to-day politics I formed my views
according to the circumstances; sometimes I had no view at all. None of the
existing political parties seemed particularly attractive to me, despite the
abundant choice. Anyway, belonging to any of them would not have saved
me from becoming a Nazi, ut exempla docent.

Sebastian in the mid-1920s. This was his mother’s favorite portrait of him. (Oliver Pretzel)

What saved me was... my nose. I have a fairly well developed figurative

sense of smell, or to put it differently, a sense of the worth (or
worthlessness!) of human, moral, political views and attitudes. Most
Germans unfortunately lack this sense almost completely. The cleverest of
them are capable of discussing themselves stupid with their abstractions and
deductions, when just using their noses would tell them that something
stinks. I had already acquired the habit of using my nose to test the few
opinions I held firmly.
 As for the Nazis, my nose left me with no doubts. It was just tiresome to
talk about which of their alleged goals and intentions were still acceptable
or even “historically justified” when all of it stank. How it stank! That the
Nazis were enemies, my enemies and the enemies of all I held dear, was
crystal clear to me from the outset. What was not at all clear to me was
what terrible enemies they would turn out to be. I was inclined not to take
them very seriously — a common attitude among their inexperienced
opponents, which helped them a lot, and still helps them.
There are few things as comic as the calm, superior indifference with
which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in
Germany, as if from a box at the theater. It was, after all, a movement with
the declared intention of doing away with us. Perhaps the only comparably
comic thing is the way that now, years later, Europe is permitting itself
exactly the same indifferent attitude, as though it were a superior, amused
onlooker, while the Nazis are already setting it alight at all four corners.

Berlin, January 22, 1933. A street near the Bülow Platz. The area in the vicinity of the Platz had
been cordoned off and traffic diverted. Thousands of armed police ensured that residents kept their
windows shut. (Illustrated London News Picture Library)
 ~ 17 ~

At first the revolution only gave the impression of being a “historical

event” like any other: a matter for the press that might just possibly have
some effect on the public mood.
The Nazis celebrate January 30 as their day of revolution. They are
wrong. There was no revolution on January 30, 1933, just a change of
government. Hitler became Chancellor, by no means the Führer of a Nazi
regime (the cabinet contained only two Nazis apart from him). He swore an
oath of allegiance to the Weimar constitution. The general opinion was that
it was not the Nazis who had won, but the bourgeois parties of the right,
who had “captured” the Nazis and held all the key positions in the
government. In constitutional terms, events had taken a much more
conventional, unrevolutionary course than most of what had happened
during the previous six months. Outwardly also, the day had no
revolutionary aspects, unless one considers a Nazi torchlight procession
through Wilhelmstrasse or a minor gunfight in the suburbs that night as
signs of a revolution.
For most of us outsiders, the experience of January 30 was that of
reading the papers — and the emotions we felt while we were doing so.
The morning headline was “Hitler Called to President.” That produced a
certain nervous, impotent irritation. Hitler had been called to the president
in August and November. He had been offered the vice-chancellorship and
then the chancellorship. Both times he had set impossible conditions, and
both times there had been solemn declarations: “Never again...” Each time
“never again” had lasted exactly three months. Hitler’s opponents in
Germany at that time suffered from a compulsive urge to offer him
everything he wanted, indefatigably and at an ever cheaper price, indeed to
press it upon him. It is the same now with his opponents outside Germany.
Again and again this “appeasement” was formally renounced, and again and
again it gaily reappeared at the crucial moment; just so today. Then as now,
one’s only hope was Hitler’s own unreasonableness. Would it not sooner or
later exhaust the patience of his opponents? Then as now, it became
apparent that their patience knew no bounds...
 At midday the headline said: “Hitler Makes Impossible Demands.” We
nodded, half reassured. It was only too credible. It would have gone against
his nature to ask for less than too much. Perhaps the cup had once more
passed from us. Hitler — the last defense against Hitler.
At about five o’clock the evening papers arrived: “Cabinet of National
Unity Formed — Hitler Reichschancellor.”
I do not know what the general reaction was. For about a minute, mine
was completely correct: icy horror. Certainly this had been a possibility for
a long time. You had to reckon with it. Nevertheless it was so bizarre, so
incredible, to read it now in black on white. Hitler Reichschancellor... for a
moment I physically sensed the man’s odor of blood and filth, the
nauseating approach of a man-eating animal — its foul, sharp claws in my
face.
Then I shook the sensation off, tried to smile, started to consider, and
found many reasons for reassurance. That evening I discussed the prospects
of the new government with my father. We agreed that it had a good chance
of doing a lot of damage, but not much chance of surviving very long: a
deeply reactionary government, with Hitler as its mouthpiece. Apart from
this, it did not really differ much from the two governments that had
succeeded Brüning’s. Even with the Nazis it would not have a majority in
the Reichstag. Of course that could always be dissolved, but the
government had a clear majority of the population against it, in particular
the working class, which would probably go Communist, now that the
Social Democrats had completely discredited themselves. One could
prohibit the Communists, but that would only make them more dangerous.
In the meantime the government would be likely to implement reactionary
social and cultural measures, with some anti-Semitic additions to please
Hitler. That would not attract any of its opponents to its side. Foreign policy
would probably be a matter of banging the table. There might be an attempt
to rearm. That would automatically add the outside world to the 60 percent
of the home population who were against the government. Besides, who
were the people who had suddenly started voting Nazi in the last three
years? Misguided ignoramuses for the most part, victims of propaganda, a
fluctuating mass that would fall apart at the first disappointment. No, all
things considered, this government was not a cause for alarm. The only
question was what would come after it. It was possible that they would
drive the country to civil war. The Communists were capable of going on
the attack before a prohibition against them came into force.
The next day this turned out to be the general opinion of the intelligent
press. It is curious how plausible an argument it is, even today, when we
know what came next. How could things turn out so completely different?
Perhaps it was just because we were all so certain that they could not do so
— and relied on that with far too much confidence. So we neglected to
consider that it might, if worse came to worst, be necessary to prevent the
disaster from happening.
Through the whole of February 1933 everything that happened remained
a matter for the press; in other words, it took place in an arena that would
lose all reality for 99 percent of the population the moment there were no
newspapers. Admittedly, enough occurred in that arena: the Reichstag was
dissolved; then, in a flagrant breach of the constitution, Hindenburg also
dissolved the Prussian regional parliament. There were fast and furious
changes of personnel in the higher civil service, and the election campaign
was accompanied by ferocious acts of terror. The Nazis no longer felt any
restraint; with their gangs, they regularly broke up the election meetings of
other parties. They shot one or two political opponents every day. In a
Berlin suburb they even burned down the house of a Social Democrat
family. The new Prussian regional interior minister (a Nazi: a certain
Captain Göring) promulgated an incredible decree. It ordered the police to
intervene in any brawl on the side of the Nazis, without investigating the
rights and wrongs of the matter, and furthermore to shoot at the other side
without prior warning. A little later an “auxiliary police force” was formed
from the ranks of the SA.
All this was still something one only read about in the press. You did not
see or hear anything that was any different from what had gone on before.
There were brown SA uniforms on the streets, demonstrations, shouts of
“Heil,” but otherwise it was “business as usual.” In the Kammergericht, the
highest court in Prussia, where I worked as Referendar at that time, the
process of the law was not changed at all by the fact that the interior
minister enacted ridiculous edicts. The newspapers might report that the
constitution was in ruins. Here every paragraph of the Civil Code was still
valid and was mulled over and analyzed as carefully as ever. Which was the
true reality? The chancellor could daily utter the vilest abuse against the
Jews; there was nonetheless still a Jewish Kammergerichtsrat
(Kammergericht judge) and member of our senate who continued to give
his astute and careful judgments, and these judgments had the full weight of
the law and could set the entire apparatus of the state in motion for their
enforcement — even if the highest officeholder of that state daily called
their author a “parasite,” a “subhuman,” or a “plague.” Who cut the worse
figure? Who was the butt of the irony of the situation?
I must admit that I was inclined to view the undisturbed functioning of
the law, and indeed the continued normal course of daily life, as a triumph
over the Nazis. They could behave as raucously and wildly as they wished.
They could still only stir up the political surface. The depths of the ocean of
life remained unaffected.
Entirely unaffected? Did not some of the surface waves send out
vibrations, as evidenced by a new jittery tension, a new intolerance and
heated readiness to hate, which began to infect private political discussions,
and even more by the unrelenting pressure to think about politics all the
time? Was it not a remarkable effect of politics on private life that we
suddenly considered any normal daily private event as a political
demonstration?
Be that as it may, I still clung to this normal unpolitical life. There was
no angle from which I could attack the Nazis. Well then, at least I would not
let them interfere with my personal life. It was partly this feeling of
defiance that made me decide to go to one of the great carnival balls. I was
not particularly in the mood for that kind of thing; but let’s see if the Nazis
can stop me enjoying the carnival...
Sebastian with his mother in the mid-1930s. (Oliver Pretzel)
 ~ 18 ~

Carnival in Berlin is, like so many of the city’s customs, a somewhat

artificial, stage-managed affair. There are no droll rituals sanctified by long
usage as there are in the Catholic areas of Germany. It does not have the
spontaneous warmheartedness that carries one along in the Munich
carnival. Its major characteristics are the very Berlinish ones of “bustle”
and “organization.” A carnival ball in Berlin is like a large, colorful, well-
organized love raffle, with winning tickets and duds. You take your chance,
join up with a girl, kiss and cuddle her, and go through all the preparatory
stages of a love affair in a single night. The usual end is a taxi drive at
daybreak and the exchange of phone numbers. By then you usually know
whether it is the start of something that you would like to take further, or
whether you have just earned yourself a hangover. It all takes place in a
wild, garish environment (the “bustle”), with the clashing noise of several
dance bands, in a building decorated with colored paper chains and lanterns,
accompanied by as much alcohol as you can afford. You are packed in like
sardines with several thousand other young couples all doing the same
thing, not bothering about anyone else.
 Carnival in Berlin. Haffner is third from left. (Oliver Pretzel)

The ball I went to was for some reason called “Dachkahn” — ”Roof
Punt” — and was organized by an art academy. It was big, loud, colorful,
and full, like all Berlin carnival balls. It took place on February 25, a
Saturday. I arrived fairly late and it was already in full swing, a teeming
crowd, glimpses of silk, naked shoulders and female legs, a crush in which
one could hardly move, the cloakrooms full, no room at the bars. The crush
was part of the obligatory “bustle.”
I found it difficult to get into the mood. On the contrary, I arrived feeling
rather depressed. I had had some worrying news that afternoon. The
election campaign was not going the way the Nazis wanted. They were
planning a coup, with massive arrests and a regime of terror. We should be
prepared for the worst in the next few weeks. It made me uneasy, but of
course it was still only a matter for the press. This was the true reality,
wasn’t it: the overheard scraps of conversation, laughter, music, the freely
given smiles?
I stood there on a step, distracted and undecided, watching the revelers
around me — the hot, shiny, glowing, eager, smiling faces; so many, so
innocent, all just hoping to meet a nice boyfriend or girlfriend for a night, or
a season, a whiff of the sweetness of life, a little adventure, something to be
fondly remembered. All at once I had a strange, dizzy feeling. I felt as
though I were inescapably imprisoned with all these young people in a giant
ship that was rolling and pitching. We were dancing on its lowest, narrowest
deck, while on the bridge it was being decided to flood that deck and drown
every last one of us.
An arm pushed itself through mine from behind. I recognized a familiar
voice and surfaced back to reality (if that was what it was). It was an old
acquaintance from happy tennis-club days, a girl called Lisl, whom I had
lost sight of for some time, almost forgotten. Now she stood there
comforting and friendly, ready for some fun. She interposed herself firmly
between me and my black thoughts. Her small, solid body screened out the
world and the Nazis, and brought me back to the path of carnival duty.
Within an hour I had been found a partner. I had my raffle prize, a small
black-haired girl, in a Turkish page boy’s costume, very dainty to look at,
with large brown eyes. At first glance she resembled the actress Elisabeth
Bergner. That was her intention — many Berlin girls wanted to look like
Elisabeth Bergner at that time. One could not ask for better.
Lisl gave me a wink and disappeared into the throng and Miss “Bergner”
became my girlfriend for the night; and not just for that night but for a
whole desolate period to come. It was not to be an entirely happy
friendship, but I did not know that yet. She was light as a feather, lay easily
in my arms when we danced, spoke precociously in a small, high-pitched
voice, making cheeky little jokes with a certain brittle, dry Berlin charm. As
she did so her large eyes, so much older than her face, lit up. She was very
attractive and I was satisfied with my prize. We danced a while and then
had some drinks. After that we strolled about a bit and came to a small
room where the music could be heard only faintly, from a distance. We
settled down and tried to guess each other’s names. After a little while we
gave up and decided to invent new ones. She called me “Peter.” I called her
“Charlie.” Good names for lovers in a Vicki Baum novel. You could not ask
for better. In giving ourselves these names we were preparing to become a
pair of lovers à la mode. The few other couples on either side of us were
occupied only with themselves. They did not bother us. However, an elderly
actor, commanding and lonely as he stood in the center of the room, gave us
his whimsical blessing, calling us his children and ordering cocktails for all
of us. It was almost like a little family. After a while I felt like dancing
again. I had promised Lisl to look her up later, but events took a different
turn.
I do not know how the rumor first spread that the police were in the
building. From time to time people had come into the room and tipsily tried
to attract our attention by cracking more or less successful jokes as well as
they could. Someone may have shouted, “Get up, the police are here!” I did
not think that was a particularly good joke. Then the rumor intensified. A
few girls started to become nervous, then jumped up and left, followed by
their cavaliers. Suddenly there was a young man dressed completely in
black, with black hair and black eyes, in the middle of the room. He
declared in a fierce, rough voice that we would all do well to get out unless
we wanted to spend the night at Alexanderplatz (that was where the police
headquarters were, and the cells). He behaved rather as if he were a
policeman himself, but on closer inspection I remembered that he had been
in the room, kissing a girl, for quite a while. The girl had disappeared. Now
I noticed that he was wearing a badge on his cap that represented the fasces
bundle of a Roman lictor and, my God, his black costume was a fascist
uniform! Strange costume! Strange behavior! The old actor rose from his
chair and, swaying a little, left the room. It felt like a dream.
Somewhere in one of the rooms that gave ours its dim illumination the
lights went out. There were loud screams. All of a sudden we all looked
pale as ghosts. It made a very theatrical effect. “Is that true about the
police?” I asked the black-clad young man. “It is true, my son!” he bawled
out. “But why? What’s up?” “Work it out for yourself. There are people
who don’t like this sort of thing,” he said, and he slapped a nearby girl
loudly on her naked thigh. I was not quite sure whether he was on the side
of the police, or whether this was some kind of wild gesture of defiance. I
shrugged. “Let’s see for ourselves, eh, Charlie?” She nodded and followed
me trustingly.
There was tumult everywhere, turmoil, unease, and an edge of panic.
Something was definitely up. Perhaps something unpleasant had happened,
maybe an accident, or a fight. Could it be that even here some people had
shot at one another, Nazis or Communists? It did not seem altogether
impossible. We pushed our way through several rooms. There! The police
really were there in their helmets and their blue uniforms. They stood there
amid the turbulent flow of alarmed, brightly costumed figures, like rocks in
the breaking waves. Now we would find out. I approached one of them, a
little deprecatingly, smiling and confident, as one approaches a policeman
to ask for directions. “Do we really have to leave?”
“You have permission to leave,” was the reply, and I flinched, so
threateningly had it been said: slowly, icily, and maliciously. I looked at him
— and flinched again. What kind of face was that? Not the usual, familiar,
friendly, honest face of an ordinary policeman. This face seemed to consist
entirely of teeth. The man had literally snarled at me, baring both rows of
teeth, an unusual grimace for a human being. His teeth showed, small,
pointed, and evil like a shark’s. The whole pale, blond face was fishlike and
sharklike under the helmet, with watery, colorless eyes and a pike’s pointed
nose above the teeth. Very Nordic, one had to admit, but then again not
really human, rather more like the face of a crocodile. I shuddered. I had
seen the face of the SS.
 Berlin, January 22, 1933. A large Nazi demonstration outside the headquarters of the German
Communist Party, in the Bülow Platz, the center of a working-class area. (Mary Evans Picture
Library)
 ~ 19 ~

Two days later there was the Reichstag fire.

There have been few contemporary events that I missed so completely.
While it was taking place I was visiting a friend in the suburbs. He was also
a Referendar. We spoke of politics. Today he has a high position in the
military administration. He is “strictly apolitical,” dutifully and
conscientiously working on the technical aspects of attacks on foreign
countries. Then he was a good companion, chagrined by his somewhat dry
character, the product of an all-too-sheltered upbringing. As the only child
of parents whose great hope he represented, he had been unable to escape
the loving incarceration of their home. His great regret was that it seemed
impossible for him ever to have a real love affair. He was certainly not a
Nazi, but a “nationalist” and for “law and order.” He could not find his way
out of this dilemma. He had always voted for the Deutsche Volkspartei
(German People’s Party), but he sensed that this was futile now. Perhaps he
would not vote at all.
His visiting friends were wrestling for his political soul. “You can’t fail
to see,” said one, “that we now have a clear nationalist policy. How can you
still dither? You have to decide one way or the other. So what if a few
clauses go by the board?” A second friend countered that at least the Social
Democrats had the merit of having “integrated the working class into the
state.” The present government placed this hard-won achievement at risk. I
provoked general mild disapproval with the “frivolous” comment that it
seemed to me a matter of good taste to vote against the Nazis,
independently of where one stood politically. “Well, then at least vote black,
white, and red” (meaning nationalist), the champion of the Nazis remarked
carelessly.
While we were arguing rather pointlessly and drinking Moselle wine the
Reichstag was burning. Poor Marinus van der Lubbe was found in the
building, equipped with every conceivable piece of identification. Outside,
against a flaming backdrop, like a Wagnerian Wotan, Hitler uttered the
memorable words, “If this is the work of the Communists, which I do not
doubt, may God have mercy on them!” We had no inkling of all that. The
radio was switched off. Around midnight we sleepily took the night buses
to our various homes. At that very moment the raiding parties were already
on their way to get their victims out of bed, in the first great wave of
concentration-camp arrests: left-wing deputies and literary figures,
unpopular doctors, officials, and lawyers.
It was only the next morning that I read about the fire, and not until
midday that I read about the arrests. Around the same time a decree of
Hindenburg’s was promulgated. It abolished freedom of speech and
confidentiality of the mail and telephone for all private individuals, while
giving the police unrestricted rights of search and access, confiscation and
arrest. That afternoon men with ladders went around, honest workmen,
covering campaign posters with plain white paper. All parties of the left had
been prohibited from any further election publicity. Those newspapers that
still appeared reported all this in a fawning, fervently patriotic, jubilant
tone. We had been saved! What good luck! Germany was free! Next
Saturday all Germans would come together in a festival of national
exaltation, their hearts swelling with gratitude! Get the torches and flags
out!
Thus the press. The streets were exactly the same as always. The
cinemas were open. The law courts sat and heard cases. No sign of a
revolution. At home people were a little confused, a little anxious, and tried
to understand what was happening. That was difficult, very difficult, in such
a short time.
So the Communists had burned down the Reichstag. Well, well. That
could well be so, it was even to be expected. Funny, though, why they
should choose the Reichstag, an empty building, where no one would profit
from a fire. Well, perhaps it really had been intended as the “signal” for the
uprising, which had been prevented by the “decisive measures” taken by the
government. That was what the papers said, and it sounded plausible.
Funny also that the Nazis got so worked up about the Reichstag. Up till then
they had contemptuously called it a “hot air factory.” Now it was suddenly
the holy of holies that had been burned down. Well, what suits their book,
don’t you agree, my friend, that’s politics, isn’t it? Thank God we don’t
understand it. The main thing is: the danger of a Communist uprising has
been averted and we can sleep easy. Good night.
More seriously: perhaps the most interesting thing about the Reichstag
fire is that the claim that it was the work of the Communists was so widely
believed. Even the skeptics did not regard it as entirely incredible. That was
the Communists’ own fault. They had become a strong party in recent
years, and had again and again trumpeted their “readiness.” Nobody
believed they would allow themselves to be “prohibited” and slaughtered
without putting up a fight. During the whole of February we had been
permanently at “eyes left,” waiting for the Communist counterstrike. Not a
Social Democrat counterstrike. Nobody expected anything from Severing
and Grzesinski anymore, after the events of July 20, 1932.[xxi] On that day,
protected by eighty thousand heavily armed policemen and by the full
support of the law, they had backed down in the face of the “superior
might” of a single company of the army. A Communist attack was what we
expected. The Communists were determined people, with fierce
expressions. They raised their fists in salute, and had weapons — at least,
they used guns often enough in the everyday pub brawls. They boasted
continually about the strength of their organization, and they had probably
learned how to do “these things” in Russia. The Nazis had left no one in
doubt that they wanted to destroy them. It was natural, indeed obvious, that
the Communists would retaliate. It was only surprising that there had been
nothing of the kind so far.
It took a long time for the Germans to realize that the Communists had
been sheep in wolves’ clothing. The Nazi myth of the Communist putsch
that had been averted fell on fertile ground that had been prepared by the
Communists themselves. Who would have believed that there was nothing
behind the façade of raised fists? There are still some people in Germany
who fall for the Communist scare, and that is the Communists’ own doing.
The number who do so is not very large anymore; the poor showing of the
German Communists is becoming common knowledge. Even the Nazis
tend to avoid this particular tune, except with distinguished foreign visitors.
They still fall for anything.
After all that, I do not see that one can blame the majority of Germans
who, in 1933, believed that the Reichstag fire was the work of the
Communists. What one can blame them for, and what shows their terrible
collective weakness of character clearly for the first time during the Nazi
period, is that this settled the matter. With sheepish submissiveness the
German people accepted that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost
what little personal freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution;
as though it followed as a necessary consequence. If the Communists had
burned down the Reichstag, it was perfectly in order that the government
took “decisive measures”!
Next morning I discussed these matters with a few other Referendars.
All of them were very interested in the question of who had committed the
crime, and more than one of them hinted that they had doubts about the
official version; but none of them saw anything out of the ordinary in the
fact that, from now on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters
opened, and one’s desk might be broken into. “I consider it a personal
insult,” I said, “that I should be prevented from reading whichever
newspaper I wish, because allegedly a Communist set light to the
Reichstag. Don’t you?” One of them cheerfully and harmlessly said, “No.
Why should I? Did you read Forwards and The Red Flag up to now?”
On the evening of this eventful Tuesday I made three telephone calls.
The first was to my girlfriend Charlie, to arrange a rendezvous. I was a little
in love with her, but it was largely out of defiance. I did not want my affairs
interfered with, especially not now. Besides, Charlie was Jewish.
Then I phoned a jujitsu club and asked about their terms and ordered a
prospectus. I had the feeling that the time had come when I ought to learn
jujitsu. (However, I soon realized that the time had passed when jujitsu
might have helped. A form of mental jujitsu was what was needed now.)
Finally, I phoned my faithful friend Lisl. Not for a rendezvous, just to
apologize for not seeing her since the ball and to ask how she had been, a
more serious question than usual under the current circumstances.
On the phone Lisl’s voice was tearful. She said: “You are involved with
the law, aren’t you?” Did I know anything about what had happened to
those detained yesterday? Her voice failed her. Then, with a hard edge to it,
she asked, were they at least still alive? She had not yet adjusted to the
phones being tapped.
Her partner had been arrested. This was not just a carnival boyfriend, but
the man she loved. He was a well-known left-wing doctor. He was famous
for organizing a magnificent social-medical service in his borough — a
working-class area. He had published articles in which he advocated
legalizing abortion on social grounds. So he was on the Nazis’ first list.
I spoke to Lisl a few times during the next few weeks. There was no way
of helping her, and it became ever harder to find anything comforting to say.
 ~ 20 ~

What is a revolution?
Constitutional lawyers define it as a change of constitution by means not
foreseen therein. By this definition the Nazi revolution of March 1933 was
not a revolution. Everything went strictly “by the book,” using means that
were permitted by the constitution. At first there were “emergency decrees”
by the president of the Reich, and later a bill was passed by a two-thirds
majority of the Reichstag giving the government unlimited legislative
powers, perfectly in accordance with the rules for changing the constitution.
Now, that is obviously shadow boxing, but even if we look at things as
they really were, there is still room for doubt whether what happened that
March really deserves the name of a revolution. From a simple,
commonsense point of view, one would say that the essential characteristic
of a revolution is that people violently attack the established order and its
representatives, police, army, etc., and overcome them. It need not always
be thrilling and glorious. It can be accompanied by atrocities, brutality,
plunder, murder, and arson. At all events, we expect revolutionaries to be on
the attack, to show courage, risk their lives. Barricades may be out of date,
but some form of spontaneity, uprising, commitment, and insurrection seem
to be an essential part of a genuine revolution.
None of that was to be found in March 1933. The events were a
combination of the most disparate ingredients. What was completely absent
was any act of courage or spirit by any of the participants. The month of
March demonstrated that the Nazis had achieved an unassailable position of
power: through terror, celebration and rhetoric, treachery, and finally a
collective breakdown — a million individuals simultaneously suffered a
nervous collapse. More bloodshed has accompanied the birth of many
European states, but none came into being in a more loathsome way.
European history knows two forms of terror. The first is the
uncontrollable explosion of bloodlust in a victorious mass uprising. The
other is cold, calculated cruelty committed by a victorious state as a
demonstration of power and intimidation. The two forms of terror normally
correspond to revolution and repression. The first is revolutionary. It
justifies itself by the rage and fever of the moment, a temporary madness.
The second is repressive. It justifies itself by the preceding revolutionary
atrocities.
It was left to the Nazis to combine both forms of terror in a manner that
invalidates both justifications. In 1933 the terror was practiced by a real
bloodthirsty mass (namely the SA — the SS did not play a part until later),
but this mass acted as “auxiliary police,” without any emotion or
spontaneity, and without any risk to themselves. Rather, they acted from a
position of complete security, under orders and with strict discipline. The
external picture was one of revolutionary terror: a wild, unkempt mob
breaking into homes at night and dragging defenseless victims to the torture
chambers. The internal process was repressive terror: cold, calculated,
official orders, directed by the state and carried out under the full protection
of the police and the armed forces. It did not take place in the excitement
following a victorious battle or danger successfully overcome — nothing of
the kind had happened. Nor was it an act of revenge for atrocities
committed by the other side — there had been none. What happened was a
nightmarish reversal of normal circumstances: robbers and murderers acting
as the police force, enjoying the full panoply of state power, their victims
treated as criminals, proscribed and condemned to death in advance.
An example that became public knowledge because of its scale occurred
some months later in the Cöpenick area of Berlin, where a Social
Democratic trade unionist defended himself, with the help of his sons,
against an SA patrol that broke into his home at night to “arrest” him. In
obvious self-defense he shot two SA men. As a result, he and his sons were
overcome by a larger troop of SA men and hanged in a shed in the yard that
same night. The next day, the SA patrols appeared in Cöpenick, in
disciplined order, entered the homes of every known Social Democrat, and
killed them on the spot. The exact number of deaths was never made public.
This form of terror had the advantage that, according to the
circumstances, one could either shrug one’s shoulders and speak of “the
unavoidable, if regrettable, side effects of any revolution” — using the
justification for revolutionary terror — or point to the strict discipline and
explain that public law and order were being maintained and that these
actions were required to prevent revolutionary disorder overwhelming
Germany: the justification for repressive terror. Both excuses were used in
turn, depending on the audience being addressed.
 Certainly, this kind of publicity made, and still makes, the terror under
the Nazis more repulsive than under any other regime in European history.
Even cruelty can have a magnificent aspect, if it is practiced with open
commitment and idealism; when those who are cruel stand by their deeds
with fervor — as happened in the French Revolution and the Russian and
Spanish civil wars. In contrast, the Nazis never showed anything but the sly,
pale, cowardly face of a murderer denying his crime. While they were
systematically torturing and murdering their defenseless victims, they daily
declared in fine, noble words that not a single hair of anyone’s head would
be harmed, and that never before had a revolution shed less blood or been
conducted more humanely. Indeed, only a few weeks after the atrocities
began, a law was passed that forbade anyone, under pain of severe
penalties, to claim, even in the privacy of his own home, that atrocities were
taking place.
Of course, it was not the intention to keep the atrocities secret. In that
case they would not have served their purpose, which was to induce general
fear, alarm, and submission. On the contrary, the purpose was to intensify
the terror by cloaking it in secrecy and making even talking about it
dangerous. An open declaration of what was happening in SA cellars and
concentration camps — in a public speech or in the press — might still
have led to desperate resistance, even in Germany. The secret whispered
rumors, “Be careful, my friend! Do you know what happened to X?” were
much more effective in breaking people’s backbones.
The effect was intensified by the way one was permanently occupied and
distracted by an unending sequence of celebrations, ceremonies, and
national festivities. It started with a huge victory celebration before the
elections on March 4 — ”Tag der nationalen Erhebung” (Day of National
Rising). There were mass parades, fireworks, drums, bands, and flags all
over Germany, Hitler’s voice over thousands of loudspeakers, oaths and
vows — and all before it was even certain that the elections might not be a
setback for the Nazis, which indeed they were. These elections, the last that
were ever held in prewar Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 percent of the
votes (in the previous elections they had achieved 37 percent). The majority
was still against the Nazis. If you consider that terror was in full swing, that
the parties of the left had been prohibited from all public activity in the
decisive final week before the elections, you have to admit that the German
people as a whole had behaved quite decently. However, it made no
difference at all. The defeat was celebrated like a victory, the terror
intensified, the celebrations multiplied. Flags never left the windows for a
whole fortnight.
A week later Hindenburg abolished the Weimar national flag, which was
replaced by the swastika banner and a black, white, and red “temporary
national flag.” There were daily parades, mass meetings, declarations of
gratitude for the liberation of the nation, military music from dawn to dusk,
awards ceremonies for heroes, the dedication of flags, and, as a final
climax, the tasteless display of the “Day of Potsdam” — with the traitor
Hindenburg visiting the grave of Frederick the Great, Hitler swearing
loyalty to something or other for the nth time, bells tolling, a solemn
procession to church by the members of the Reichstag, a military parade,
swords lowered in salute, children waving flags, and a torchlight parade.
The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending
events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used
to cheering and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it. It
was reason enough that people who distanced themselves too obviously —
sshh! — were daily and nightly tortured to death with steel whips and
electric drills. Better to celebrate, howl with the wolves, “Heil, Heil!”
Besides, people began to enjoy doing so. The weather in March 1933 was
glorious. Was it not wonderful to celebrate in the spring sunshine, in
squares decked with flags? To merge with the festive crowds and listen to
high-sounding patriotic speeches, about freedom and fatherland, exaltation
and holy vows? (It was certainly better than having one’s belly pumped up
with a water hose in some hidden SA cellar.)
People began to join in — at first mostly from fear. After they had
participated, they no longer wanted to do so just from fear. That would have
been mean and contemptible. So the necessary ideology was also supplied.
That was the spiritual basis of the victory of the National Socialist
revolution.
True, something further was necessary to achieve all this. That was the
cowardly treachery of all party and organizational leaders, to whom the 56
percent of the population who had voted against the Nazis on March 5 had
entrusted themselves. This terrible and decisive event was not much noticed
by the outside world. Naturally, the Nazis had no interest in drawing
attention to it, since it would considerably devalue their “victory,” and as
for the traitors themselves: well, of course, they did not want attention
drawn to it. Nevertheless, it is finally only this betrayal that explains the
almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted
entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.
The betrayal was complete, extending from left to right. I have already
described how, behind their façade of being “ready” and prepared for civil
war, the Communists were preparing only for the emigration of their
leading members.
What of the Social Democratic leadership? Their betrayal of their
faithful and blindly loyal millions of followers, for the most part decent,
unimportant individuals, had begun on July 20, 1932, when Severing and
Grzesinski “yielded to greater force.” They had fought the election
campaign of 1933 in a dreadfully humiliating way, chasing after the Nazi
slogans and emphasizing that they were “also nationalist.” On March 4, a
day before the elections, their “strong man,” the Prussian prime minister,
Otto Braun, drove across the Swiss frontier. He had prudently bought a
small house in Ticino. In May, a month before they were finally dissolved,
the Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag had unanimously expressed
their confidence in Hitler and joined in the singing of the “Horst Wessel
Song,” the Nazi anthem. (The official parliamentary report noted:
“Unending applause and cheers, in the house and the galleries. The
Reichschancellor turns to the Social Democratic faction and applauds.”)
The great middle-class Catholic party, Zentrum, which in the last few
years had attracted the backing of more and more middle-class Protestants,
had already fallen in March. It was this party that supplied the votes
necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship.
In this it followed its leader, the ex-Reichschancellor Brüning. This is
frequently forgotten abroad, and Brüning is still considered as a possible
replacement for Hitler. Believe me, it is not forgotten in Germany. A man
who, even on March 23, 1933, thought it tactically justifiable to procure for
Hitler the votes of his party on a decisive issue has ruled himself out forever
there.
Finally, the German nationalists, the right-wing conservatives, who
venerated “honor” and “heroism” as the central characteristics of their
program. Oh God, what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle
their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward! One might at
least have expected that, once their claim in January proved illusory — that
they had “tamed” the Nazis and “rendered them harmless” — they would
act as a “brake” and “prevent the worst.” Not a bit of it. They went along
with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews, the persecution of
Christians. They were not even bothered when their own party was
prohibited, and their own members arrested. Socialist officials who abandon
their party members and voters are a dismal enough sight; but what is one
to say of aristocratic officers — such as Herr von Papen — who stand by
when their nearest friends and associates are shot, and who remain in office
and shout “Heil Hitler!”?[xxii]
As the parties, so the leagues. There was the League of Communist
Front-Line Veterans and a centrist association called Reichsbanner with a
black, red, and gold flag, the colors of the Weimar Republic. It was
organized on military lines by a coalition of parties including the Social
Democrats, had arms and millions of members, and was explicitly intended
to hold the SA in check. During the whole period this association remained
completely invisible, not a glimmer. It disappeared without trace, as though
it had never existed. Resistance in Germany only took the form of
individual acts of desperation — as in the case of the trade union official in
Cöpenick. The officers of the Reichsbanner showed not the slightest
opposition when their facilities were “taken over” by the SA. The
Stahlhelm, the army of the German nationalists, permitted itself to be
absorbed and then dissolved bit by bit. They grumbled, but offered no
resistance. There was not one single example of energetic defense, of
courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March
1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found
themselves without leaders. Some tried to join the Stahlhelm and the
German nationalists, when it became clear that none of the others was going
to fight. For a few weeks, their membership numbers showed an
exceptional rise, then the organization was disbanded — and it, too,
capitulated without a fight.
This terrible moral bankruptcy of the opposition leadership is a
fundamental characteristic of the March “revolution” of 1933. It made the
Nazi victory exceedingly easy. On the other hand, it also sheds doubt on the
strength and durability of that victory. The swastika has not been stamped
on the Germans as though they were a firm, resistant but malleable mass,
but as though they were a formless, yielding pulp that can equally easily
take a different shape. Admittedly, March 1933 has left open the question as
to whether it is worth the effort to try and reshape it. The moral inadequacy
of the German character shown in that month is too monstrous to suppose
that history will not one day call the nation to account for it.
With other nations, every revolution has ultimately led to an enormous
increase in the moral energy of both sides, however much blood might
initially have been shed, however much they had at first been weakened. In
the long run, revolutions have thus always strengthened the nations
concerned. Just consider the vast quantity of heroism, death-defying
courage, and human greatness exhibited by the Jacobins and the Royalists
in the French Revolution — admittedly against a backdrop of cruelty and
violence. It is the same with the Republicans and Franco supporters in
Spain. Whatever the outcome, the courage of the fighters remains a source
of strength in the mind of the nation. Instead of that source of strength,
today’s Germans have the memory of shame, cowardice, and weakness.
That will inevitably have consequences one day, perhaps even lead to the
dissolution of the German state.
It was out of this treachery of its opponents, and the feeling of
helplessness, weakness, and disgust that it aroused, that the Third Reich
was born. In the elections of March 5 the Nazis had remained a minority. If
there had been elections three weeks later, the German people would almost
certainly have given them a true majority. This was not just a result of the
terror, or intoxication resulting from the constant festivities (though the
Germans like being intoxicated by patriotic celebrations). The decisive
cause was anger and disgust with the cowardly treachery of their own
leadership. That had become for a moment stronger than the rage and hate
against the real enemy. Hundreds of thousands, who had up until then been
opponents, joined the Nazi Party in March 1933. The Nazis called them the
“casualties of March” and treated them with suspicion and contempt. The
workers also left their Social Democratic and Communist unions in equally
large numbers and joined Nazi Betriebszellen (factory cells) or the SA.
They did it for many reasons, often for a whole tangled web of them; but
however hard one looks, one will not find a single solid, positive, durable
reason among them — not one that can pass muster. In each individual case
the process of becoming a Nazi showed the unmistakable symptoms of
nervous collapse.
 The simplest and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic
reason was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a
kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses.
Many also felt a need for revenge against those who had abandoned them.
Then there was a peculiarly German line of thought: “All the predictions of
the opponents of the Nazis have not come true. They said the Nazis could
not win. Now they have won. Therefore the opponents were wrong. So the
Nazis must be right.” There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the
belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a
member, even now shift its direction. Then, of course, many just jumped on
the bandwagon, wanting to be part of a perceived success. Finally, among
the more primitive, inarticulate, simpler souls there was a process that
might have taken place in mythical times when a beaten tribe abandoned its
faithless god and accepted the god of the victorious tribe as its patron. Saint
Marx, in whom one had always believed, had not helped. Saint Hitler was
obviously more powerful. So let’s destroy the images of Saint Marx on the
altars and replace them with images of Saint Hitler. Let us learn to pray: “It
is the Jews’ fault” rather than “It is the capitalists’ fault.” Perhaps that will
redeem us.
The sequence of events is, as you see, not so unnatural. It is wholly
within the normal range of psychology, and it helps to explain the almost
inexplicable. The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called
“breeding.” 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. That
was shown in March 1933. At the moment of truth, when other nations rise
spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply
collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.
The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown is the unified nation,
ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.
 ~ 21 ~

That was the sequence of events as it presents itself with the clarity and
certainty of hindsight today. At the time, while I experienced them, it was
not possible to gauge their significance. I felt, intensely, the choking,
nauseous character of it all, but I was unable to grasp its constituent parts
and place them in an overall order. Each attempt was frustrated and veiled
by those endless, useless, vain discussions in which we attempted again and
again to fit the events into an obsolete, unsuitable scheme of political ideas.
How eerie these discussions now seem, when an accident of memory
throws up a scrap of one of them. In spite of all our historical and cultural
education, how completely helpless we were to deal with something that
just did not feature in anything we had learned! How meaningless our
explanations, how infinitely stupid the attempts at justification, how
hopelessly superficial the jury-rigged constructions with which the intellect
tried to cover up the proper feeling of dread and disgust. How stale all the
isms we brought up. I shudder to think of it.
Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on
as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was
daily mocked by the events that served as its background. I still went to the
Kammergericht, the law was still practiced there, as though it still meant
something, and the Jewish judge still presided in his robes, quite
unmolested. However, his colleagues now treated him with a certain tactful
delicacy, like one does somebody suffering from a serious disease. I still
phoned my girlfriend Charlie. We went to the cinema, had a meal in a small
wine bar, drank Chianti, and went dancing together. I still saw my friends,
had discussions with acquaintances. Family birthdays were still celebrated
as they always had been. But while in February we could still question
whether all this did not represent a triumph of indestructible reality over the
Nazis’ carryings-on, now it was no longer possible to deny that daily life
itself had become hollow and mechanical. Every minute merely confirmed
the victory of the enemy forces flooding in from all sides.
Strangely enough, it was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life
that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror. I have
described how the treachery and cowardice of the leaders of the opposition
prevented their organizations from being used against the Nazis or offering
any resistance. That still leaves the question why no individuals ever
spontaneously opposed some particular injustice or iniquity they
experienced, even if they did not act against the whole. (I am not blind to
the fact that this charge applies to me as much as to anyone else.)
It was hindered by the mechanical continuation of normal daily life.
How different history would be if men were still independent, standing on
their own two feet, as in ancient Athens. Today they are yoked to the details
of their work and daily timetable, dependent on a thousand little details,
cogs in a mechanism they do not control, running steadily on rails and
helpless if they become derailed. Only the daily routine provides security
and continuity. Just beyond lies a dark jungle. Every European of the
twentieth century feels this in his bones and fears it. It is the cause of his
reluctance to do anything that could “derail” his life — something
audacious or out of the ordinary. It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the
possibility of immense catastrophes of civilization such as the rule of the
Nazis in Germany.
Yes, I roared and raged during that March of 1933. Yes, I frightened my
parents with wild proposals: I would leave the law courts; I would emigrate
and demonstratively convert to Judaism. But it went no further than the
expression of these intentions. Though it was not really relevant to current
events, my father’s immense experience of the period from 1870 to 1933
was deployed to calm me down and sober me up. He treated my heated
emotions with gentle irony. I must admit that calm skepticism has always
had a stronger influence on me than emotionally proclaimed conviction. It
took me quite a while to realize that my youthful excitability was right and
my father’s wealth of experience was wrong; that there are things that
cannot be dealt with by calm skepticism. I lacked the self-confidence to
draw active conclusions from my feelings.
Perhaps, after all, I was exaggerating events. Perhaps it was best to hold
steady and let things pass over me. The only place where I felt confident
and sure of myself was at the courts, where I was protected by the
paragraphs of the Civil Code and legal procedure. Though for the moment
the activities of the courts seemed to lack meaning, nothing had changed
there. Maybe they would turn out to be durable and strong.
In this way, unsure of myself, temporizing, I performed my routine daily
duties. At home I gave way to fruitless and ridiculous outbursts at the
dinner table. Excluded from events and passive like millions of others, I let
events come at me.
And they did.
 ~ 22 ~

At the end of March the Nazis felt strong enough to initiate the first act
of their real revolution, a revolution not against some constitution or other,
but against the basis of human society on earth, a revolution that, if nothing
is done, will stop at nothing. The first diffident move was the boycott of the
Jews on April 1, 1933.

Berlin, April 1, 1933. A Jewish department store. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

It had been thought up by Hitler and Goebbels over tea and biscuits at
Obersalzberg in Bavaria the Sunday before. On Monday the papers carried
the peculiarly ironic headline “Mass Demonstrations Announced.” From
Saturday, April 1, they said, all Jewish shops would be boycotted. SA
troops would stand guard in front of them and prevent anyone from going
in. All Jewish doctors and lawyers were also to be boycotted. SA patrols
would check their consulting rooms to ensure that the ruling was obeyed.
One could see the advances that the Nazis had made in just one month
by considering the justification for the boycott. The myth of a Communist
coup that had been used to override the constitution and remove civil
liberties had been carefully and plausibly constructed. They had even felt
the need to supply some direct evidence in the form of the Reichstag fire.
The justification for this new affront was a barefaced insult and mockery of
those who were expected to act as though they believed it. The boycott was
to be carried out as a defense and reaction against the totally unfounded
horror stories about the new Germany that the German Jews were alleged to
have cleverly spread abroad. Yes, just so.

Berlin, April 1, 1933. Notice in a shoe-shop window. The photo may have been retouched at the time
to insert the English text. (Oliver Pretzel)

Further measures were added in the next few days (some of them later
temporarily rescinded). All “Aryan” shops had to sack their Jewish
employees. Then all Jewish shops had to do so too. Jewish shops had to pay
their “Aryan” employees in full during the period they were closed by the
boycott. Jewish owners had to withdraw from their businesses and install
“Aryan” managers. And so on.
At the same time a great “education campaign” against the Jews was set
in motion. The Germans were informed through pamphlets, posters, and
meetings that it had been a mistake to consider the Jews as human beings.
In reality they were a kind of “subhuman” animal, but with the
characteristics of a devil. The consequences that would be drawn from this
were not spelled out for the moment. Still, the campaign slogan was given
out as “Juda verrecke” (Perish Judah). A man who had hitherto been
unknown to most Germans was appointed as leader of the boycott: Julius
Streicher.
All this aroused in the German people something one might not have
expected after the previous four weeks: widespread alarm. A murmur of
dissent, suppressed but audible, spread through the land. The Nazis sensed
that they had gone too far for the moment, and withdrew some of their
measures after April 1. Not, however, without first allowing these to
unleash the full force of their terror. By now everyone knows to what extent
the Nazis have changed their true intentions.
Apart from the terror, the unsettling and depressing aspect of this first
murderous declaration of intent was that it triggered a flood of arguments
and discussions all over Germany, not about anti-Semitism but about the
“Jewish question.” This is a trick the Nazis have since successfully repeated
many times on other “questions” and in international affairs. By publicly
threatening a person, an ethnic group, a nation, or a region with death and
destruction, they provoke a general discussion not about their own
existence, but about the right of their victims to exist. In this way that right
is put in question.
Suddenly everyone felt justified, and indeed required, to have an opinion
about the Jews, and to state it publicly. Distinctions were made between
“decent” Jews and the others. If some pointed to the achievements of
Jewish scientists, artists, and doctors to justify the Jews (justify? what for?
against what?), others would counter that they were a detrimental “foreign
influence” in these spheres. Indeed, it soon became customary to count it
against the Jews if they had a respectable or intellectually valuable
profession. This was treated as a crime or, at the very least, a lack of tact.
The defenders of the Jews were frowningly told that it was reprehensible of
the Jews to have such-and-such a percentage of doctors, lawyers,
journalists, etc. Indeed, percentage calculations were a popular ingredient of
the “Jewish question.” People discussed whether the percentage of Jews
among the members of the Communist Party was not too high, and among
the casualties of the Great War perhaps too low. (This is the literal truth. I
heard this argument in the mouth of an educated man with a Ph.D., who
reckoned himself a member of the cultured class. He argued quite seriously
that the twelve thousand Jewish dead in the Great War was too small a
proportion of the Jewish population in comparison with the corresponding
number of “Aryans” killed, and derived from this a certain justification for
Nazi anti-Semitism.)
Today it is quite clear that Nazi anti-Semitism had nothing to do with the
virtues or vices of the Jews. The interesting thing about the Nazis’ intention
to train the Germans to be persecutors of the Jews throughout the world,
and if possible exterminate them, an intention they made no secret of, is not
the justification they gave. That is such utter nonsense that it is demeaning
even to take it seriously enough to argue against it. It is the intention itself
that is significant. It is something new in the history of the world: an
attempt to deny humans the solidarity of every species that enables it to
survive; to turn human predatory instincts, that are normally directed
against other animals, against members of their own species, and to make a
whole nation into a pack of hunting hounds. Once the violence and
readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been
awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is
a simple matter to change the target. That can be clearly seen today; instead
of “Jews,” one can just as easily say “Czechs” or “Poles” or anyone else.
We have here the systematic infection of a whole nation, Germany, with
a germ that causes its people to treat their victims like wolves; or, to put it
differently, the freeing and revitalization of precisely those sadistic instincts
whose chaining and restraint has been the work of a thousand years of
civilization. In a later chapter I intend to show how, in spite of its general
weakness and dishonor, large parts of the German nation still find the
strength to resist, perhaps from a dark feeling for what is at issue. Were it
different, and should the central core of the Nazis’ program become a
reality, it would amount to a major crisis for humanity, and would place the
survival of the species Homo sapiens at risk. It might only be possible to
save the species by destroying the part infected by the “wolf virus”
completely.
This brief discourse shows that it is precisely the Nazis’ anti-Semitism
that raises the most basic questions of existence, not just for the Jews. That
is not true to the same extent of any of their other election pledges. It shows
how ridiculous the attitude is, still found widely in Germany, that the anti-
Semitism of the Nazis is a small side issue, at worst a minor blemish on the
movement, which one can regret or accept according to one’s personal
feelings for the Jews, and of “little significance compared to the great
national issues.” In reality these “great national issues” are unimportant
day-to-day matters, the ephemeral business of a transitional period in
European history — while the Nazis’ anti-Semitism is a fundamental
danger and raises the specter of the downfall of humanity.
Again, these are all things that nobody saw with any clarity in March
1933. In this case, however, I can pride myself in having had a sense of
what was in the air. I felt distinctly that what had happened so far was
merely disgusting and no more. But what was in the offing had something
apocalyptic about it. In rarely visited corners of my mind I felt that we were
facing ultimate questions, though I did not yet know quite what they were.
At the same time, coupled with the feeling of dread, I had an almost
joyful sense that events were closing in on me. I am what the Nazis call an
“Aryan.” Of course I know as little as anyone else which races go to make
up my genetic heritage, but Jewish blood has not been in the family during
the two or three hundred years that it can be traced. Nevertheless I feel a
stronger instinctive affinity to the world of the German Jews than to the
ordinary northern Germans among whom I grew up. My relationships with
Jews go back a long way and have been very close. My oldest and closest
friend was Jewish. My new little girlfriend Charlie was Jewish. I had really
not taken this affair very seriously, but now that the hand of doom was
reaching for her, I felt that I loved her a little more fiercely and
passionately.
I phoned her on the evening of the day of the first announcements in the
papers. That week I saw her almost every day, and our relationship began to
take on the shape of a true love affair. Of course, in everyday life Charlie
was not a little Turkish page boy, as she had been at the ball. She was a girl
from a lower-middle-class family with a confusing background and with
many relatives. But she was a small, fragile, friendly person, and calamity
threatened her. During these weeks I truly loved her.
I remember a bizarre scene with Charlie in that last week of March, amid
the distant thunder of the approaching boycott. We had gone for a walk in
the Grunewald, the woods to the west of Berlin. It was beautiful, unusually
warm spring weather, as it had been throughout that March. We sat on the
grass among the fir trees inhaling the scent of resin, under an indescribably
clear sky with little clouds, like a couple in a film. The world was full of the
peace of springtime. We sat there for about two hours and every ten minutes
or so a group of young people would go past. It seemed to be a day for
school outings. They were all fresh-faced adolescents accompanied and
supervised by their teachers, who often wore a pince-nez or a little beard, as
one expects of a teacher faithfully watching over his little flock. Every one
of these classes, as they passed, shouted “Juda verrecke!” to us in their
bright young voices, as though it was a sort of hiker’s greeting. It may not
have been aimed at us in particular. I do not look at all Jewish, and Charlie
did not look very Jewish either. Perhaps it was just a friendly greeting.
Perhaps, though, it was intended for us and was a challenge.
So there I sat “on the springtime hill” with a small, graceful, vivacious
girl in my arms. We kissed and caressed each other, and every so often a
group of boys went past and cheerfully told us to perish. Well, we did not
oblige, and they went on their way unconcerned by our failure to comply.
A surreal image.
 ~ 23 ~

Friday, March 31. Tomorrow things would get serious. I still could not
quite believe it. I scanned the papers, looking for signs of any mitigation,
perhaps some movement toward a more reasonable, acceptable position.
There was nothing. Just the intensification of some measure or other and
pedantic instructions about the details of the action and the manner in which
it was to be executed.
Otherwise it was business as usual. Looking at the steady bustle and
traffic on the streets, one had no sense that anything special was about to
take place. Jewish shops were still open and trading as usual. Today one
was still permitted to shop there. It would not be prohibited until tomorrow,
at 8 a.m. precisely.
I went to the Kammergericht. It stood there, cool and gray as always, set
back from the street in a distinguished setting of lawns and trees. Its halls
were filled with the hushed fluttering of attorneys in their batlike, black silk
gowns, carrying briefcases under their arms, with concentrated, serious
expressions on their faces. Jewish attorneys were pleading in court as
though this were a day like any other.
Not being due in court, I went to the library (as though this were a day
like any other), settled down at one of the long worktables, and started
reading a document about which I had to give an opinion. Some
complicated affair with intricate points of law. I carried the heavy legal
tomes to my place and surrounded myself with them. I looked up decisions
of the high courts of the Reich and made notes. As always, the high-
ceilinged, spacious room was filled with the inaudible electricity of many
minds hard at work. In making pencil marks on paper, I was setting the
instruments of the law to work on the details of my case, summarizing,
comparing, weighing the importance of this or that word in a contract,
investigating what bearing this or that clause would have on the matter,
according to the precedents. When I scribbled a few words something
happened, like the first cut in a surgical operation: a question was clarified,
a component of a judicial decision put in place. Not the final decision,
naturally: “It is thus irrelevant whether the plaintiff... so it remains to
investigate whether...” Careful, precise, silent work. Everybody in the room
was similarly immersed in their own cases. Even the ushers, somewhere
between beadles and policemen, moved more quietly here in the library, and
seemed to try and make themselves invisible. The room was full of extreme
silence, a silence filled with the high tension of deeply concentrated work.
It was like a silent concert. I loved this atmosphere. At home I would have
been unable to work today, here it was perfectly easy. Your thoughts just
could not stray. It was like being in a fortress, or better, a test tube. No
breath came in from the outside world; here there was no revolution.
What was the first noticeable noise? A door banging? A distant sound
like an order being given? Suddenly everybody raised their heads and
strained to hear what it was. The room was still utterly quiet: but the quality
of the silence had changed. It was no longer the silence of concentrated
work. It was filled with alarm and agitation. There was a clatter of footsteps
outside in the corridor, the sound of rough boots on the stairs, then a distant
indistinct din, shouts, doors banging. A few people got up and went to the
door, looked out, and came back. One or two approached the ushers and
spoke quietly with them — in here no one ever raised their voice. The noise
from outside grew stronger. Somebody spoke into the silence: “SA.” Then,
not particularly loudly, somebody else said, “They’re throwing out the
Jews,” and a few others laughed. At that moment this laughter alarmed me
more than what was actually happening. With a start I realized that there
were Nazis working in this room. How strange.
Gradually the disturbance took shape — at first it had been intangible.
Readers got up, tried to say something to one another, paced about slowly
to no great purpose. One man, obviously a Jew, closed his books, packed
his documents, and left. Shortly afterward somebody, perhaps a
superintendent, appeared in the doorway and announced clearly but calmly,
“The SA is in the building. The Jewish gentlemen would do well to leave.”
Almost at once we heard shouts from outside: “Out with the Jews!” A voice
answered, “They’ve already gone,” and again I heard two or three merry
giggles, just as before. I could see them now. They were Referendars just
like me.
The premature end to the carnival ball four weeks ago came unpleasantly
to mind. Things were breaking down now, as then. Several readers packed
their cases and left. I was reminded of the phrase “You have permission to
leave.” Did they still have permission? Today it was no longer so certain.
Others left their things on the tables and went out of the library to see what
was going on. More than ever, the ushers tried to be invisible. Of those of
us who stayed behind, one or two lit cigarettes — in the library of the
Kammergericht! The ushers took no action. That itself was something of a
revolution.
The scouts later explained what had happened in the main part of the
building. No atrocities, why, certainly not! Everything went extremely
smoothly. The courts had, for the most part, adjourned. The judges had
removed their robes and left the building quietly and civilly, going down the
staircase lined with SA men. The only place where there had been trouble
was the attorneys’ room. A Jewish attorney had “caused a fuss” and been
beaten up. Later I heard who it was. He had been wounded five times in the
last war, had lost an eye, and even been promoted to captain. It had
probably been his misfortune that he still remembered the tone to use with
mutineers.
In the meantime, the intruders had arrived at the library. The door was
thrust open and a flood of brown uniforms surged in. In a booming voice,
one of them, clearly the leader, shouted, “Non-Aryans must leave the
premises immediately.” It struck me that he used the careful expression
“non-Aryans,” but also a rather colloquial expression for “premises.”
Someone, probably the same person as before, answered, “They’ve already
left.” Our ushers stood there as though they were about to salute. My heart
beat heavily. What should I do, how keep my poise? Just ignore them, do
not let them disturb me. I put my head down over my work. I read a few
sentences mechanically: “The defendant’s claim that... is untrue, but
irrelevant...”Just take no notice!
Meanwhile a brown shirt approached me and took up position in front of
my worktable. “Are you Aryan?” Before I had a chance to think, I said,
“Yes.” He took a close look at my nose — and retired. The blood shot to my
face. A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat. I had said “Yes”! Well,
in God’s name, I was indeed an “Aryan.” I had not lied, I had allowed
something much worse to happen. What a humiliation, to have answered
the unjustified question as to whether I was “Aryan” so easily, even if the
fact was of no importance to me! What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the
right to stay with my documents in peace! I had been caught unawares,
even now. I had failed my very first test. I could have slapped myself.
 As I left the Kammergericht it stood there, gray, cool, and calm as ever,
set back from the street in its distinguished setting. There was nothing to
show that, as an institution, it had just collapsed. There was also nothing
about my appearance to show that I had just suffered a terrible reverse, a
defeat that would be almost impossible to make good. A well-dressed
young man walked down Potsdamer Strasse. There was nothing untoward
about the scene. Business as usual, but in the air the approaching thunder of
events to come...
 ~ 24 ~

That evening I had two more noteworthy experiences. The first was that
for about an hour I feared for the life of my little friend Charlie. The fear
turned out to be unfounded — but not unjustified.
The cause was ridiculous enough. We missed each other. We had agreed
to meet outside the department store where she earned a hundred marks a
month in the typing pool. She was not, after all, a Turkish pageboy, but a
young girl from a hardworking lower-middle-class family, with plenty to
worry about. When I arrived at 7 p.m. the store was already closed. It lay
dark and silent with the roller shutters all drawn. It was a Jewish business,
there was no one there. Perhaps the SA had been there today already.
I took the subway to Charlie’s home and climbed the stairs of the large
apartment building. I rang the doorbell, twice, three times. There was no
sound from the flat. I went down to the street and phoned from a telephone
box. No reply. I went and waited rather futilely at the entrance to the
subway station where she would have arrived if she had come home from
work. Crowds flowed in and out, undisturbed and unchecked, as they did
every day. Charlie was not among them. Every now and then I tried to
phone again, without success.
All this while I felt a weakness in my knees, a feeling of utter
helplessness. Had she been “picked up” in her flat or “taken away” from
work? Perhaps she was already in the police cells at Alexanderplatz or on
her way to Oranienburg, where the first concentration camp had been
opened? There was no knowing. Anything was possible. The boycott could
be just a demonstration, but it could also be the excuse — ”Juda verrecke!”
— for deliberate, general, disciplined murder and slaughter. The uncertainty
was one of the most subtle effects of the terror. To fear for the life of a
Jewish girl on March 31, 1933, was not unreasonable — even if the fear
turned out to be groundless.
This time it was. After about an hour, when I again made my phone call,
I unexpectedly heard Charlie’s voice at the other end of the line. The
employees of the store had left together and sat around trying to decide
what to do, since they had obviously just lost their jobs. They had not had
any ideas. No, the SA had not been in the store today. “I’m so sorry. It took
so long. I was on tenterhooks the whole time...” Her parents? They had
gone to the hospital to visit an aunt who had had a baby today of all days,
impertinently disobeying the order “Juda verrecke!” However, it was
difficult to imagine what would happen tomorrow, when the hospital and
the doctor had to be boycotted. The possibility that the patients would be
driven out — as indeed happened five years later — was already in the air
then. We felt it darkly, but we could not quite bring it into the open. The
coming events remained, for the moment, unreal.
At that instant I felt mainly relief, and also perhaps that in my anxiety I
had made myself ridiculous. Five minutes later Charlie appeared, very chic,
with a little feather cap cocked on one side of her head, a young city girl
ready for a night out. Indeed, our current problem was where to go. It was
past nine, too late for the cinema, but we wanted to go somewhere; after all,
we had a date. At last I thought of something that only started at nine-thirty.
We took a taxi to the Katakombe.
There was a hint of madness about it all, which you could even sense
while it was happening. Now, as I view events from a distance, it is much
clearer. Having just experienced real fear for someone’s life, and unsure
whether the next day might not be genuinely life-threatening for one of us, I
nevertheless saw no reason we should not go to a cabaret.
Incidentally, it is typical of the early years of the Nazi regime that the
whole façade of everyday life remained virtually unchanged. The cinemas,
theaters, and cafés were full. Couples danced in the open air and in the
dance halls. People strolled down the streets. The Nazis used this to great
effect in their propaganda. “Come and see our normal, peaceful, quiet
country. Come and see how well even the Jews are doing here.” The secret
vein of madness, fear, and tension, of living by the day, and dancing a dance
of death: those one could not see. Just as when you see the smiling face on a
poster for razor blades in today’s subway stations, you do not see that it
belongs to a man whose head was cut off in Plötzensee prison four years
ago, for “high treason,” or what goes by that name today.
The fact that this was possible also speaks against us. Our reaction to the
experience of fearing for one’s life, and being totally at the mercy of events,
was only to try and ignore the situation and not allow it to disturb our fun. I
think a couple of a hundred years ago would have known better how to deal
with such an experience — if only by celebrating a great night of love,
spiced by danger and the sense of loss. Charlie and I did not think of doing
anything special, and just went to the cabaret because nobody stopped us:
first, because we would have gone anyway, and second, in order to think
about unpleasant things as little as possible. That may seem cold-blooded
and daring, but it really only indicates a weakness of the emotions. We were
not equal to the situation, even as victims. If you will allow me this
generalization, it is one of the uncanny aspects of events in Germany that
the deeds have no doers and the suffering has no martyrs. Everything takes
place under a kind of anesthesia. Objectively dreadful deeds produce a thin,
puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks.
Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents. Even death
under torture only produces the response “Bad luck.”
That evening, however, we were recompensed for our inadequacy
beyond our deserts. Chance had led us to the Katakombe, and this was the
second remarkable experience of the evening. We arrived at the only place
in Germany where a kind of public, courageous, witty, and elegant
resistance was taking place. That morning I had witnessed how the Prussian
Kammergericht, with a tradition of hundreds of years, had ignobly
capitulated before the Nazis. In the evening I experienced how a small troop
of artistes, with no tradition to back them up, saved our honor with grace
and glory. The Kammergericht had fallen but the Katakombe stood upright.
The man who led this small group of artistes to victory — standing firm
in the face of overwhelming, murderous odds must be counted as a victory
— was called Werner Finck.[xxiii] This minor cabaret master of ceremonies
has his place in the annals of the Third Reich, indeed one of the very few
places of honor there. He did not look like a hero, and if he finally became
something like one, it was in spite of himself. He was not a revolutionary
actor, had no biting satire; he was not David with a sling. His character was
at bottom harmless and amiable, his wit gentle, light, and capricious. His
jokes were based on double entendre and puns, which he handled like a
virtuoso. He had invented something that could be called the hidden punch
line. Indeed, as time went by it became more and more necessary for him to
hide his punch lines, but he did not conceal his opinions. His act remained
full of harmless amiability in a country where these qualities were on the
liquidation list. This harmless amiability hid a kernel of real, indomitable
courage. He dared to speak openly about the reality of the Nazis, and that in
the middle of Germany. His spiel contained references to concentration
camps, the raids on people’s homes, the general fear and general lies. He
spoke of these things with infinitely quiet mockery, melancholy, and
sadness. Listening to him was extraordinarily comforting.
This March 31 was perhaps his greatest evening. The house was full of
people staring at the next day as if into an abyss. Finck made them laugh as
I have never heard an audience laugh. It was dramatic laughter, the laughter
of a newborn defiance, throwing off numbness and desperation, feeding off
the present danger. It was a miracle that the SA had not long since arrived
to arrest everybody here. On this evening we would probably have gone on
laughing in the police vans. We had been improbably raised above fear and
danger. That morning in the Kammergericht I had felt weak and indecisive
when put to the test. Here I felt strong, brave, and resourceful. If they came
here — they, not we, would make the worse showing. The proper words
had probably already been sharpened.
We felt a strange, morbid ecstasy as we left, at about midnight, still free.
We were in high spirits, talked wildly, and kissed each other on the street,
drunk on something more powerful than alcohol: courage. We felt absurdly
invulnerable.
It was already the first of April.
 ~ 25 ~

“If you notice that they are entering people’s homes, Charlie, come to
me,” I said as we parted, though I must admit I wondered how I could
explain it to my parents. That, however, must take second place. “You will
be safe with us, I hope. Promise you’ll come.” She was touched, and
promised to do so.
Thank God she did not need to. She would not have found me at home.
For the next day...
At ten o’clock in the morning, I received a telegram. “Please come if you
can, Frank.” I said goodbye to my parents, almost like someone leaving for
war, and took the suburban railway out toward the east to see Frank Landau.
I was not unhappy to be called on to do something, instead of passively
awaiting the turn of events.
Frank Landau was my oldest and best friend. We had known each other
since we started grammar school in the same class, had raced together in the
Rennbund Altpreussen and later in proper athletics clubs. We had gone to
university together and were now both Referendars. We had shared virtually
every boyish hobby and enthusiasm. We had read each other our first
literary attempts and had continued this with more serious pieces later. We
both vaguely considered ourselves to be authors rather than Referendars.
Some years we had seen each other every day, and we told each other
everything — including about our love affairs, which we discussed in detail
without feeling at all indiscreet, rather as one thinks about them when one is
alone. In the seventeen years we had known each other we had never
seriously quarreled. That would have been like quarreling with oneself. As
adolescents we had derived much pleasure from analyzing our differences,
among which we counted our racial origins the least. They did not separate
us.
He was the more brilliant of the two of us. He was very handsome, tall,
broad-shouldered, but otherwise lightly built; as a young boy he had been
compared to an Apollo. Later, when his nose had become more prominent,
his brow higher, and his face more lined, he reminded me of the young
King Saul. His life also, though it was very similar to mine, seemed to be
laid out on slightly grander lines. His emotions rose higher and sank deeper,
love shook him more than me, and there was more luster about his
adolescence — for which, however, he paid by periods of deep, devouring,
desperate despondency, which I was spared.
He was currently in the latest of these depressions, and it had lasted
dangerously long. This time it had an external cause. A year before, his
girlfriend, Hanni, had been unfaithful — a chance affair, thoughtlessly
entered, not really serious. It had completely overwhelmed him. That seems
a bit ridiculous by the usual twentieth-century standards in love affairs; but
this had been a great passion, of a character quite out of fashion, and, it
sometimes seems, no longer possible, like in Goethe’s Werther or La
nouvelle Héloïse, the kind that produced Heine’s Book of Songs, or
Chopin’s waltzes. It was the sort of passion that cannot bear lighthearted
faithlessness, and what I had witnessed, first with him, and then, when she
realized what she had done, with her, was almost a complete inner collapse.
The aftermath had been depressing: separation; an incomplete and skewed
reconciliation; attempts at affairs with other women that had left him ever
more unhappy and at sea. The patched-up friendship with Hanni was
merely a caricature of the past; there was a gradual spiritual dwindling and
decline, and things only got more and more hopeless and tangled. It was the
kind of story you read in a novel; it is the toll that is exacted for the bliss of
great passion.
Recently, another girl had appeared on the scene. Her name was Ellen.
She was a cool, intelligent young lady, a student, fairly intellectual in her
tastes, who had a not unpleasant air of upper-middle-class calm and
regularity — the personification of a cultured convalescence and
rehabilitation after murderous revolutions, turbulence, and suffering. I had
recently been introduced to her — or rather Frank had presented her to me.
Afterward, he had asked me half-jokingly what I would say if he got
engaged to her. Then he would take his Assessor examinations, marry, and
become a bourgeois. Was she not the perfect wife for that? I had laughed
and called the idea a bit hasty. Frank had also laughed, and we had moved
on to other matters.
So now I was traveling to his home. His father, with whom he lived, was
a doctor, and so under boycott. I was curious how things would look there.
It looked barbarous but also rather ordinary. The doors of Jewish shops,
which were quite common in the eastern part of Berlin, stood open. SA men
stood in front of them with their legs planted apart. Obscenities were
smeared on the windows, and the shop owners had for the most part made
themselves scarce. Bunches of people stood around, half anxious, half
gleeful. The whole business seemed awkward and halting, as though they
were all expecting something more, but were not quite sure what. It did not
give the impression of imminent bloodshed. I arrived at the Landaus’ flat
without difficulties. They were apparently not coming into people’s homes
yet, I concluded, with relief for my friend Charlie.
Frank was not there. Instead, I was received by his father, a large, jovial
old man. We had often talked, and he had generously inquired after my
literary work, sung the praises of Maupassant, whom he admired above all
others, and pressed me with a certain severity to try quantities of spirits, so
to speak testing the fineness of my palate. Today he was offended. Not
worried or anxious. Just offended. Many Jews still had this attitude at that
time, and I hasten to add that I regard that as a very strong point in their
favor. In the meantime the majority have lost the strength for it. They have
suffered too many blows. It is the same process that happens, compressed
into a few minutes, when an individual in a concentration camp is tied to
blocks and flogged to a pulp: the first blow strikes his pride and his spirit
rears up wildly; the tenth and twentieth strike only the body and produce
little more than a whimper. In the last six years the German Jewish
community has collectively gone through a comparable experience.
Old Landau had not yet been beaten to a pulp then. He was offended —
and the only thing that startled me was that he considered me an emissary
of those who had offended him. “Well what do you say?” he began, and
ignoring my stammered explanation that I considered it just as disgusting,
he faced up to me and said, “Do you really think I have invented false
horror stories and spread them abroad? Does any one of you believe that?” I
was somewhat taken aback to see that he was preparing to plead his cause.
“The Jews would have to be a lot more stupid than we are to send horror
stories to foreign countries. As though we had not also seen the newspaper
reports that all letters may now be opened! Strangely enough we are still
allowed to read the papers. Does anyone really believe this stupid lie, that
we are inventing horror stories? And if nobody believes it, then what do
they mean by it? Can you tell me that?”
“Of course nobody with any sense believes it,” I said. “But what does
that matter? The fact is that you have fallen into the hands of enemies. We
have all fallen into their hands. They have us now, and they can do with us
what they will.”
He stared bitterly at the ashtray in front of him and only half listened.
“It’s the lies that so outrage me,” he said, “the damned, disgusting lies in all
this. Why don’t they just kill us, if that’s what they want? As far as I’m
concerned, I am old enough. But they shouldn’t spread these dirty lies as
well. You tell me why they’re doing that!” Deep inside he could clearly not
let go of the idea that somehow I was linked to the Nazis and knew their
secrets.
Mrs. Landau joined us, greeted me with a sad smile, and tried to come to
my defense. “Why are you asking Frank’s friend these questions?” she said.
“He knows as little as we do. He’s not a National Socialist.” (She said
“National Socialist” formally, politely.) But her husband continued to shake
his head as though he were trying to shake off everything we said. “Tell me,
please, why they are lying,” he insisted. “Why do they still lie, when they
already have the power to do what they like? I want to know that.”
“I think you should look at the boy,” she said. “He’s moaning so.”
“For God’s sake,” I said, “is your son ill?” Frank had a younger brother.
They were obviously talking about him.
“It seems so,” said Mrs. Landau. “He was so terribly upset when he was
expelled from the university yesterday, and today he’s been sick repeatedly
and is complaining of stomach pains. It looks a bit like appendicitis,
although,” and she made an attempt at a smile, “although I’ve never heard
of anybody getting appendicitis from being upset.”
“A lot happens nowadays that nobody has ever heard of,” said the old
man grimly, and he got up. He went to the door with heavy steps, then
turned around once more and said: “You’re a good lawyer, aren’t you? Can
you tell me this: Is my son committing an offense by letting me examine
him, instead of boycotting me?”
“Don’t be offended,” said Mrs. Landau. “He can’t get over it. Frank will
be here any minute and we shall have lunch. How are you and your family?
Is your father well?”
Frank arrived. He entered the room quickly and spoke very calmly. His
calm had an air of great tension and caution, like the calm of generals at a
map table or of certain monomaniacs developing their idées fixes with
pedantic logic.
 “Good of you to come,” he said, “excuse my lateness. I couldn’t help it.
Later I want to ask you several favors. I’m leaving.”
“When and where to?” I asked with the same tense calm.
“To Zurich,” he said. “Tomorrow morning if possible. My father is still
opposed, but I will go. You know what happened yesterday at the
Kammergericht?”
“I was there myself,” I said. (Oh dear, I remembered that Frank had been
in court yesterday!)
“Well, then you know,” he said. “There’s nothing left for me here, so I’m
leaving. You must help me get ready. Besides, I have just gotten engaged.”
“To Ellen?”
“Yes, she’s coming with me. I have to talk to her parents today. I’d be
grateful if you could come along. She has to talk to them too. I need your
help for many things today.”
“And Hanni?”
“I will have to talk to her, too, tonight,” he said. For a moment he
seemed less calm and collected and there was a strained sound to his voice.
“That’s a lot for one day,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “and you must help me get through it.”
“Of course,” I said, “I’m at your disposal.”
Then we were called to lunch. Mrs. Landau tried without success to get a
normal conversation going. Her husband kept bursting in; we sat mostly in
silence.
“Well, has he told you yet that he wants to leave?” Frank’s father asked
suddenly. “What do you think of that?”
“I think it’s very sensible,” I said. “He should leave while he can. What’s
left for him here?”
“Staying put,” said the old man. “Just because of the troubles he should
stay and not let them chase him away. He has passed his exams, he has the
right to become a judge. Let’s see if they can — ”
“Oh, Papa,” Frank interrupted impatiently.
“I fear,” I said, “that that right has evaporated since the Kammergericht
judges allowed the SA into their chambers.” (I remembered what had
happened, and I blushed.) “I fear we have no position left to defend. We’re
all virtually prisoners now, and flight is the only alternative left to us. I want
to leave too.”
I really did want to leave, though not quite by tomorrow morning...
“You, too?” asked Mr. Landau. “Why you?” He could obviously not get
rid of the idea that as an “Aryan” I must have become a Nazi; he had
probably experienced that too often recently to consider any other
possibility.
“Because I dislike what’s happening here,” I said. It sounded rather thin
and arrogant, though I had just wanted to say it as simply as possible.
The old man did not reply and sank into silence. “I shall lose both my
sons in one day,” he said after a while.
“Oh, Ernst!” cried his wife.
“The little one needs an operation,” he said. “The most beautiful acute
appendicitis. I can’t do it. My hands are not steady enough. And will
anybody else do it today? Shall I phone around and beg: ‘Oh, dear
colleague, or dear ex-colleague, would you operate on my son for God’s
sake — but he’s a Jew’?”
“So-and-so will do it,” said Mrs. Landau. She mentioned a name that I
have forgotten.
“Well, he ought to,” said her husband. He laughed and said to me, “We
did amputations in a field hospital together for two years. But can one tell
today?”
“I’ll phone him,” said Mrs. Landau. “I’m sure he’ll do it.” She was quite
magnificent that day.
After the meal, we went in to see the sick boy for a few minutes. He
smiled awkwardly as though he had done something naughty, suppressing a
moan from time to time. “So you’re leaving?” he asked his brother. “Yes.”
“Well, I can’t go today,” the young boy said. “Will you say goodbye to me
later?”
Frank looked dejected as we left the room.
“It’s horrible,” I said.
“Yes, it is truly horrible,” he replied. “I don’t know what will become of
the boy. He can’t stand injustice, and he has no means of coping with it. Do
you know what he told me yesterday, after all that has happened? He would
like to save Hitler’s life, and then say to him, ‘Right. I’m a Jew. Now let’s
talk things over for an hour...’”
We went into Frank’s room. Open suitcases lay around and suits had
been laid out. It was about two o’clock. “At six I have to meet Ellen at
Wannsee Station,” he said, “so we have to leave at five. There’s a lot to do
till then.”
“Packing?” I said.
“That, too,” he said, “but mainly something else. This is where I need
your help. I have a pile of stuff — old letters, old pictures, old diaries,
poems, souvenirs, and whatever. I don’t want to leave it all here, but I can’t
take it with me. I don’t want to destroy it all. Would you look after some of
it?”
“Of course.”
“We have to go through it all now. It’s fairly untidy, some of it can just
be thrown away. Shall we try and go through it quickly?”
He pulled open a drawer. Two great heaps of papers, albums and diaries
lay inside: his past life. A large part of it was also mine. Frank took a deep
breath and smiled. “We have to get a move on, we haven’t got much time.”
And so we went through the papers, opened old letters, let old photos run
through our fingers. Oh, what flowed out toward us there! It was our youth
that had been preserved in that drawer, like dried flowers in an album, their
perfume made stronger and more concentrated by being dead, belonging
irretrievably to the past. Old pictures of us in sporting dress among friends,
of a boat trip with some girls — ”My God, do you remember?” — beach
pictures, bathed in the sun of distant days, our faces patches of light and
shade; tennis pictures of happy days. Where were the friends now, with
whom we saw ourselves arm in arm, the cheerful girls chasing tennis balls,
forever suspended by the shutter’s click? Frank opened envelopes.
Manuscripts that had once been familiar and exciting reappeared and called
urgently for our attention. Here was one in my handwriting as it had been a
few years ago...
We are all familiar with the great cleanout. It is a job for rainy Sundays,
and we all know the nostalgic titillation of conjuring up the past, the
irresistible urge to read everything again, to experience everything again...
also the narcotic stupor that gradually creeps over us with its yielding
softness. It always costs one whole day and usually the night as well, and
the longer it goes on, the more one yields to these dreams.
We had just three hours and we raced through our dream landscapes with
the flickering speed of a cartoon chase. In addition we had to be strict and
destructive. The big box had room only for the most valuable items, which
would lie there gathering dust for some far-off moment of leisure and
smiles — when would I experience that again? The rest went into the
waste-paper basket. A field trial of our own youth. What had value, what
was important? We grew ever more silent at our strange work. Time was
running out. We had to be quick, quick at killing — or burying.
We were interrupted twice. The first time Mrs. Landau came in to say
that the ambulance was waiting outside. Frank’s brother was being taken to
the clinic for the operation. She and her husband would go with him. If
Frank wanted to say goodbye, now was the time. “Yes,” said Frank. It was a
strange parting; one brother headed for the operating theater, the other for
exile. “Excuse me a moment,” said Frank, and he left with his mother. He
stayed away five minutes.
The second interruption came about an hour later. The flat was empty
apart from us and the maid. We heard the doorbell, and then the maid
knocked and said two SA men were outside.
They were two coarse, plump young men in brown shirts and breeches
and marching boots; not SS sharks, just the kind of people who might
otherwise be delivering a case of beer, and touch their caps mumbling rough
thanks for the tip. They were clearly unused to their new position and task,
and they covered up their embarrassment by a certain strident stiffness.
“Heil Hitler,” they chorused at the top of their voices. Silence. Then the
one who was obviously senior asked, “Are you Dr. Landau?”
“No,” answered Frank, “his son.”
“And you?”
“I’m a friend of Mr. Landau,” I said.
“And where is your father?”
“He’s gone to the clinic with my brother,” answered Frank. He spoke
slowly and measured his words.
“What’s he doing there?”
“My brother needs an operation.”
 “Well, that’s all right then,” said the SA man, genially gratified. “Show
us the consulting room.”
“If you please,” said Frank, and he opened the door. The two men
stomped past us into the consulting room, which lay empty, white, and tidy
before them, and looked severely at the many shining instruments.
“Any patients today?” asked the spokesman.
“No,” said Frank.
“Well, that’s all right then,” he said again. It seemed to be his
catchphrase. “Show us the other rooms.”
And he stomped through the flat with his companion, casting
disapproving, inquisitive glances all around, a bit like a bailiff choosing
items to impound. “So nobody else has been here,” he said at last, and after
Frank had confirmed this, “Well, that’s all right then,” a third time.
We stood at the front door again, and the two men hesitated, as though
they felt they ought to do something now. Then out of the general silence
they suddenly chorused “Heil Hitler!” at the tops of their voices again and
stomped down the stairs. We shut the door behind them and returned to our
work in silence.
Time ran away with us and toward the end we acted more and more
summarily. Whole packets of letters were thrown into the wastepaper basket
unread. Perhaps we felt more strongly than an hour ago how completely
destroyed and done with our youth had become. What did it matter if its
vestiges were obliterated?
Five o’clock. We tied up the box and surveyed our work of destruction.
“I’ll pack the other stuff sometime tonight,” said Frank. He still had to
phone the clinic, and I had to phone Charlie. Then he told the maid he was
leaving.
“Do your parents know about your engagement?”
“No. It would be too much at once for them. It will all just have to take
its course.”
At the kiosk there was a copy of Der Angriff (The Attack), which had
just come off the press. It had the cheering headline “Storm Signals.”
We took the suburban railway and rode from the east through the center
of Berlin and out again to the west. In the train we had a chance to talk for
the first time that day, but we did not have a real conversation. Too many
people got in and out and sat near us. We could not tell whether they were
informers, and then there were so many things to organize, with which we
had to interrupt ourselves — messages, favors, and errands that we had to
arrange. His plans? They were vague enough. First he wanted to do a Swiss
Ph.D., to survive as a student on two hundred marks a month (this amount
could still legally be sent abroad). He also had some kind of uncle in
Switzerland. Perhaps he could help out... “The main thing is to get out. I’m
worried that soon they won’t let us out.”
In truth, that day the whole potion had already been brewed, though it
was put on ice again and only administered five years later. At Wannsee
Station Ellen was waiting for us. Wordlessly she showed us a newspaper. It
contained this item: “Exit Visas Introduced.” The justification was again, I
believe, the alleged spreading of horror stories abroad.
“It looks as though we’re already trapped,” said Frank. Ellen, a self-
controlled and well-brought-up young lady, suddenly punched the sky with
clenched fists, a gesture more suited to the stage or pictures in a museum. It
was startling, coming from a well-dressed young lady in a leafy suburb.
“Perhaps it won’t take effect immediately,” I said.
“Anyway,” said Frank, “we must hurry all the more now. We may just be
lucky. If not — too bad.”
We went through a few streets lined with villas, past gardens. It was
quiet here, and there was nothing visible that indicated what was going on
today, not even graffiti on shop windows. Ellen had hooked her arm under
Frank’s and I carried the box with his papers. Dusk was gathering and a
warm drizzle began to fall. I felt a certain numbness in my head. Everything
was deadened by a deep feeling of unreality. But there was also something
threatening in the air. We had fallen too suddenly and too deeply into the
impossible for there to be any limits. No one would be really surprised if
tomorrow all the Jews were to be arrested or ordered to commit suicide as a
punishment for some trumped-up charge. SA men would say, “Well, that’s
all right then,” genially gratified when they were told that the Jews had all
properly killed themselves. The streets would look the same as always.
“Well, that’s all right then.” The villas would be unchanged in their friendly
gardens, blustery spring weather, and drizzle...
I gave a start. We had arrived — and I was disconcerted because I was a
stranger and had no reason to be there. I need not have worried. Ellen’s
family’s house was so full that nobody noticed me. From the outside it had
appeared quiet, reserved, distinguished; inside it was more like a refugee
camp trying vainly to pretend it was a tea party. About twenty guests sat or
stood around in the large, elegant reception rooms, apparently younger
family friends, used to visiting the house, who had come to find assistance
and consolation today, here where they were used to taking tea and listening
to music. They found only the anxiety and worry of their friends, and the
polite, courteous atmosphere was suffused with an air of suppressed panic.
Tea was offered; the guests stirred their cups and said “please” and “thank
you.” It was almost the usual murmured conversation of a tea party, but the
murmuring was so uneasy that one would not have been surprised if there
had been a sudden scream.
I knew one of the guests a little. He was a Referendar like me, and he
had come to ask Ellen for a translation. He had drafted a letter to a lawyer
in Brussels in whose office he had worked for a time. “Here it is,” he said,
and pulled a scrap of paper from his inside pocket. Perhaps his life
depended on this scrap of paper. “Let me have a look,” said Ellen, and she
began to scribble between his lines, but then she was called away.
Somebody else wanted her for something. She came back and scribbled a
bit more, but then her mother called her again. When she returned she was
almost at her wits’ end and mumbled to herself. “Referendar... what’s the
French for Referendar?...” Suddenly she burst out, “Look, I’m sorry, please
don’t be angry. I simply can’t do it today, not now.”
“But of course, not at all,” the poor man said politely, his face falling.
The host, Ellen’s father, a portly, friendly man, forced a smile and tried
to raise the depressed mood by telling jokes. Ellen’s mother drew Frank into
a corner to discuss the news about the exit visas with a few others. I joined
the group.
“If we only knew when it came into effect!” somebody said.
“Doesn’t it say in the paper?” asked another.
“No, not a word. That’s the trouble. Have a look.” Ellen’s mother
produced another copy of the newspaper, which already looked rather
tattered.
“You only have to phone the police,” I suggested.
“But that might just cause us more trouble,” somebody replied.
 “You can always give a false name,” I said. “Anyway, I’d be happy to do
it if you wish.”
“Are you really prepared to do it?” exclaimed Ellen’s mother. The
general relief was as great as if I had offered some momentous service. “But
please, please — not from our phone,” she begged. I realized that her
surface poise was thin and crumbling and that, although she was still
smiling, she felt more like screaming. “If you would do us that great favor
— there’s a telephone box just around the corner. Here, wait a minute, I’ll
get some coins.”
In the meantime Ellen’s father had extracted Frank from the group.
“Ellen’s already told me that you wish to speak to me — let’s not make it
too formal...” They disappeared, and I went off to the phone box around the
corner.
When I got through I gave a false name. After a long wait somebody at
the police station finally found the information that the exit visa regulation
would take effect from the following Tuesday. I said, “Many thanks,” and
hung up, very pleased.
When I came back, the room I had left was almost empty. There was
only an old man sitting in a corner — maybe he had been there all along,
silent and unnoticed; perhaps he was a grandfather. He looked like one of
the old Jews in Rembrandt’s paintings. He had a little pointed beard, and
wrinkles all over his face. He sat in a large chair and very calmly smoked a
pipe, visibly deep in thought. The others must have gone to some other
room in this rambling house. I wanted to ask where they were, but before I
could put my question, the old man addressed me; his little, deep-seated,
clear eyes were directed straight at me.
“You don’t appear to be a Jew,” he said, and when I explained that I had
accompanied a Jewish friend, he said with great authority, “It is good that
you stand by your friend!” I became rather embarrassed and stammered
something, but I was even more bemused when he continued, “It is also
wise of you. Did you know that?”
He seemed to enjoy my uneasiness. He sucked slowly at his pipe and
then announced with an old, rusty, but still strong voice, “The Jews will
survive this. Don’t you agree? Oh, you needn’t worry, they will. Many
others have sought to eradicate the Jews. The Jews have outlived them all.
They will outlive this as well. And then they will remember. Have you
heard of Nebuchadnezzar?”
“The Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible?” I asked doubtfully.
“Just so,” the grandfather said. He regarded me with a spark of sarcasm
in his little eyes. “He wanted to eradicate the Jews, and he was a greater
man than your Herr Hitler, and his empire was greater than the German
Reich. And the Jews were younger then, younger and weaker, and they had
less experience. He was a great man, Nebuchadnezzar, a clever man and a
cruel man.”
He spoke slowly, as if he were preaching. He relished his speech, and
took solemn, slow puffs at his pipe between the sentences. I listened
politely.
“But the great King Nebuchadnezzar did not succeed,” he continued. “In
spite of all his greatness and all his cleverness and all his cruelty. He is so
forgotten that you smile when I mention his name. Only the Jews remember
him. And they are still here and alive. And here comes this Herr Hitler and
wants to eradicate them again. He won’t succeed either, this Herr Hitler.
Don’t you believe me?”
“I sincerely hope you’re right,” I said modestly.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “A little trick, one of God’s little
tricks, if you wish. Those men that persecute the Jews always suffer
misfortune. Why is that so? How should I know? I don’t know why, but it is
a fact.”
As I tried to rack my brain for historical examples and counterexamples,
he continued:
“Consider the great King Nebuchadnezzar. He was a great man in his
time. King of kings, a great, great man. But in old age he went mad, and he
went on all fours in the fields like a cow, and chewed grass with his teeth
like a cow.” He broke off for a puff at his pipe, then a little smile appeared
on his face, a smile of inner mirth, and his eyes sparkled, as though he had
just had a really funny and heartwarming thought. “Perhaps,” he said,
“perhaps Herr Hitler will one day go on all fours in the fields, eating grass
like a cow. You are young, you may experience it yet. I won’t.” Suddenly he
broke into irresistible laughter at his image. His entire frame shook as he
chuckled silently, until he choked a little on the smoke from his pipe, and
started coughing.
 Just then, Ellen’s mother looked in at the door. “Well?” she asked
anxiously, and I gave my good news, for which she thanked me effusively.
“Now you must drink a glass to the health of the young couple,” she said,
and she pulled me away. “You know all about it?”
I made a bow to the old man as I left and he dismissed me, still amused,
with a dignified nod of his head. In another room all the assembled
involuntary engagement guests stood around and, with anxious faces, drank
wine or held glasses in their hands.
Frank and Ellen stood among them accepting their congratulations. They
looked neither happy nor unhappy. It was a strange engagement party. My
news that they had two days free to escape the country was just the right
engagement present. However, it made some of the guests uneasy, and they
started to talk of leaving.
Half an hour later, I was on the train again with Frank. Night had fallen
and the rain had become steady. Our compartment was empty. Now at last,
for the first time that day, we really had a chance to talk. But we were silent.
Suddenly he said: “What do you think of all this? You haven’t said
anything yet. Am I doing the right thing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s certainly right for you to leave tomorrow. I
only wish I could go too.”
“I had to tie up all the loose ends,” he said, as though I had rebuked him.
“Do you understand? I couldn’t go with all these half-finished, undecided
things left hanging. So now I’m engaged to Ellen, and she’s coming with
me, and it’s all tidy.”
I nodded. “Are you pleased?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. After a while he laughed and said, “Maybe it’s
all complete nonsense. I don’t know. It happened so quickly.”
“Are you going to see Hanni now?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. And then, putting his hand on my arm with sudden
warmth, “Would you do me a real favor? Please stay in touch with Hanni.
Phone her in the next few days and comfort her a little, if you can. Tell her
— no, don’t tell her anything. But comfort her a little, if you can, and,” he
continued, and he became more eager and warmer than he had been all day,
“try and help her a bit with her passport troubles. She has no passport. It’s a
dreadful muddle, because she doesn’t have a proper nationality. She was
born somewhere that was Hungarian at the time, but now belongs to
Czechoslovakia. Her father died in 1920. Nobody knows if he opted for a
nationality, or which he opted for if he did. Now neither Hungary nor
Czechoslovakia will give her a passport. It’s dreadfully complicated.”
“Of course,” I said, “I’ll see what I can do. Comforting — well, I’ll try.”
“Yes,” he said, “that will be difficult.”
Silence fell again, and the train carried us through the night and rain.
Suddenly he said: “Maybe if Hanni had had a passport it would all be quite
different now.”
We arrived at Zoo Station and got out. For the first time one saw
something of the revolution, in a negative way, to be sure: the usually
bright, sparkling streets of the amusement area around the zoo were dead
and deserted, as I had never seen them before.
We waited at a phone box. He was already impatient. The time for
phoning Hanni had already passed. “Hanni next,” he said thoughtfully,
“then my father, then packing. Thanks, anyway, for all your help.”
“Have a safe journey,” I said to him. “Just get through this night.
Tomorrow it will all be behind you and you will be out.” Only at that
moment did I fully grasp that this was a parting.
Perhaps there would have been a lot more to say, but it was too late. The
telephone box became available, so we shook hands and said goodbye.
LEAVE-TAKING
 ~ 26 ~

Before I continue my story — the private story of just one, not

particularly important or interesting, young person in the Germany of 1933
— I interpose here a brief word to the reader; in particular to that reader
who feels, not without some apparent justification, that I have already
overtaxed his interest in my insignificant person.
Am I mistaken, or can I hear some readers, who have so far patiently
followed my story, beginning to riffle the pages of the book? A riffling that
expresses the feeling, “What is the point of all this? What concern of ours is
the fact that in 1933 in Berlin young Mr. XY feared for his girlfriend
because she was late for a rendezvous, or that he was gauche in his dealings
with the SA — or, for that matter, as the next few chapters will reveal, that
he was forced to say farewell to all his friends, his ambitions, and his fairly
conventional immature opinions? After all, it seems that things of real
historical importance were taking place in Berlin in 1933. If we are to be
told anything, then it should be these things: what happened between Hitler
and Blomberg or Schleicher or Röhm behind the scenes, who really set fire
to the Reichstag, why Braun fled and Oberföhren committed suicide. 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 the events, a young man who obviously took no part at all in these
events and had no influence on them, who was not even a particularly well-
placed witness.”
A weighty accusation; I have to screw up all my courage to confess that I
still do not think it justified, and that I do not think I am wasting a serious
reader’s time by telling my private story. It is all true: I took no direct part
in events, and I was not a particularly well-placed witness. Nobody can be
more skeptical about my importance than I am myself. Nevertheless —
please do not take this as a sign of vanity — I am convinced that by telling
my private, unimportant story I am adding an important, unrecognized facet
to contemporary German and European history — more significant and
more important for the future than if I were to disclose who set fire to the
Reichstag, or what Hitler really said to Röhm.
What is history, and where does it take place?
 If you read ordinary history books — which, it is often overlooked,
contain only the scheme of events, not the events themselves — 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. According to this view, the history of the present
decade is a kind of chess game among Hitler, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-shek,
Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Daladier, and a number of other men whose names
are on everybody’s lips. We anonymous others seem at best to be the
objects of history, pawns in the chess game, 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.
It may seem a paradox, but it is nonetheless the simple truth, to say that
on the contrary, the decisive historical events take place among us, the
anonymous masses. The most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals
are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually
and almost unconsciously by the population at large. It is characteristic of
these decisions that they do not manifest themselves as mass movements or
demonstrations. Mass assemblies are quite incapable of independent action.
Decisions that influence the course of history arise out of the individual
experiences of thousands or millions of individuals.
This is not an airy, abstract historical construction, but indisputably real
and tangible. For instance, what was it that caused Germany to lose the
Great War in 1918 and the Allies to win it? An advance in the leadership
skills of Foch and Haig, or a decline in Ludendorff’s? Not at all. It was the
fact that the “German soldier,” that is, the majority of an anonymous mass
of 10 million individuals, was no longer willing, as he had been until then,
to risk his life in any attack, or to hold his position to the last man. Where
did this change of attitude take place? Certainly not in large, mutinous
assemblies of German soldiers, but unnoticed and unchecked in each
individual soldier’s breast. Most of them would probably not have been able
to describe this complicated and historically important internal process and
would merely have used the single expletive “Shit!” If you had interviewed
the more articulate soldiers, you would have found a whole skein of
random, private (and probably uninteresting and unimportant) reasons,
feelings, and experiences, a combination of letters from home, relations
with the sergeant, opinions about the quality of the food, and thoughts on
the prospects and meaning of the war and (since every German is
something of a philosopher) about the meaning and value of life. It is not
my purpose here to analyze the inner process that brought the Great War to
an end, but it would be interesting for those who wish to reconstruct this
event, or others like it, to do so.
Mine is a different topic, although the mental processes it involves are
similar. They may perhaps be of greater consequence, interest, and
importance: namely, the psychological developments, reactions, and
changes that took place simultaneously in the mass of the German
population, which made Hitler’s Third Reich possible and today form its
unseen basis.
There is an unsolved riddle in the history of the creation of the Third
Reich. I think it is much more interesting than the question of who set fire
to the Reichstag. It is the question “What became of the Germans?” Even
on March 5, 1933, a majority of them voted against Hitler. What happened
to that majority? Did they die? Did they disappear from the face of the
earth? Did they become Nazis at this late stage? How was it possible that
there was not the slightest visible reaction from them?
Most of my readers will have met one or more Germans in the past, and
most of them will have looked on their German acquaintances as normal,
friendly, civilized people like anyone else — apart from the usual national
idiosyncrasies. When they hear the speeches coming from Germany today
(and become aware of the foulness of the deeds emanating from there),
most of these people will think of their acquaintances and be aghast. They
will ask, “What’s wrong with them? Don’t they see what’s happening to
them — and what is happening in their name? Do they approve of it? What
kind of people are they? What are we to think of them?”
Indeed, behind these questions there are some very peculiar, very
revealing mental processes and experiences, whose historical significance
cannot yet be fully gauged. These are what I want to write about. You
cannot come to grips with them if you do not track them down to the place
where they happen: the private lives, emotions, and thoughts of individual
Germans. They happen there all the more since, having cleared the sphere
of politics of all opposition, the conquering, ravenous state has moved into
formerly private spaces in order to clear these, too, of any resistance or
recalcitrance and to subjugate the individual. There, in private, the fight is
taking place in Germany. You will search for it in vain in the political
landscape, even with the most powerful telescope. Today the political
struggle is expressed by the choice of what a person eats and drinks, whom
he loves, what he does in his spare time, whose company he seeks, whether
he smiles or frowns, what he reads, what pictures he hangs on his walls. It
is here that the battles of the next world war are being decided in advance.
That may sound grotesque, but it is the truth.
That is why I think that by telling my seemingly private, insignificant
story I am writing real history, perhaps even the history of the future. It
actually makes me happy that in my own person I do not have a particularly
important, outstanding subject to describe. If I were more important I would
be less typical. That is also why I hope my intimate chronicle will find
favor in the eyes of the serious reader, who has no time to waste, and reads
a book for the information it contains and its usefulness.
On the other hand, I must beg forgiveness of the more casual reader, who
lends me his ear less critically and reads the story of an unusual life under
unusual circumstances for its interest alone. I have tested his patience with
this digression and others, in which I have not resisted the temptation to
spin out some of the ideas that seem to me to follow from my story. How
better to regain his favor than by quickly getting back to my narrative?
 ~ 27 ~

April 1, 1933, had been the first climax of the Nazi revolution. In the
following weeks, events showed a tendency to revert to being merely
matters for the press. Certainly the terror continued, as did the celebrations
and parades, but no longer in the tempo furioso of March. Concentration
camps had become an institution. One was advised to get used to that fact
and mind one’s tongue. The Gleichschaltung — placing Nazis in
controlling positions of all ministries, local agencies, boards of large
companies, committees of associations — continued, but it now took a
pedantic, orderly form with laws and regulations. It no longer had the wild,
unpredictable character of the “individual actions” of the previous months.
The revolution became official. It became a fact, something that a German
is used to accommodating and putting up with.
It was again permissible to visit Jewish shops. One was still told not to
do so, and permanent posters described one as a “traitor to the race” if one
did, but it was permitted. There were no SA guards at the doors. Jewish
civil servants, doctors, lawyers, and journalists were still dismissed, but
now it happened legally and in an orderly fashion, by paragraph such-and-
such of the Civil Code, and there were exceptions for veterans and people
who had been employed before the war. Could one ask for more? The
courts, which had been suspended for a week, were allowed to resume their
sessions and pass their verdicts. However, judges could now be removed,
quite legally and according to law. The judges, who could be ousted at a
moment’s notice, were told that their powers had been immeasurably
increased. They had become “people’s judges,” “sovereign judges.” They
need no longer anxiously follow the letter of the law. Indeed, it was better if
they did not. Understood?
It was strange to sit in the Kammergericht again, the same courtroom,
the same seats, acting as if nothing had happened. The same ushers stood at
the doors and ensured, as ever, that the dignity of the court was not
disturbed. Even the judges were for the most part the same people. Of
course, the Jewish judge was no longer there. He had not even been
dismissed. He was an old gentleman and had served under the Kaiser, so he
had been moved to an administrative position in some Amtsgericht (lower
court). His position on the senate was taken by an open-faced, blond young
Amtsgerichtsrat, with glowing cheeks, who did not seem to belong among
the grave Kammergerichtsrats. A Kammergerichtsrat is a general, an
Amtsgerichtsrat a lieutenant colonel.[xxiv] It was whispered that in private
the newcomer was something high up in the SS. He saluted with
outstretched arm and a resounding “Heil Hitler!” The president of the
senate and the other old gentlemen thereupon made a vague gesture with
their right arms and murmured something inaudible. Previously they had
chatted quietly and knowledgeably during the breakfast break in the
deliberating room, discussing the events of the day, or professional gossip,
the way old gentlemen do. That no longer happened. There was a deep,
embarrassed silence while they ate their sandwiches.
The deliberations themselves were also often strange. The new member
of the senate produced unheard-of points of law in a fresh, confident voice.
We Referendars, who had just passed our exams, exchanged looks while he
expounded. At last the president of the senate remarked with perfect
politeness, “Colleague, could it be that you have overlooked paragraph 816
of the Civil Code?” At which the new high court judge looked embarrassed,
like a candidate who has just slipped up in a viva, leafed through his copy
of the Code, and then admitted lightly, “Oh, yes. Well, then it’s just the
other way around.” Those were the triumphs of the older law.
There were, however, other cases — cases in which the newcomer did
not back down but gave eloquent speeches, in a somewhat overloud voice,
stating that here the paragraphs of the law must yield precedence; he would
then instruct his co-judges that the meaning was more important than the
letter of the law. He would quote Hitler. Then, with the gesture of a
romantic stage hero, he would insist on some untenable decision. It was
piteous to observe the faces of the old Kammergerichtsrats as this went on.
They looked at their notes with an expression of indescribable dejection,
while their fingers nervously twisted a paper clip or a piece of blotting
paper. They were used to failing candidates for the Assessor examination
for spouting the kind of nonsense that was now being presented as the
pinnacle of wisdom; but now this nonsense was backed by the full power of
the state, by the threat of dismissal for lack of national reliability, loss of
livelihood, the concentration camp... They coughed; they said, “Of course
we agree with your opinion, but you will understand...” They begged for a
little understanding for the Civil Code and tried to save what could be
saved.
 That was the Kammergericht in Berlin in April 1933. It was the same
Kammergericht whose judges had stood up to Frederick the Great 150 years
earlier and, faced with a cabinet decree, had preferred jail to changing a
judgment they considered correct in the king’s favor. In Prussia every
schoolchild knows the story of the miller of Potsdam, which, whether it is
true or not, gives an indication of the court’s reputation. The king wanted a
windmill removed because it disturbed the view from his new palace of
Sans Souci. He offered to buy the mill. The miller refused, he wanted to
keep his mill. The king threatened to dispossess the miller, whereupon the
miller said, “Just so, Your Majesty, but there’s still the Kammergericht in
Berlin.” To this day the mill can be seen next to the palace.
In 1933 the Kammergericht toed the line. No Frederick the Great was
needed, not even Hitler himself had to intervene. All that was required was
a few Amtsgerichtsrats with a deficient knowledge of the law.
I would not remain a witness of the decline of this great, proud, old
institution for long. My training period was nearing its end. I experienced
only a few short months of the Kammergericht of the Third Reich. They
were sad months, months of taking leave in more than one sense. I felt as
though I were at a deathbed. I was out of place in this building. The spirit
that had reigned there was disappearing bit by bit and leaving hardly a
trace. I had a chill feeling of homelessness. I had not been a lawyer heart
and soul, indeed I had not been particularly enthusiastic about the legal,
civil-service career my father had planned for me. Nevertheless I had had a
sense of belonging in this place. It depressed me to see the dismal,
inglorious collapse and destruction of a world in which I had lived, not
without some feeling of being at home, of participation, even of pride. It
dissolved before my eyes, disintegrated and decayed, and I could do
nothing about it. My only option was to shrug my shoulders and to admit
the certainty that I had no future here.
Outwardly, though, everything appeared quite different. We Referendars
rose daily in importance. The Association of National Socialist Lawyers
wrote us all (me included) the most flattering letters: we were the
generation who would build the new German justice. “Join us. Help us in
the historic task assigned to us by the Führer’s will!” I dropped the letters in
the wastepaper basket, but not everybody did that. One could sense that the
Referendars felt their increasing importance. They, not the
Kammergerichtsrats, were the ones who now knowledgeably discussed
court gossip in the breaks. You could hear the invisible field marshal’s
batons rattling in their bags.
Even those who had hitherto not been Nazis felt their chance. “Yes,
there’s a sharp wind blowing, colleague,” they would say, and with quiet
satisfaction they would report that someone who had only just passed his
Assessor examination was already employed at the Ministry of Justice or,
on the other hand, of feared, “sharp” presidents of court senates who had
simply been dismissed or sent to some obscure Amtsgericht in the
provinces: “He was too close to the Reichsbanner, you know. Now he has to
put up with the consequences.” The atmosphere reminded one of the
glorious year 1923, when it had suddenly been young people who set the
tone, and one could become the director of a bank and possessor of a motor
car from one day to the next — while age and cautious reliance on
experience had only led to the mortuary.
Yet it was not quite like 1923. The price of admission was somewhat
higher. You had to choose your words with care and conceal your thoughts
to avoid going to the concentration camp instead of the Ministry of Justice.
Confident and proud though the conversations in the court corridors were,
they were hampered by an undertow of fear and mistrust. The opinions that
were expressed sounded a bit like exam responses learned by rote. Quite
often the speaker broke off suddenly, and looked around to see if someone
had perhaps misinterpreted his words.
Jubilant youths, but with butterflies in their stomachs. One day — I do
not remember what heresy I had just uttered — one of my co-Referendars
took me aside, looked closely into my eyes, and said, “A word of warning,
colleague. I have your best interests at heart.” Another close look. “You’re a
republican, aren’t you?” He put a placatory hand on my arm. “Shh. Don’t
worry. I am one too at heart. But you must be more careful. Don’t
underestimate the fascists.” (He used the word “fascists.”) “Skeptical
comments are no use nowadays. You’re only digging your own grave.
Don’t fancy that there’s anything to be done against the fascists now!
Certainly not by open opposition, believe me! I think I know the fascists
better than you. We republicans must howl with the wolves.”
That was the voice of the republicans.
 ~ 28 ~

It was not only the Kammergericht that I had to bid adieu to in those
days. “Adieu” had become the motto of the day — a radical leave-taking of
everything, without exception. The world I had lived in dissolved and
disappeared. Every day another piece vanished quietly, without ado. Every
day one looked around and something else had gone and left no trace. I
have never since had such a strange experience. It was as if the ground on
which one stood was continually trickling away from under one’s feet, or
rather as if the air one breathed was steadily, inexorably being sucked away.
What was happening openly and clearly in public was almost the least of
it. Yes, political parties disappeared or were dissolved; first those of the left,
then also those of the right; I had not been a member of any of them. The
men who had been the focus of attention, whose books one had read, whose
speeches we had discussed, disappeared into exile or the concentration
camps; occasionally one heard that one or another had “committed suicide
while being arrested” or been “shot while attempting to escape.” At some
point in the summer the newspapers carried a list of thirty or forty names of
famous scientists or writers; they had been proscribed, declared to be
traitors to the people and deprived of their citizenship.
More unnerving was the disappearance of a number of quite harmless
people, who had in one way or another been part of daily life. The radio
announcer whose voice one had heard every day, who had almost become
an old acquaintance, had been sent to a concentration camp, and woe betide
you if you mentioned his name. The familiar actors and actresses who had
been a feature of our lives disappeared from one day to the next. Charming
Miss Carola Neher was suddenly a traitor to the people; brilliant young
Hans Otto, who had been the rising star of the previous season, lay
crumpled in the yard of an SS barracks — yes, Hans Otto, whose name had
been on everyone’s lips, who had been talked about at every soiree, had
been hailed as the “new Matkowski” that the German stage had so long
been waiting for. He had “thrown himself out of a fourth-floor window in a
moment when the guards had been distracted,” they said. A famous
cartoonist, whose harmless drawings had brought laughter to the whole of
Berlin every week, committed suicide, as did the master of ceremonies of a
well-known cabaret. Others just vanished. One did not know whether they
were dead, incarcerated, or had gone abroad — they were just missing.
The symbolic burning of the books in April had been an affair of the
press, but the disappearance of books from the bookshops and libraries was
uncanny. Contemporary German literature, whatever its merits, had simply
been erased. Books of the last season that one had not bought by April
became unobtainable. A few authors, tolerated for some unknown reason,
remained like individual ninepins in the wreckage. Otherwise you could get
only the classics — and a dreadful, embarrassingly bad literature of blood
and soil, which suddenly sprang up. Readers — always a minority in
Germany, and as they were daily told, an unimportant one at that — were
deprived of their world overnight. Further, since they had quickly learned
that those who were robbed might also be punished, they felt intimidated
and pushed their copies of Heinrich Mann and Feuchtwanger into the back
rows of their bookshelves; and if they dared to talk about the newest Joseph
Roth or Jakob Wassermann they put their heads together and whispered like
conspirators.
Many journals and newspapers disappeared from the kiosks — but what
happened to those that continued in circulation was much more disturbing.
You could not quite recognize them anymore. In a way a newspaper is like
an old acquaintance: you instinctively know how it will react to certain
events, what it will say about them and how it will express its views. If it
suddenly says the opposite of what it said yesterday, denies its own past,
distorting its features, you cannot avoid feeling that you are in a madhouse.
That happened. Old-established democratic broadsheets such as the
Berliner Tageblatt or the Vossische Zeitung changed into Nazi organs from
one day to the next. In their customary, measured, educated style they said
exactly the same things that were spewed out by the Angriff or the
Völkischer Beobachter, newspapers that had always supported the Nazis.
Later, one became accustomed to this and picked up occasional hints by
reading between the lines of the articles on the arts pages. The political
pages always kept strictly to the party line.
To some extent, the editorial staff had been replaced; but frequently this
straightforward explanation was not accurate. For instance, there was an
intellectual journal called Die Tat (Action), whose content lived up to its
name. In the final years before 1933 it had been widely read. It was edited
by a group of intelligent, radical young people. With a certain elegance they
indulged in the long historical view of the changing times. It was, of course,
far too distinguished, cultured, and profound to support any particular
political party — least of all the Nazis. As late as February its editorials
brushed them off as an obviously ephemeral phenomenon. Its editor in chief
had gone too far. He lost his job and only just managed to save his neck
(today he is allowed to write light novels). The rest of the editorial staff
remained in post, but as a matter of course became Nazis without the least
detriment to their elegant style and historical perspective — they had
always been Nazis, naturally; indeed better, more genuinely and more
profoundly so than the Nazis themselves. It was wonderful to behold: the
paper had the same typography, the same name — but without batting an
eyelid it had become a thoroughgoing, smart Nazi organ. Was it a sudden
conversion or just cynicism? Or had Messrs. Fried, Eschmann, Wirsing,
[xxv] etc. always been Nazis at heart? Probably they did not know
themselves. Anyway, I soon abandoned the question. I was nauseated and
wearied, and contented myself with taking leave of one more newspaper.
In any event, these leave-takings were not the most painful — taking
leave of all the manifestations and elements that make up the atmosphere of
an era was harder. They are difficult to describe but should not be
underestimated, as they can make life very somber. It is unpleasant enough
when the air over a whole country loses all its freshness and perfume and
becomes choking and poisonous. But to a certain extent one can exclude
this outside air, shut one’s windows tightly, and withdraw into the four
walls of one’s private life. One can seal oneself off, put flowers in one’s
room, and close one’s eyes and hold one’s nose when one goes out. The
temptation to do this was great, even for me — and many others gave in to
it. Thank God, my attempt to seal myself off failed from the outset. I could
not shut the windows. There were leave-takings after leave-takings waiting
for me in my most private life.
 ~ 29 ~

All the same, the temptation to seal oneself off was a sufficiently
important aspect of the period for me to devote some space to it. It has its
part to play in the psychopathological process that has unfolded in the cases
of millions of Germans since 1933. After all, to a normal onlooker most
Germans today exhibit the symptoms of lunacy or at the very least severe
hysteria. If you want to understand how this came about, you have to take
the trouble to place yourself in the peculiar position in which non-Nazi
Germans — and that was still the majority — found themselves in 1933,
and try to understand the bizarre, perverse conflicts they faced.
The plight of non-Nazi Germans in the summer of 1933 was certainly
one of the most difficult a person can find himself in: a condition in which
one is hopelessly, utterly overwhelmed, accompanied by the shock of
having been caught completely off balance. We were in the Nazis’ hands for
good or ill. All lines of defense had fallen, any collective resistance had
become impossible. Individual resistance was only a form of suicide. We
were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas of life
there was rout, panic, and flight. No one could tell where it would end. At
the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege. Just a
little pact with the devil — and you were no longer one of the captured
quarry. Instead you were one of the victorious hunters.
That was the simplest and crudest temptation. Many succumbed to it.
Later they often found that the price to be paid was higher than they had
thought and that they were no match for the real Nazis. There are many
thousands of them today in Germany, Nazis with a bad conscience. People
who wear their Nazi badges like Macbeth wore his royal robes, who, in for
a penny, in for a pound, now find their consciences shouldering one burden
after another, who search in vain for a way out, drink and take sleeping
pills, no longer dare to think, and do not know whether they should rather
pray for the end of the Nazi era — their own era! — or dread it. When that
end comes they will certainly not admit to having been the culprits. In the
meantime, however, they are the nightmare of the world. It is impossible to
assess what these people might still be capable of in their moral and
psychological derangement. Their history has yet to be written.
 Our predicament in 1933 held many other temptations apart from this,
the crudest; each was a source of madness and mental sickness for those
who yielded. The devil has many nets, crude ones for crude souls, finer
ones for finer souls.
If you refused to become a Nazi you found yourself in a fiendish
situation: it was one of complete and unalleviated hopelessness; you were
daily subjected to insults and humiliations, forced to watch unendurable
scenes, had nowhere to turn to mitigate your anguish. Such a situation
carries its own temptations: apparent remedies that hide the barb of the
devil.
One temptation, often favored by older people, was withdrawal into an
illusion: preferably the illusion of superiority. Those that surrendered to this
clung to the amateurish, dilettantish aspects that Nazi politics undoubtedly
exhibited at first. Every day they tried to convince themselves and others
that this could not continue for long, and maintained an attitude of amused
criticism. They spared themselves the perception of the fiendishness of
Nazism by concentrating on its childishness, and misrepresented their
position of complete, powerless subjugation as that of superior,
unconcerned onlookers. They found it both comforting and reassuring to be
able to quote a new joke or a new article about the Nazis from the London
Times. They were people who predicted the imminent end of the regime, at
first with calm certainty, later, as the months went by, with ever more
desperate self-deception. The worst came for them when the Nazi Party
visibly consolidated itself and had its first successes: they had no weapons
to cope with these.
In the years that followed, this group was the target of a psychologically
clever bombardment with boastful statistics. They formed the majority of
the late converts to Nazism in the years from 1935 to 1938. Once their
strenuously maintained pose of superiority had been rendered untenable,
great numbers of these people yielded. Once the successes they had always
declared to be impossible became reality, they conceded defeat. “But he has
achieved what no one else achieved!” “Yes, that’s just the trouble.” “Oh,
you just love paradoxes, don’t you.” (A conversation from 1938.)
A few of them still hold the banner high. Even after all their defeats they
still prophesy the inevitable collapse of the regime every month, or at least
once a year. Their stand has a certain magnificence, you have to admit, but
also a certain eccentricity. The funny thing is that one day, after they have
stood fast through all their cruel disappointments, they will be proved right.
I can already see them strutting around after the defeat of the Nazis and
telling everybody that they had predicted it all along. By then, however,
they will have become tragicomic figures. There is a way of being right that
is shameful and lends its opponent undeserved glory. Think of Louis XVIII.
The second danger was embitterment — masochistically surrendering
oneself to hate, suffering, and unrelieved pessimism. This is perhaps the
most natural reaction to defeat for the Germans. In their darkest hours (in
private or in public life) every German has to fight against this temptation:
to give up completely once and for all; to let the world go to the devil with a
wan indifference bordering on compliance; to commit sullen, angry suicide.

I ‘gin to be weary of the sun

And wish th’ estate o’th’world were now undone.[xxvi]

It looks very heroic: all consolation is utterly rejected — but the sufferer
fails to see that this is itself the most poisonous, dangerous, vicious form of
consolation. The perverse indulgence in self-sacrifice, a Wagnerian lust for
death and destruction — that is the most complete consolation for a
defeated man who cannot find the strength and courage to face defeat and
bear it. I make bold to prophesy that this will be the basic stance of
Germany after it has lost the Nazi war — the wild, headstrong wailing of a
child taking the loss of its doll for the end of the world. (There was already
a lot of this in the German reaction to the defeat of 1918.) In 1933, little of
the inner feelings of the defeated majority was reflected in public attitudes
because officially no one had been defeated. Officially there was only
celebration, things getting better, “liberation,” “deliverance,” salvation,
intoxicating unity. Suffering had to be kept quiet. Yet embitterment was a
typical reaction of the defeated after 1933. I encountered it so often myself
that I am convinced the number of those affected in this way must run into
millions.
It is difficult to assess the external consequences of such an internal
attitude. Occasionally it leads to suicide. Much more commonly, however,
people adapt to living with clenched teeth, in a manner of speaking.
Unfortunately, they form the majority of the representatives of a visible
“opposition” in Germany. So it is no wonder that the opposition has never
developed any goals, methods, plans, or expectations. Most of its members
spend their time bemoaning the atrocities. The dreadful things that are
happening have become essential to their spiritual well-being. Their only
remaining dark pleasure is to luxuriate in the description of gruesome
deeds, and it is impossible to have a conversation with them on any other
topic. Indeed, it has gone so far that many of them would feel that
something was missing if they did not have atrocities to talk about, and with
some of them despair has almost become cozy. Still, it is a way of “living
dangerously”: it makes one bilious, and can lead to serious illness and even
madness. There is also a narrow side alley that leads from here to Nazidom:
if it makes no difference anyway and everything is lost, then why not be
bitterly, angrily cynical and join the devils oneself? Why not take part,
secretly cackling with scorn? That attitude is not unheard of.
There is a third temptation I need to mention. It is the one I had to fight
against myself, and again I was certainly not the only one. Its starting point
is the recognition of the danger of succumbing to the previous temptation.
You do not want to let yourself be morally corrupted by hate and suffering,
you want to remain good-natured, peaceful, amiable, and “nice.” But how
to avoid hate and suffering if you are daily bombarded with things that
cause them? You must ignore everything, look away, block your ears, seal
yourself off. That leads to a hardening through softness and finally also to a
form of madness: the loss of a sense of reality.
For simplicity’s sake, let me talk about my own experiences, not
forgetting that my case should be multiplied a hundred thousand or a
millionfold.
I have no talent for hate. I have always been convinced that involving
oneself too deeply in polemics and arguments with incorrigible opponents,
hating the despicable too much, destroys something in oneself — something
that is worth preserving and is difficult to rebuild. My natural gesture of
rejection is to turn away, not to go on the attack.
I also have a strong sense of the honor one does an opponent by deigning
to hate him, and I felt that the Nazis in particular were not worthy of this
honor. I did not want to be on such close terms with them as to hate them.
The worst affront I suffered from them was not their intrusive demands for
me to join in — those were beneath thinking or getting upset about — but
the fact that, by being impossible to ignore, they daily caused me to feel
hate and disgust, feelings that are so much against my nature.
Could I not find an attitude that avoided being forced to feel anything,
even hate or disgust? Could I not develop a serene, imperturbable disdain,
“taking one look and then moving on”? What if it cost me half, or if need be
all, my external life?
At just this time I read a dangerous, alluringly ambiguous sentence of
Stendhal’s. He wrote it as a coda after the restoration of 1814, an event that
he felt to be a “descent into the quagmire,” just as I viewed the events of
1933. There was only one thing, he wrote, still worth the toil and trouble,
namely “to hold oneself holy and pure.” Holy and pure! That meant not
only steering clear of all participation, but also of all devastation through
pain, and any distortion through hate — in short, from any reaction at all,
even that caused by rejection. Turn away — retreat into the smallest corner
if you have to, if you can only keep it free of the polluted air, so that you
can save undamaged the only thing worth saving, namely (to use the good
old theological word) your soul.
I still think that there is some justification for this attitude; and I do not
repudiate it. However, simply ignoring everything and retreating into an
ivory tower, the way I imagined it then, was not the right thing to do. I
thank God that my attempt to do so failed quickly and thoroughly. Some of
my acquaintances’ attempts did not fail so quickly, and they had to pay a
high price to learn that one can sometimes save the peace of one’s soul only
by sacrificing and relinquishing it.
In contrast to the first two ways of evading the Nazis, this third way did
find a kind of public expression in Germany in the following years. Literary
idylls suddenly sprang up and flourished everywhere. In the outside world,
even in literary circles, it has gone unnoticed that, as never before, so many
recollections of childhood, family novels, books on the countryside, nature
poems, so many delicate and tender little baubles were written in Germany
in the years 1934-38. Apart from open Nazi propaganda literature, almost
everything that was published in Germany belongs to this genre. In the last
two years it has declined somewhat, apparently because the effort required
to achieve the necessary harmlessness has become too great. Up until then it
was uncanny. A whole literature of cowbells and daisies, full of children’s
summer-holiday happiness, first love and fairy tales, baked apples and
Christmas trees, a literature of obtrusive intimacy and timelessness,
manufactured as if by arrangement in the midst of marching, concentration
camps, armaments factories, and the public displays of Der Stürmer.[xxvii]
If you had to read quantities of these books, as I did, you gradually felt that
in all their quiet tenderness they were screaming at you, between the lines,
“Don’t you see how timeless and intimate we are? Don’t you see how
nothing can disturb us? Don’t you see how unaffected we are? See it please,
please, we beg you.”
I knew some of the writers personally. For each of them, very nearly, the
moment has since come when it became impossible to go on; some event
that could not be blocked out by earplugs; maybe the arrest of a close
acquaintance or something like that. No childhood reminiscences can shield
one from that. There were some serious breakdowns. They are sad stories. I
will tell one or the other when the time comes.
Those were the conflicts the Germans faced in the summer of 1933.
They represented a choice among different forms of spiritual death. People
who have lived in normal times may well feel that they are being shown a
madhouse, or perhaps a psychopathological laboratory. However, there is
no avoiding the fact that that is the way it was, and I cannot change it.
Incidentally, these were still relatively innocuous times. It gets much worse.
 ~ 30 ~

My attempt to seclude myself in a small, secure, private domain failed

very quickly. The reason was that there was no such domain. Very soon the
wind whistled into my private life from all sides and blew it apart. By the
autumn there was nothing left of what I had considered my “circle of
friends.”
For instance, there was a small “working group” of six young
intellectuals, all of them Referendars approaching the Assessor
examinations, all from the same social class. I was one of them. We
prepared for the exams together, and that was the outward reason the group
had been formed. But it had long since become something more than that
and formed a small, intimate debating club. We had very different political
opinions, but would not have dreamed of hating one another for them.
Indeed, we were all on very good terms. The opinions were not
diametrically opposed, rather — in a manner typical of the range of views
held by young intellectual Germans in 1932 — they formed a circle. The
extreme ends of the arc almost met.
The most “left-wing” member was Hessel, a doctor’s son with
Communist sympathies; the most “right-wing” was Holz, an officer’s son
who held military, nationalistic views. Yet they often made a common front
against the rest of us. They both came from the “youth movement” and both
thought in terms of leagues. They were both anti-bourgeois and anti-
individualistic. Both had an ideal of “community” and “community spirit.”
For both, jazz music, fashion magazines, the Kurfürstendamm,[xxviii] in
other words the world of glamour and “easy come, easy go,” were a red rag.
Both had a secret liking for terror, in a more humanistic garb for the one,
more nationalistic for the other. As similar views make for similar faces,
they both had a certain stiff, thin-lipped, humorless expression and,
incidentally, the greatest respect for each other. Courtesy was anyway a
matter of course among the members of the group.
Two other opponents who understood each other well — and often
supported each other against their own confederates — were Brock and I.
We were more difficult to locate on the political scale than Hessel and Holz.
Brock’s opinions were revolutionary and extremely nationalistic, mine
rather conservative and extremely individualistic. From the ideas of the
right and the left we had each picked the exact opposite. Yet there was
something that united us: at heart we were both aesthetes, and we both
worshipped unpolitical gods. Brock’s god was adventure, collective
adventure à la 1914-18 or 1923; my god was the god of Goethe and Mozart.
Forgive me if I do not name him for the moment. So it was inevitable that
we were opponents on every topic, but often opponents who gave each
other a wink. We could also drink well together. Hessel was a teetotaler and
opposed to alcohol on principle. Holz drank in such desperate moderation
that it was a shame.
Then there were two natural mediators: Hirsch, the son of a Jewish
university professor, and Von Hagen, the son of a very high civil servant.
Von Hagen was the only one of us who belonged to a political organization.
He was a member of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German
Democratic Party) and also of the Reichsbanner. That did not prevent him
from mediating. On the contrary, it predestined him for it. He tried to
reconcile all opinions and had understanding for every point of view.
Further, he was the embodiment of a good upbringing, tact, and impeccable
manners. It was impossible for a discussion to degenerate into altercation if
he was present. Hirsch was his second. His specialty was gentle skepticism
and tentative anti-Semitism. Yes, he had a weakness for anti-Semites and
always tried to give them a chance; I remember a discussion between us in
which he seriously took the anti-Semitic part, and I, to redress the balance,
took the anti-Teutonic part. Such was the chivalry of our debates. Besides,
Hirsch and Von Hagen did their very best to bring an occasional tolerant
smile to Holz’s and Hessel’s lips, and to induce Brock and me to make a
serious “avowal” now and then. They did their utmost to prevent Holz and
me, or Hessel and Brock, destroying each other’s holy of holies (that was
only thinkable in these two combinations).
It was a nice group of hopeful young men; if you had seen them in 1932
sitting around a table, smoking and eagerly debating with one another, you
could hardly have thought that its members would, within a year,
figuratively speaking, be standing on opposing barricades ready to shoot
one another. To cut a long story short, today Hirsch, Hessel, and I are
emigrants, Brock and Holz are high Nazi officials, and Von Hagen is a
lawyer in Berlin. He is a member of the Association of National Socialist
Lawyers and of the National Socialist Drivers’ Reserve, and possibly (with
regret, but it is necessary) of the party itself. You can see that he is still
faithful to his role of mediator.
From the beginning of March 1933 the atmosphere in our group started
to become poisonous. It was no longer as easy as before to hold courteous
academic discussions about the Nazis. There was an embarrassing, tense
meeting at Hirsch’s home shortly before April 1. Brock made no secret of
the fact that he greeted the coming events with a pleasantly warm feeling of
amusement and he relished the superiority with which he could state that
“there is naturally a certain nervousness among my Jewish friends.” In his
view, expressed in the same mode, the organization seemed to be pretty
dreadful, but it was interesting to see how such a mass experiment would
turn out. In any case it opened up the most exciting prospects. Thus spoke
Brock, and it was difficult to find anything for which he did not have an
answer, given with the same brazen smile. Holz responded thoughtfully that
there might well be regrettable incidents in such a summary and
improvisatory process, but that anyway the Jews... and so on.
Our host, Hirsch, finding himself thus relieved of the necessity of taking
sides with the anti-Semites, sat silently by, biting his lips. Von Hagen
pointed out tactfully that on the other hand the Jews... and so on. It was a
beautiful discussion about the Jews, and it dragged on. Hirsch continued to
say nothing and occasionally passed around the cigarettes. Hessel tried to
attack racism with scientific arguments. Holz defended it with scientific
counterarguments. It was all very pedantic and very sober. “All right,
Hessel,” he said, more or less, taking a slow puff on his cigarette, exhaling
and watching the smoke coil upward, “in a humane state, such as you are
tacitly assuming, all these problems may not exist. But you have to admit
that when a new form of state is being set up, as is the case at the moment,
racial homogeneity...”
I began to feel nauseated, and decided to say something tactless. “It
seems to me,” I said, “that the question here is not how a national state
should be founded, but quite simply, the personal stance of each one of us.
Isn’t that so? Apart from that, there is nothing over which we have any
power or influence. What I find interesting in your attitude, Mr. Holz, is
how you reconcile your opinions with your current status as a guest of this
house.” At that, Hirsch cut me short and emphasized that he had never
made his invitation dependent on any particular opinion, etc. “Of course,” I
replied, quite angry now, even with him, “and it is not your stance that I am
criticizing, but that of Mr. Holz. I would like to know what it feels like to be
someone who accepts the invitation of a person whom he intends in
principle to do away with, along with all his kind.”
“Who mentioned doing away with?” cried Holz, and everybody started
to protest, except Brock, who said that he personally saw no contradiction
here. “You may be aware,” he said, “that in wartime officers are frequently
guests in houses that they are going to blow up the next morning.” Holz, on
the other hand, soberly proved to me that one could not speak of “doing
away with, when Jewish shops were being boycotted in an orderly and
disciplined manner.”
“Why is it not doing away with them?” I cried, outraged. “If you
systematically ruin somebody, and take any possibility of earning a living
from them, they must surely finally starve. Is that not so? I call it doing
away with someone when you deliberately allow them to starve, don’t
you?”
“Calm down,” said Holz, “nobody starves in Germany. If a Jewish
shopkeeper is really ruined, he will get social security payments.” The
terrible thing was that he said that quite seriously, without the slightest
sneer. We parted in a hostile mood.
In the course of April, just before the lists were closed, Brock and Holz
became members of the Nazi Party. It would be wrong to say they were
jumping on a bandwagon. Both had undoubtedly shared some opinions with
the Nazis all along. Up to now the party had not been strong enough to
persuade them to join. The little extra was supplied by the recruiting power
of victory.
It became difficult to hold the group together. Von Hagen and Hirsch
were kept very busy. Still, it managed to survive for another five or six
weeks. Then, at the end of May, there was a meeting at which it broke apart.
It happened just after the mass murders in Cöpenick. Brock and Holz
came to our meeting like murderers fresh from the deed. Not that they had
taken part in the slaughter themselves, but it was obviously the topic of the
day in their new circles. They had clearly convinced themselves that they
were in some way accomplices. Into our civilized, middle-class atmosphere
of cigarettes and coffee cups the two of them brought a strange, bloodred
cloud of sweaty death.
 They started to speak of the matter immediately. It was from their
graphic descriptions that we found out what had actually happened. The
press had only contained hints and intimations.
“Fantastic, what happened in Cöpenick yesterday, eh?” began Brock, and
that was the tone of his narrative. He went into detail, explained how the
women and children had been sent into a neighboring room before the men
were shot point-blank with a revolver, bludgeoned with a truncheon, or
stabbed with an SA dagger. Surprisingly, most of them had put up no
resistance, and made sorry figures in their nightshirts. The bodies had been
tipped into the river and many were still being washed ashore in the area
today. His whole narrative was delivered with that brazen smile on his face
which had recently become a stereotypical feature. He made no attempt to
defend the actions, and obviously did not see much need to. He regarded
them primarily as sensational.
We found it all dreadful and shook our heads, which seemed to give him
some satisfaction.
“And you see no difficulty with your new party membership because of
these things?” I remarked at last.
Immediately he became defensive and his face took on a bold Mussolini
expression. “No, not at all,” he declared. “Do you feel pity for these people?
The man who shot first the day before yesterday knew that it would cost
him his life, of course. It would have been bad form not to hang him.
Incidentally, he has my respect. As for the others — shame on them. Why
didn’t they put up a fight? They were all longtime Social Democrats and
members of the Eiserne Front.[xxix] Why should they be lying in their beds
in their nightshirts? They should have defended themselves and died
decently. But they’re a limp lot. I have no sympathy for them.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly, “whether I feel much pity for them, but
what I do feel is an indescribable sense of disgust at people who go around
heavily armed and slaughter defenseless victims.”
“They should have defended themselves,” said Brock stubbornly. “Then
they wouldn’t have been defenseless. That is a disgusting Marxist trick,
being defenseless, when it gets serious.”
At this point Holz intervened. “I consider the whole thing a regrettable
revolutionary excess,” he said, “and between you and me, I expect the
responsible officer to be disciplined. But I also think that it should not be
overlooked that it was a Social Democrat who shot first. It is
understandable, and in a certain sense even justified, that under these
circumstances the SA takes, er, very energetic countermeasures.”
It was curious. I could just about stand Brock, but Holz had become a
red rag to me. I could not help myself. I felt compelled to insult him.
“It is most interesting for me to hear your new theory of justification,” I
said. “If I am not mistaken, you did once study law?”
He gave me a steely look and elaborately picked up the gauntlet. “Yes, I
have studied law,” he said slowly, “and I remember that I heard something
about state self-defense there. Perhaps you missed that lecture.”
“State self-defense,” I said, “interesting. You consider that the state is
under attack because a few hundred Social Democrat citizens put on
nightshirts and go to bed?”
“Of course not,” he said. “You keep forgetting it was a Social Democrat
who first shot two SA men — ”
“ — who had broken into his home.”
“Who had entered his abode in the course of their official duty.”
“And that allows the state the justification of self-defense against any
other citizens? Against me and you?”
“Not against me,” he said, “but perhaps against you.”
He was now looking at me with really steely eyes and I had a funny
feeling in the back of my knees.
“You,” he said, “are always niggling and willfully ignoring the
monumental developments in the resurgence of the German people that are
taking place today.” (I can hear the very word “resurgence” to this day!)
“You grasp at every little excess and split legal hairs to criticize and find
fault. You seem to be unaware, I fear, that today people of your ilk represent
a latent danger for the state, and that the state has the right and the duty to
react accordingly — at the very least when one of you goes so far as to dare
to offer open resistance.”
Those were his words, soberly and slowly spoken in the style of a
commentary on the Civil Code. All the while he looked at me with those
steely eyes.
“If we are dealing in threats,” I said, “then why not openly? Do you
intend to denounce me to the Gestapo?”
 About here Von Hagen and Hirsch began to titter, attempting to turn it all
into a joke. This time, however, Holz put a spanner in the works. Quietly
and deliberately (and it was only now that I realized, with a certain
unexpected satisfaction, how deeply angered he was):
“I admit that for some time I have been wondering whether that is not
my duty.”
“Oh,” I said. I needed a few moments to taste all the different flavors on
my tongue: a little surprise, a little admiration for how far he was prepared
to go, a little sourness from the word “duty,” a little satisfaction at how far I
had driven him, and a new cool insight: that is the way life is now, and that
is how it has changed — and a little fear. Having made a quick assessment
of what he might be able to say about me, if he went through with it, I said,
“I must say that it does not speak for the seriousness of your intentions that
you have been thinking about it for some time, only to tell me the result of
your thoughts.”
“Don’t say that,” he said quietly. Now all the trumps had been played
and to raise the stakes further we would have had to become physical. It had
all taken place sitting down, while we were smoking. Anyway, the others
now intervened and reproachfully tried to calm us both down.
Oddly enough, the political debate continued quietly and bitterly for
several hours; but in reality the group had broken up. We made no
arrangements for further meetings.
Hirsch took leave of me in September, to go to Paris. I had already lost
sight of Brock and Holz. I only heard snippets of gossip about their careers
in later years. Hessel left for America a year later. The group had been
blown apart.
By the way, for a few days I was concerned that Holz really would set
the Gestapo on to me. As time passed I realized that he had obviously not
done so. It was decent of him, really!
 ~ 31 ~

No, retiring into private life was not an option. However far one
retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been
fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old
distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible
to treat it merely as a “political event.” It took place not only in the sphere
of politics, but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the
walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one
option: to remove yourself physically — emigration. Emigration: that
meant saying goodbye to the country of one’s birth, language, and
education and severing all patriotic ties.
In that summer of 1933 I was prepared to take even this final step. I had
become accustomed to leave-taking all around. I had lost my friends, had
seen harmless acquaintances changed into virtual murderers or enemies,
threatening to deliver me to the Gestapo. I had seen all my small daily
pleasures vanish. Solidly based institutions such as the Prussian justice
system had caved in before my eyes. The world of books and discussion
groups had dissolved. Opinions, points of view, theoretical systems had had
to be abandoned as never before. Where were the career plans and ideas I
had so confidently entertained just a few months before? The adventure had
begun. Already the basic tenor of my life had changed. The pain of leave-
taking was followed by numbness and exhilaration: I no longer felt firm
ground beneath my feet, but rather seemed to float or swim in empty space,
strangely light and free as a bird. Partings no longer caused much pain, just
a feeling of “Let it go” and “Well then, you can dispense with that, too,”
and I felt myself becoming ever poorer, but also ever lighter. Even so, this
final parting — mentally taking leave of my own country — was difficult,
strenuous, and painful. It advanced by fits and starts, with many relapses;
sometimes I felt I would not have the strength to go through with it.
Once again, in telling my story I am not recounting just my own
unimportant experience, but what thousands of others also went through.
True, in March and April, as I had witnessed the nation leap into the
quagmire to the accompaniment of patriotic jubilation and shouts of
triumph, I had angrily declared that I would emigrate, and have nothing
more to do with “this country”; I would rather run a tobacconist’s shop in
Chicago than be a German secretary of state, and so on. But these had just
been outbursts. There was not much thought and little serious reality behind
them. Now, in the chilly, airless coolness of these months of parting, it was
quite a different matter to consider leaving my country in earnest.
To be sure, I was not a German nationalist. The nationalism of the sports
clubs that had been the dominant feeling of the years following the Great
War and is now the spiritual basis of Nazism, the childish delight of seeing
one’s own country represented by ever larger blobs of color on the map, the
feeling of triumph over “victories” and the pleasure in seeing people
humiliated and subjugated, the relish of the fear aroused in others, the
bombastic national self-praise in the style of the “Meistersingers,” the
hysteria about “German” thought, “German” feeling, “German” constancy,
“German” manhood, “being German!” — all of that had long been
abhorrent and repugnant to me. It was no sacrifice to forgo it. However, that
did not prevent me from being a fairly good German, and I was conscious
of it often enough, if only for the shame I felt at the excesses of German
nationalism. Like most members of any nation I felt proud of the better
points that one sees here and there in German history and the German
character; offended by the insults in word or deed sometimes aimed at
Germany by the nationalists of other countries; gratified when Germany
was unexpectedly praised; and ashamed when compatriots of mine, or
worse still my whole country, behaved badly. In a nutshell, I belonged to
my country as one belongs to one’s family: more critical than outsiders, not
always on the best of terms with all its members, certainly not prepared to
make it the center of my life with a cry of “my family first and foremost”;
but belonging to it after all, and making no secret of it. To give up this sense
of belonging, to turn away and learn to look on one’s home country as an
enemy, is no small matter.
I do not “love” Germany, just as I do not “love” myself. If there is a
country that I do love, it is France, but I could love any country more easily
than my own — even without the Nazis. However, one’s own country plays
a different and far more indispensable role than that of a mistress; it is just
one’s own country. If one loses it, one almost loses the right to love any
other country. One loses the prerequisites for the delightful game of
international hospitality — for exchange, mutual invitations, getting to
know one another, showing off to each other. One becomes, well,
“stateless,” a man without a shadow, without a background, at best tolerated
somewhere — or if, voluntarily or involuntarily, one fails to follow inner
emigration with the real thing, utterly homeless, an exile in one’s own
country.
To undergo this operation, the internal detachment of oneself from one’s
country of one’s own free will, is an act of biblical savagery: “If your eye
offend you, tear it out!” Many who came as close as I did balked at this step
and have since stumbled along, spiritually and morally lamed, shuddering at
the crimes committed in their names, unable openly to deny responsibility
for them, caught in a net of apparently insoluble conflicts: Do they not owe
it to their country to sacrifice their greater wisdom, their morals, their
human dignity, and their conscience? Does not what they call the
“incredible rise of Germany” show that the sacrifice is worth it and that it
all adds up? They forget that it is no better for a nation than for a single man
to gain the whole world if it loses its soul; and they also forget that they are
sacrificing not just themselves for their patriotism (or what they think is
patriotism) but also their country.
For — and this is what made the parting finally almost inevitable —
Germany did not remain Germany. The German nationalists themselves
destroyed it. It gradually became clear that the conflict was only
superficially about the question of whether it was necessary to leave one’s
country in order to keep faith with oneself. The real conflict beneath the
surface, hidden by the common clichés and platitudes, was between
nationalism and keeping faith with one’s country.
The Germany that was “my country” and the country of those like me
was not just a blob on the map of Europe. It was characterized by certain
distinctive attributes: humanity, openness on all sides, philosophical depth
of thought, dissatisfaction with the world and oneself, the courage always to
try something fresh and to abandon it if need be, self-criticism, truthfulness,
objectivity, severity, rigor, variety, a certain ponderousness but also delight
in the freest improvisation, caution and earnestness but also a playful
richness of invention, engendering ever new ideas that it quickly rejects as
invalid, respect for originality, good nature, generosity, sentimentality,
musicality, and above all freedom, something roving, unfettered, soaring,
weightless, Promethean. Secretly we were proud that in the realm of the
spirit our country was the land of unlimited possibilities. Be that as it may,
this was the country we felt attached to, in which we were at home.
 This Germany has been destroyed and trampled underfoot by the
nationalists, and it has at last become clear who its deadliest enemy was:
German nationalism itself and the German Reich. To stay loyal to it and
belong to it, one had to have the courage to recognize this fact — and all its
consequences.
Nationalism — that is, national self-reflection and self-worship — is
certainly a dangerous mental illness wherever it appears, capable of
distorting the character of a nation and making it ugly, just as vanity and
egoism distort the character of a person and make it ugly. In Germany this
illness has a particularly vicious destructive effect, precisely because
Germany’s innermost character is openness, expansiveness, even in a
certain sense selflessness. If other peoples suffer from nationalism it is an
incidental weakness, beside which their true qualities can remain intact; but
in Germany nationalism kills the basic values of the national character. That
explains why the Germans — doubtless a fine, sensitive, and human people
in healthy circumstances — become positively inhuman when they
succumb to the nationalist illness; they take on a brutal nastiness of which
other peoples are incapable. Only the Germans lose everything through
nationalism: the heart of their humanity, their existence, their selves. This
illness, which damages only the external features of others, corrodes their
souls. A nationalist Frenchman can still be a typical (and otherwise quite
likable) Frenchman. A German who yields to nationalism is no longer a
German. What he achieves is a German Empire, maybe even a Great or
Pan-German Empire — but also the destruction of Germany.
Admittedly, you should not imagine that in 1932 Germany and its culture
were in a flourishing, magnificent state, which the Nazis demolished at a
single blow. The history of Germany’s self-destruction through poisonous
nationalism goes further back than that. It would be worth writing about. Its
great paradox is that every act of this self-destruction consisted of a
victorious war, a great outward triumph. One hundred and fifty years ago
Germany was in the ascendant. The “liberation wars” against Napoleon of
1813 and 1815 were the first setback, the wars of 1864 to 1870 the second.
Nietzsche was the first to recognize prophetically that German civilization
had just lost its war against the German Reich. For a long time Germany
was prevented from finding its political shape by the straitjacket of
Bismarck’s Prusso-German Reich. From then on it had no political
representation (except perhaps in its Catholic sector): the nationalist right
hated it, the Marxist left ignored it. Yet it remained mutely and stubbornly
alive — until 1933. You could still find it in a thousand homes, families,
and circles of friends, in the editorial offices of some newspapers and
publishers, in theaters and concert halls, and in odd corners of public life
from churches to cabarets. It was only the Nazis, radical and thoroughly
organized as they were, who rooted and smoked it out wherever it was to be
found. The first country to be occupied by the Nazis was not Austria or
Czechoslovakia. It was Germany. It was just one of their now so familiar
tricks that they occupied and trampled on the nation in the name of
“Germany” itself — that was part of the mechanism of destruction.
A German who felt attached to this Germany — and not to any structure
that happened to be erected in a particular geographical location — had no
alternative but to leave, however forbidding this step, which would
outwardly deprive him of his country, must appear. On the other hand, the
expansiveness and openness that lie in the original German character made
this loss perhaps a little easier than it would have been for others. One came
to feel that any foreign country would seem more like home than Adolf
Hitler’s “Reich.” Perhaps it might be possible — one thought with timid
hope — to save a little bit of Germany here and there “abroad.”
 ~ 32 ~

Yes, people in Germany had vague hopes that something positive would
come from the emigrants. There was not much basis for these hopes, but
since the situation was hopeless at home, and since it is difficult to live
without some hope, they placed their hopes abroad.
One hope, which a few months before would have been a fear, and
which many still were not sure whether they should call hope or fear, was
directed toward “foreign countries.” In Germany, that meant France and
England. Could France and England idly contemplate what was happening
in Germany for long? Would not the humanitarian left in both countries be
appalled by the barbaric tyranny that was taking place on their doorsteps —
and would not the nationalist right be alarmed by the preparations for war
that were not even kept hidden, and the open rearmament that had been
pursued almost from the very first day of the new regime? Whatever the
shade of their governments, surely these two countries would soon lose
patience with the Nazis and use their still infinitely superior military might
to stop the mischief in a week? If the politicians there were not totally blind,
no other course of action was conceivable. One could not expect them to sit
idly by while the knives were being sharpened for use against their
countries — they would hardly be fooled by a few “peace speeches” when
every schoolchild in Germany could see straight through them.
In the meantime the political emigrants in France and England would
certainly be favored and cultivated by sensible statesmen. They would form
the backbone of the organization of the future German republic, which
would have learned from the mistakes of its predecessor and be truly
effective. Perhaps everything would seem to have been a bad dream, as
after a cleansing thunderstorm, or the quick, decisive lancing of a boil. We
would begin again at the point where a false start had been made in 1919, a
bit more wisely and with fewer prejudices.
Those were the hopes. Admittedly, they had little foundation, except that
their realization would have been sensible and desirable. These hopes,
coupled with my overwhelming feeling that everything in life had become
unpredictable anyway and that I could only act on the spur of the moment,
replaced any properly thought-out plans for emigration that I might have
made. I would just leave, or so I thought. Where to? Paris, of course. For as
long as it was permitted I would arrange to have two hundred marks a
month sent to me, and then I would take stock. There would doubtless be
something for me to do. There was, after all, no lack of things that needed
to be done.
The naiveté of this plan was in part an expression of my situation at the
time, that of a young person who has never lived away from home and feels
the time approaching when he must “fly the nest.” That in this case “flying
the nest” meant going into exile, that it was a step into the unknown, an
adventure, did not bother me very much. The strange counterpoint of a
certain numb desperation (“It can’t get much worse”) and a youthful spirit
of adventure made the decision easier for me. One should also not forget
that, like all Germans of my generation, the feeling that everything was so
uncertain was deeply embedded in my mind. It is a commonly held belief
that caution is just as dangerous as recklessness, and that caution deprives
one of the pleasure of taking risks. Incidentally, everything I have
experienced in my life reinforces the truth of this perception.
Thus, one day, when my training period at the Kammergericht had
ended, I declared to my father that I wanted to “leave.” I could not see
anything worthwhile for me here; in particular it was impossible and
senseless to try to become a judge or administrative civil servant in the
current circumstances. I wanted to get out, go to Paris for the time being.
Would he give me his blessing and send me two hundred marks a month as
long as that was possible?
It was almost surprising how weak my father’s opposition was. In March
he had brushed aside emotional outbursts like this with a quiet smile of
superiority. In the meantime he had grown very old. He no longer slept at
night. The drumming and alarms at the nearby SS barracks kept him awake,
but more so, perhaps, his thoughts.
It is harder for an old man to bear the destruction and disappearance of
everything he has worked for than it is for a young one. For me leave-
taking, even in its most radical form, meant a new beginning; for him it was
final. His dominant feeling was that he had lived in vain. There had been
great pieces of legislation in his administrative area, on which he had
worked closely. They were important, daring, thoughtful, intellectual
achievements, the fruits of decades of experience and years of intense,
meticulous analysis and dedicated refinement. With a stroke of the pen they
had been declared null and void. It had not even been a major event. Not
only that, but the foundations on which such things could be built or
replaced had been washed away. The whole tradition of a state based on the
rule of law, to which generations of men like my father had devoted their
lives and energies, which had seemed so firm and permanent, had
disappeared overnight. It was not just failure that my father experienced at
the end of a life that had been severe, disciplined, industrious, and all-in-all
very successful. It was catastrophe. He was witnessing the triumph, not of
his opponents — that he would have borne with wise acceptance — but of
barbarians, beneath consideration as opponents. In those days I sometimes
saw my father sitting at his desk for long periods, just staring into space,
without a glance at the papers before him. It seemed as though he were
surveying a vast, baleful scene of destruction.
“And what do you intend to do abroad?” he said, his old skepticism still
showing in the question, and his canny lawyer’s instinct for the decisive
point. But the voice was so tired that its tone suggested the question had
only been asked as a formality, and that he would accept almost any answer.
I put the best gloss I could on my lack of plans.
“Well,” he said with a small, sad, kindly smile, “that doesn’t sound very
promising, does it?”
“True,” I said, “but what can I look forward to here?”
“I’m just afraid,” he said, beginning to warm to his argument and take a
firmer stand than he had perhaps intended, “that you are deluding yourself.
They’re not just waiting for us over there, you know. Immigrants are a
burden for any country, and it’s not pleasant to feel you are a burden.
There’s a great difference between entering a country as a kind of
ambassador, with a purpose and something to show, and coming as a
refugee looking for shelter. A great difference.”
“Don’t we have something to offer?” I said. “If the entire German
intelligentsia, all the artists and scientists, were to emigrate — which
country would not feel privileged to be given all that as a present?”
He raised his arm a little and let it sink tiredly. “Bankrupt stock,” he said.
“You lose your value if you become a refugee. Just look at the Russians.
The Russian refugees were also an elite. Now their generals, politicians,
and writers are glad if they are allowed to be waiters or taxi drivers in
Paris.”
“Perhaps they prefer being waiters in Paris to being ministers in
Moscow,” I said.
“Perhaps,” said my father, “perhaps not. Such things are easy to say
beforehand. Afterward, when you’re faced with reality, things look
different. Starvation and destitution are easy to contemplate when you have
enough to eat.”
“Should I perhaps become a Nazi for fear of starvation and destitution?”
I said.
“No,” he said, “you shouldn’t. Certainly not.”
“And do you think I can become a judge without becoming a Nazi?”
“I don’t suppose you could be a judge,” said my father, “at least for the
time being. Who can tell what lies in the future? But I thought you could at
least become a lawyer. And anyway, aren’t you beginning to get some
money for the stuff you write?”
That was true. A well-respected newspaper, in which I had occasionally
published short pieces, had written to me suggesting a closer collaboration.
At that time the great newspapers that had formerly been democratic
offered surprising opportunities for young, Aryan, non-Nazi people who
were not handicapped by a leftist record, or better still were unknown
quantities. I had not rejected the offer. I had gone to the offices and to my
delight had found an editorial staff that was not in the least Nazi, that
thought and felt as I did. It was pure joy to sit in the offices, exchange
pieces of news and slander; it was pleasant to dictate articles and watch
them being passed to the messengers to be taken to the typesetters. It
sometimes felt like being in a nest of conspirators. The only thing that made
me uneasy was that, in spite of all the allusions concealed between the lines
of the articles we had written, which had produced such laughter in the
office, the next morning when the paper appeared, it seemed to be a
committed Nazi organ.
“I think I may actually be able to write for the paper from abroad,” I
said.
“That makes sense,” said my father. “Have you spoken to the editors
yet?”
 I had to admit that I had not.
“I suggest,” said my father, “that we let the matter rest for a few days,
and think about it a bit more carefully. You must not think that it would be
easy for your mother and me to let you go, and into such uncertainty at that.
In any case I expect you to take your exams first. If only from a sense of
propriety.”
That, he continued to insist on. After a few days he put forward a plan of
his own.
“First you will take your Assessor examination as intended. You cannot
simply throw twenty years of education overboard and run away just before
your finals. That will take about another five months. Then you have six
months in hand to write your doctoral thesis. After all, you can write that as
easily in Paris as here. So if you still feel the same way then, you can take
six months’ leave and go where you like, let’s say to Paris, and work on
your thesis. You can look around while you’re doing that. If you think that
you can gain a foothold, well and good. If not, you haven’t lost anything
and you can still come back. That will be about a year from now and who
knows what things will be like in a year’s time.”
After a little toing and froing, that was the agreed-upon plan. I thought it
was unnecessary to take the Assessor exams, but recognized that I owed it
to my father to do so. My main fear was that war might break out in the
next five months, while I was still here. It would be the inevitable
preventive war of the Western powers against Hitler and I would be forced
to fight on the wrong side.
“The wrong side?” said my father. “Do you think the French side would
be the right side for you?”
“Yes,” I said firmly, “in this case I do. As things are now, Germany can
only be liberated from abroad.”
“Oh dear,” said my father bitterly, “liberated from abroad! You probably
don’t seriously mean that. Anyway, you can’t be liberated against your will.
That’s an impossibility. If the Germans want freedom, they will have to
work for it themselves.”
“But do you see any means of doing that, in chains as we now are?”
“No.”
“So the only option is — ”
 “That ‘so’ is illogical,” said my father. “Just because one path is blocked,
it does not follow that another must be open. We should not seek comfort in
illusions. Germany took refuge in illusions in 1918 and the result is the
Nazis. If German liberals again resort to self-delusion the result will be that
we will have a foreign government.”
“Maybe that would be better than a Nazi government.”
“I don’t know,” said my father. “The more distant of two evils always
seems the lesser. It may not be the lesser in reality. I myself would not raise
a finger to bring about a foreign government.”
“But then you see no possibilities and no hope?”
“Hardly any,” said my father, “not at the moment.”
Again his eyes took on that vacant, staring look of forlorn self-control, as
if he were surveying a scene of vast desolation.
Now and again associates from his old department would visit my father.
He had retired several years ago, but he still had personal contacts there,
and he enjoyed hearing how this or that matter was developing, or how this
or that young colleague was shaping up. He liked to feel he was still part of
things and give the occasional hint or piece of informal advice. The visitors
still came, but the conversations had become dreary and unchanging. My
father would ask about a colleague, speaking his name. The visitor’s answer
was a laconic “Clause Four” or “Clause Six.”
Those were clauses from a recent law. It was called the Law for the Re-
establishment of the Civil Service and its individual paragraphs allowed
civil servants to be demoted, involuntarily retired, laid off with a lump sum,
or sacked without any pension or payoff. Every clause contained a destiny.
“Clause Four” was a devastating blow. “Clause Six” was demotion and
humiliation. These numbers dominated conversations between civil
servants.
One day the president of the department visited. He was much younger
than my father and they had had their quarrels. The president had been a
Social Democrat; my father had been far more to the right. More than once
they had clashed, and things had not been helped by the fact that the
younger man had the senior position. Nevertheless, they had respected each
other and they had not completely lost touch.
This time the visit was painful. The president, a man in his late forties,
looked as old as my father did at seventy. His hair had gone completely
white. My father told me afterward that he had often lost the thread of the
conversation, not answered, and looked absentmindedly down at the floor.
Then he had burst out, “It’s dreadful, my friend. Just dreadful.” He had
come to say goodbye. He was leaving Berlin to “crawl away somewhere in
the country.” He had just come from a concentration camp.
He was “Clause Four.”
As I said, my father himself had retired long ago. He had no official
powers anymore and he could have done nothing to harm the Nazis, even if
he had wanted to. It seemed as though he was out of the line of fire. But one
day he, too, received an official letter. It contained a detailed questionnaire.
“Under Clause X of the Law for the Re-establishment of the Civil Service,
you are required to answer the following questions truthfully and in full...
Under Clause Y, refusal to answer will entail loss of pension...”
There were a lot of questions. My father had to state which political
parties, organizations, and associations he had ever belonged to in his life,
he had to list his services to the nation, explain this and excuse that, and
finally to sign a printed declaration that he “stood behind the government of
national uprising without reservations.” In short, having served the state for
forty-five years, he was required to humble himself again in order to
continue to receive his well-earned pension.
My father stared silently at the questionnaire for a long time.
Next day I saw him seated at his desk, the form in front of him. He was
staring past it.
“Are you going to fill it in?” I asked.
My father looked at the questionnaire, grimaced, and said nothing for a
time. Then he asked, “Do you think I should?”
Silence.
“I wonder what you and your mother would live on?” he said at last.
“I really don’t know,” he repeated after a while. “I don’t even know,”
and he tried to smile, “how you will be able to go to Paris to write your
thesis.”
There was an uneasy silence. Then my father pushed the questionnaire
aside, but he did not put it away.
It lay on his desk for several days. Then one afternoon as I entered the
room I saw my father filling it in, slowly and laboriously, like a child
writing a school essay. Half an hour later he went out himself and took it to
the mailbox before he could change his mind. He showed no outward
change in his manner and spoke no more excitedly than usual, but it had
nonetheless been too much for him. With people who are used to restraint in
word and gesture, some part of the body is invariably affected by severe
mental stress. Some have heart attacks in such cases. My father’s weakness
was his stomach. He had hardly sat down at his desk again when he jumped
up and began to vomit convulsively. For two or three days he was unable to
eat or keep down any food. It was the beginning of a hunger strike by his
body, which killed him cruelly and painfully two years later.
 ~ 33 ~

The longer this summer of 1933 lasted, the more unreal everything
became. Things gradually lost their substance, changed into bizarre dreams.
I began to live in a state like that of a mild fever, pleasantly limp, slightly
dazed, and free of all responsibilities.
I registered for the Assessor examination, the great final examination of
a German lawyer’s training, which confers the right to become a judge or a
higher civil servant. I did it without any intention of ever making use of that
right. Whether I passed or failed the exam was a matter of complete
indifference to me. Normally, you will agree, examinations are stimulating
things that put you on your mettle. People even speak of examination fever.
I felt nothing of the kind. The fever I experienced was of a very different
nature.
I worked on the preparatory homework tests, which are part of the
Assessor examination, in the “legal archives,” a library on the top floor of a
large office building. It had airy studio rooms with glass partitions, beneath
a blue, windy summer sky. There I wrote my answers, as lightly and
carelessly as one writes a letter. I simply could not take them seriously. The
questions and points for discussion assumed a world that no longer existed.
They still covered the Civil Code, and even the Weimar state constitution. I
read obsolete commentaries on these dead and buried clauses, which only
yesterday had been much quoted. Instead of picking out the sentences that
were important for my answers, I read on and began to daydream. From
downstairs I could hear tinny march music. If you leaned out of the window
you could see columns of brown uniforms rolling through the streets,
punctuated by swastika flags. Wherever the flags were, passersby on both
sides of the street would raise their arms in salute (we had learned that those
who did not were beaten up). What was the occasion this time? Oh, they
were marching to the Lustgarten, a parade ground in the center of Berlin.
Herr Ley had left the International Labor Office in Geneva because he had
disagreed with something, and now the SA was parading to the Lustgarten
to slay the dragon once and for all, with singing and shouting.
You saw these marches and heard this singing every day, and you had to
be careful to disappear into a house entrance in time to avoid having to
salute the flags. We lived in a state of war, though it was a rather peculiar
war, in which victories were achieved by marching and singing. The SA,
SS, Hitler Youth, Workers’ Front, or whatever would march through the
streets singing “Do You See the Sunrise in the East?” or “Heathlands of
Brandenburg,” form ranks somewhere, listen to a speech, and thunder
“Heil!” from a thousand throats, and another enemy would bite the dust. It
was paradise for a certain kind of German, and there was a definite 1914
feeling about it. I saw old ladies with shopping bags pause and watch such a
brown column of marching, lustily singing men. With a gleam in their eyes
they said, “You can see, yes, you can just see that things are looking up.”
 Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, January 30, 1933. The nighttime parade by the SA, celebrating
Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. (Anthony Potter Collection / Hulton Archive)

Sometimes more substantial victories were won. One morning a strong

force of police surrounded and occupied the artists’ quarter in Wilmersdorf,
which had been home to many left-wing literati and still was to a few.
Victory! There was great booty. Dozens of enemy flags fell into the hands
of our troops, subversive literature, from Karl Marx to Heinrich Mann, was
loaded onto the trucks by the kilogram, and the number of prisoners was
respectable. That really was the style in which this event was portrayed in
the press, as though it were a second Battle of Tannenberg. Another time all
traffic on road and rail was brought to a standstill “at a stroke” at midday,
and every vehicle was searched. Victory! What things were uncovered!
From jewels and currency to “propaganda material of enemies of the state.”
It was really worthy of a “spontaneous demonstration” in the Lustgarten.
At the end of June all the papers had banner headlines, “Enemy Planes
over Berlin!” No one believed it, not even the Nazis, but no one was
particularly surprised, either. That was the current style. A “spontaneous
demonstration” followed: “Germany needs the freedom of the air.” Marches
and flags, the “Horst Wessel Song,” “Heil.” About the same time the
minister of culture deposed the church authorities, and appointed the Nazi
military padre Müller as “bishop of the Reich.”[xxx] At a demonstration in
the Sportpalast this was celebrated as a victory for German Christianity,
with Adolf Hitler as the German Messiah, flags, the “Horst Wessel Song,”
and “Heil.” This time the celebrations concluded with a rendering of
Luther’s chorale “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our
God”), perhaps in honor of the institution that was being buried, or for some
other tasteful reason. Then there were “church elections.” The Nazis
ordered all their nominally Christian followers to the ballot, and next day
the press reported an overwhelming election victory for German
Christianity! That evening, as I rode through the city, there was a swastika
flag on every church tower.
The Nazis were to encounter serious resistance to this attack, but that
could not yet be discerned at all outside church circles. It had not been
without qualms that I had participated for the first time in an issue of the
governance of the church, and placed my ballot paper in the box labeled
with the solemn words “Bekennende Kirche” (Confessing Church).[xxxi] I
did not feel very committed. I had always respected rather than venerated
the church, but I felt strongly that it should be respected even by those who
did not venerate it. The blasphemous fancy-dress cavortings of the “German
Christians” disgusted me, but I was utterly convinced of the futility of any
kind of resistance, particularly in the church. For decency’s sake, I thought,
one should “commit” oneself to a defeated and violated institution. I felt a
certain sympathy for the conservative old gentleman whom I heard at this
time saying, “For pity’s sake, now we even have to fight for the faith that
we don’t have.”
Emotions became less intense in the course of the summer, the tension
dropped, even the feeling of disgust weakened. It was all covered by a
narcotic cloud. For many, who had to remain in Germany, it was a time of
acclimatization, with all its dangers. For my part, I half felt as if I had
already left. A few more months and I would be in Paris — I never
considered the possibility of return. This was just a waiting period. It did
not count anymore.
Indeed, there was not much left worth experiencing. My friends had all
gone — or they were no longer my friends. Sometimes I got postcards with
foreign stamps. There were occasional letters from Frank Landau. These
letters became gloomier as time went by. At first they sounded decisive and
hopeful. Then they became shorter and more ambiguous, and once in the
middle of August there was a veritable bundle of a letter, twelve or fourteen
pages written as they came to mind, like a soliloquy. The tone was tired and
despondent, even desperate. It was all no good. Things had gone as badly as
possible with Ellen and they were going to part. There were no
opportunities for Frank in Switzerland, nothing on the horizon after his
doctorate. He could not forget Hanni, and our talks. There was nothing to
replace what he had left behind, nothing to connect with the past that might
give him strength. “I’m not writing this to ask for your advice, because I
know there is none...”
A little later Ellen suddenly came back. She simply appeared. The
relationship was over. She had capitulated. She wrote to me and I visited
her two or three times in Wannsee, sat with mixed feelings in the garden of
the house I had been in on April 1. She wanted me to explain it all to her
and give her solace and advice. She was in a bad state, confused and off
balance: she loved Frank, but she no longer thought she could live with
him. It had all been terribly hasty and now it was spoiled forever. If only
they had had time to let things develop slowly and see where they were
leading! But that was the terrible thing. Everything always had to be
decided immediately. You stood at so many crossroads. Here and now you
had to make up your mind, and the roads led in such different directions,
toward an unknowable future. Her family was preparing to emigrate to
America. Should she go with them? That would mean never seeing Frank
again. Should she go back to Zurich? That meant tying herself to him
permanently, and this summer had not been propitious. But she loved him.
“You know him. Tell me what he’s really like. Tell me what to do.”
I had spoken to Hanni at the beginning of April. She had lain in a
darkened room for a few days, eating nothing and crying all day. Later we
had traipsed from one consulate to the next, written letters to various Czech
ministries, and had interviews at police stations. It had all been to no avail.
The question of her nationality was hopelessly tangled. Hanni was a
prisoner in Germany.
~~~
I led a strange existence, almost like being a receiver in charge of a
bankrupt life. Between times I did the preparatory tests for a certificate that
meant nothing to me and that belonged more to that bankrupt life — which
had once been my own. Also between times I wrote newspaper articles,
little things with as much bitter wit as I could muster — and was surprised
to see them in print a few days later in that slightly schizophrenic paper
with its enforced, stolid Nazi opinions, a paper that had had an international
reputation only a few months ago. How proud I would have been to belong
to it then! Now it was of little concern to me, it was temporary and did not
count.
Of all the people I had been close to, only Charlie remained — strangely
enough, since it had started as a carnival fling. She stayed. She wandered
like a silken thread through the weave of that unreal summer. A slightly
painful, not quite happy love affair — but still a love affair with a little
sweetness.
She was a good, simple, young Berlin girl and in happier times our story
might have been simple, trite, and sweet. As it was, misfortune bound us
more tightly together than was good for us, and demanded more of us than
we were able to give each other; namely, to be precise, compensation for
the loss of a whole world and for daily painful, choking distress. That was
too much for both of us. I could hardly bear to speak to her about what was
going on inside me; after all, her own position was much worse and much
more dangerous, more immediate, more urgent. She was Jewish, she was
persecuted, she was in daily fear for her life and that of her parents and the
large family she belonged to, and to which she was very close. So many
terrible things were happening to the Jews, but I had difficulty telling them
all apart. Like many other young Jews she considered what was happening
to them almost to the exclusion of all else, and who can blame her? She
reacted in all innocence, becoming a Zionist from one day to the next, a
Jewish nationalist. It was a common reaction, and one that I could
sympathize with but observed with regret. It so closely followed the Nazis’
intentions. It contained so much weak-hearted acceptance of their hostile
assumptions. If I had argued with her, I would have robbed her of her only
consolation.
“But Peter, what are we to do?” she asked with large sad eyes, the one
time I tried, as gently as I could, to hint at my skepticism. She studied
Hebrew and thought about Palestine, but she had not arrived there yet. She
still went to work in the store — it had been reallowed, but who knew for
how long? — and helped to feed her family. She was touchingly caring
about her father and all her relatives, went to work, and suffered. She lost
weight and cried a great deal, but sometimes she let me comfort her and
laughed again, at least for one evening. Then she would be charmingly silly
and boisterous, but it did not last long. In August she became seriously ill,
and she had her appendix removed. That was the second time that year that
I saw appendicitis apparently caused by mental stress.
All the while we continued our little affair as well as we could. We went
to the cinema and drank wine together, tried to be merry and in love, in the
normal way. We parted late at night. I took the last subway from her distant
part of town to mine and sat around on empty platforms where the only
movement was the escalators.
On Sundays we often went for walks in the woods, or lay around by the
water’s edge or in some clearing. Berlin’s surroundings are beautiful, rather
untamed and wild. Even within the range of the suburban railway you can,
if you leave the well-trodden excursion routes, still reach areas that seem
untouched, magnificently lonely, unchangeable, and romantically sad. We
searched them out and wandered down long alleys of dark green firs, or we
lay in a meadow beneath a threateningly blue sky. The sky was beautiful,
and so were the long, densely packed rows of tall trees, the grass, the moss,
the ants, and the buzzing summer insects. It was all infinitely, lethally
soothing. Only we should not have been part of the picture. Without us it
would have been even more beautiful. We were intruders.
That summer the weather was wonderful, the sun tireless, and an ironic
God arranged that 1933 of all years would be a vintage of which
connoisseurs of wine would speak with reverence for many years.
 ~ 34 ~

An unexpected letter arrived, from Teddy in Paris. It was hardly to be

believed. She wrote that she was coming — very soon, next week. My heart
began to beat like a drum. She was coming to try to get her mother out of
the country, she wrote, and she wanted to see how things were close up. She
was a little anxious, but she was looking forward to many things and she
hoped to see a lot of me.
As I put the letter in my inside pocket I had a feeling as if life were
returning, an overwhelming tingling as though ants were crawling all over
me. I suddenly realized that all the while I had been stiff, numb, and cold,
almost dead. I ran around the flat, whistled, and smoked one cigarette after
another. I did not know what to do with myself. In my present condition it
was almost unbearable to feel such pleasure in anticipation.
The next day the headlines were “Training Camps for Referendars.” All
Referendars who were about to take their Assessor examinations, and had
finished their preparatory tests, would be required to go to training camps
where they would take part in military and sporting exercises and
ideological indoctrination sessions to prepare them for their great task as
German people’s judges. The first batch would receive their call-up papers
in the next few days. There followed an editorial comment, full of praise
and “Heil”: “Every young German lawyer will be grateful to the Minister
of Justice...”
That was the first time, I think, that I threw a real temper tantrum. The
cause may seem rather slight, but the reactions of us frail and weak human
beings are not always strictly commensurate with the general importance of
the occasion. I beat the walls with my fists as though I had been locked up,
I screamed and sobbed and cursed God and the world, my father, myself,
the German Reich, the newspaper, everyone and everything. I was about to
hand in my last preparatory homework test, and so could reckon on being
part of the first contingent. I saw red and went berserk. Then I collapsed
and wrote a short, despairing letter to Teddy. She should come as quickly as
possible so that we could see each other at least for a day or two.
The next day or the day after that I dutifully submitted my final
homework test, with a broken feeling of having had a thorough drubbing.
 Then, praise be to Prussian red tape, nothing happened. My tests were
probably gathering dust in some office. First they must be processed there,
then my name had to be ticked off on some list and transferred to some
other list, then the contingents for the camps had to be assembled, the call-
up papers printed and sent off, and marvelously, each of these stages took a
few precious days. When some days had passed without any reaction, I
calmed down and remembered the way that Prussian departments work. I
saw that there was some hope; indeed I could hope for two, maybe even
four weeks of freedom. True, any day could see an end to it, but it was not
inevitable. Every day I checked the post for official letters, at first anxiously
and with relief, then with quiet confidence, and finally, as it became more
critical, with an ever more confident, sacrilegious certainty that there would
not be one. It could have arrived any day, but it did not. Teddy arrived
instead.

Sebastian, Teddy (?), and a friend, c. 1929. (Oliver Pretzel)

 She came, and it was as if she had never been away. She brought a whiff
of Paris with her: Parisian cigarettes, Parisian magazines, Parisian gossip,
and irresistible as a perfume, the air of Paris, air that could be breathed —
and I breathed it greedily. In Paris, the fashion that summer, the summer in
which uniforms had become so horribly fashionable in Germany, was for
women to dress à l’uniforme. Thus Teddy wore a little blue lancer’s jacket
with insets and brass buttons. It was unimaginable. She came from a world
where the women wore that kind of thing for fun, and nobody thought
anything of it. She had many stories. Parisian students of all nationalities
had just been on a six-week trip through France. There had been Swedes,
Hungarians, Poles, Austrians, Germans, and Italians. They had danced the
folk dances of their countries in their national costumes and sung folk
songs. Everywhere they had been received like princes with cries of
“Bravo” and “Bis” and fraternal speeches. In Lyon, Herriot[xxxii] himself
had delivered a speech that had almost had them all in tears, and then the
city had given them such a meal that they had all felt overfed for two days...
I sat there and just let her tell me everything, eagerly asking for more. Such
things still existed! Yes, they existed — less than a day’s journey away. And
Teddy was here sitting next to me, really next to me, on my chair, telling me
all this as though it were nothing out of the ordinary.
This time I had nothing to show her in exchange, absolutely nothing.
Before, when she had come, there had still been a few things worth seeing
in Berlin: an interesting film that was the talk of the town; a few major
concerts; a cabaret or small theater with a special “atmosphere.” This time
there was nothing of the kind. You could almost see Teddy gasping for air.
Innocently she asked about cafés and cabarets that had long since been
closed, asked about actors who had not appeared for many months. Of
course she had read the news in the press, but now the reality seen face-to-
face was rather different, less sensational perhaps, but much harder to
comprehend and much harder to endure. The swastika flags everywhere, the
brown uniforms that one could not get away from: not in buses, cafés, in the
streets, or even in the Tiergarten park. They were everywhere, like an army
of occupation. The never-ending march music and drums — strange, Teddy
still noticed it, and asked what the reason was. She did not know yet that
there would have been more reason to ask if there had been no music. The
red posters with the announcements of executions on the poster pillars
almost every morning, next to the cinema programs and the posters for
summer restaurants; I did not even notice them anymore, but Teddy
shuddered as she studied them innocently. On one walk I suddenly pulled
her into a house entrance. She did not understand and asked with a start,
“What’s up?”
“There’s an SA flag passing our way,” I said, as though it were
completely obvious.
“So what?”
“You don’t want to salute it, do you?”
“No. Why?”
“You have to if they pass by and you’re on the street.”
“What do you mean: have to? You just don’t do it.”
Poor Teddy, she really did come from another world. I did not answer,
but just pulled a long face.
“I’m a foreigner,” said Teddy. “Nobody can force me.” Again I could
only smile ruefully at her illusions. She was an Austrian.
There was one day when I was seriously concerned for her safety, just
because she was Austrian. The night before, the Austrian press attaché had
been dragged from his bed, arrested, and expelled. “We” were angry with
Austria because it had refused to unite with us. Dollfuss[xxxiii] in Vienna
reacted by expelling one or maybe more Nazis — I do not remember
exactly; but I do remember how the press bayed with one voice at the
enormity of this provocation by the Austrian regime. “This will not go
unanswered,” they wrote. Given the style of our government, what could a
response consist of but the expulsion of all Austrians? But fate was kind to
us. Hitler found a problem with the idea, or put it aside for something else.
This time it did go unanswered, and Teddy was allowed to stay.
“This really is my last visit,” said Teddy. I told her that I intended to
come to Paris soon, and we immediately began to make plans: a little
international theater appeared, like a castle in Spain, run perhaps by
students or emigrant actors. “How are the German emigrants doing?” I
asked hopefully, but Teddy only answered evasively. “Those poor people
are not on their best form, it’s only to be expected,” she said mildly.
A few days passed in this way. Then there was a thunderbolt. Teddy told
me — or rather she let me surmise and deduce — that she was about to be
married, very soon after her return. “Mr. Andrews?” I asked, with sudden
inspiration (he had not played a major part in her reports). She nodded.
“Very good,” I said. We were sitting on the terrace of the Romanisches
Café, opposite the Gedächtniskirche at the end of the Kurfürstendamm.
Once it had been the meeting place of literary Berlin. Now it was deserted.
The squat stone towers of the church seemed to close in on me like dungeon
walls.
“Mon pauvre vieux,” said Teddy, “is it very bad?”
I shook my head.
Then she said something that sent a sweet wave of pain through my
head. There had never been a question of anything like marriage between
us, and our love affair had always been interrupted just at the critical
moment. I had never been very certain that I was not just a friend among
others for her and I had never told her what she meant to me. It would have
been difficult to express. It would have sounded too grandiloquent and
sentimental. Even our most intimate moments had had a light, playful tone.
“We would not have been able to marry now anyway,” she said. “How
would you have managed here with me?”
“You thought about it?” I said mawkishly.
“Of course,” she laughed. Then with a gesture of infinite warmth, “And
for now I’m still here.”
Parting. Another parting, but such a resounding, moving parting, like
none of the others. Everything seemed to be all right again, as though it had
all just been a preparation for these three weeks that remained to us.
Everything had moved aside and made room for me. There were no other
friends, and no duties, to prevent me from being with Teddy from early till
late, and to be there for her entirely. She also seemed to have come just to
see me — even if it was only to say goodbye.
At this moment the world seemed to withdraw, as if by agreement, to
free these three weeks. The German Reich generously took its time before it
finally laid its hand, already hovering, on my shoulder. There was no
official letter to call me away. My parents went on vacation. Poor Charlie
became ill and had to go to the hospital; she seemed to be doing me a
terrible favor that I could hardly accept. I know I should not have felt that
way.
The three weeks passed like a single day. Yet they were no idyll. We
hardly ever had time to act like a pair of lovers or to talk about our feelings.
Teddy had to arrange her mother’s emigration. She was a little old lady,
sitting quietly and hopelessly among her pieces of furniture, no longer able
to understand the world. So we passed our time at consulates, government
offices, and moving companies, and spent hours in the waiting room of the
government currency-exchange office. Every day we had to make plans and
organize things. Then we had to oversee the packers and the moving men.
Departure and leave-taking. It was a familiar scenario. But these three
weeks of departure and leave-taking were all the time we had left in the
whole of eternity to express all the long-held feelings of our bashful, tender
love. We were as inseparable as if we were newly betrothed, and as familiar
and easy as an old married couple. There were no wasted moments. Even
sitting in the waiting room of the currency office, discussing what we would
tell the officials, was full of sweetness.
That office’s final verdict was that a certain proportion of the family
money would not be permitted to leave the country. “There’s nothing to be
done,” said Teddy, “I’ll have to smuggle it. I’m not going to let them steal it
from us — ”
“But if you get caught!”
“I won’t get caught,” she said, beaming with confidence. “By the way, I
know how to bind books.” So for a few days we sat in Teddy’s long-unused
bedroom and fabricated bookbindings using a lot of cardboard, art paper,
and glue. Inside they were made of hundred-mark notes. Looking up from
our work, we suddenly saw our faces in the mirror. “Old jailbirds,” said
Teddy, and work stopped for a couple of minutes. One day our work was
interrupted by the doorbell. There were two SA men at the door. This time
they only rattled collection boxes menacingly. I said, “Sorry!” rudely and
shut the door in their faces. With Teddy behind me I felt an indescribable,
gay confidence.
But sometimes I would wake up at night and the world would seem gray
as a gallows yard. In those hours, but only then, I knew that it was all over.
Mr. Andrews was waiting for Teddy in Paris. When I arrived there, she
would be Mrs. Andrews and I liked Andrews far too much to cheat him.
Perhaps they would have children. This thought made me feel sick to death.
I saw Andrews before me as I had sometimes seen him two years before. It
had been a peculiar time. Teddy had remained in Paris against her family’s
wishes, a prodigal daughter with no money but lots of friends who all
wanted to tear off as large a piece of her for themselves as they could get,
and who were all incapable of really helping her (I was not much better
than any of the others). At that time the quiet Mr. Andrews had occasionally
come to Teddy’s tiny, untidy hotel room, put his feet up on the
chimneypiece, and had an unnecessary and ineffective language lesson.
Then he would unexpectedly say something really clever and helpful,
smiling slightly before he left again, quietly and unobtrusively. A patient
man. Now he was going to marry Teddy. An Englishman. The English
always seemed to have all the luck. They got everything worth having in
the world: India and Egypt and Gibraltar and Cyprus and Australia and
South Africa, the gold countries, Canada, and now also Teddy! A poor
German like me had the Nazis instead. Those were the miserable thoughts I
had if, by some misfortune, I awoke during the night.
The next day it would all be forgotten and I was happy. It was autumn,
an early, golden autumn. The sun shone every day. There was still no
official letter. Today we had to go to the finance ministry, then to the police
and the consulate. If we were lucky there might be an hour free in the
afternoon for a walk in the Tiergarten. We might hire a rowing boat. And
Teddy all day.

Let us not look forward

Nor back. Be cradled, as in
A swaying boat on the sea.

— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN, “Mnemosyne”

 ~ 35 ~

Four weeks later I was wearing jackboots and a uniform with a swastika
armband, and spent many hours each day marching in a column in the
vicinity of Jüterbog. Along with all the others, I chorused “Do You See the
Sunrise in the East” or “Heathlands of Brandenburg” and other marching
songs. We even had a flag — with a swastika, of course — and sometimes
this flag was carried before us. When we came through villages, the people
on either side of the road raised their arms to greet the flag, or disappeared
quickly into some house entrance. They did this because they had learned
that if they did not, we, that is I, would beat them up. It made not the
slightest difference that I — and, no doubt, many another among us — fled
into entryways to avoid these flags, when we were not marching behind
them. Now we were the ones embodying an implicit threat of violence
against all bystanders. They greeted the flag or disappeared. For fear of us.
For fear of me.
I still feel dizzy when I consider my predicament then. It was the Third
Reich in a nutshell.
 ~ 36 ~

Jüterbog is a barracks town in the south of Brandenburg. One fine

autumn morning fifty or a hundred other young men and I blown together
from all over Germany found ourselves on the platform of its station. We
had coats over our arms, suitcases in our hands, and embarrassed
expressions on our faces. None of us knew what was in store for us; each of
us wondered what the point of being here was. We intended to take our
Assessor examinations — and for that reason we had been ordered,
unasked, to this unwelcoming provincial platform. Not a few of us would
have armed ourselves with quiet reservation and irony against the
“ideological training” that we had been promised. But surely none had
foreseen the strange, disturbing, outlandish picture we presented standing
around with our little suitcases in this dismal part of the world, faced only
with the problem of presenting ourselves at a place called the New Camp,
which no one knew, for purposes that were unclear to all of us. Obviously
we were not going to be met. After a while we hired a car to take our cases
to the camp. The driver told us where it was: a few kilometers down a
highway. Some of us suggested hiring more cars to drive us there. Others
rejected that out of hand: what kind of impression would it make in the
camp if we drove up in hired cars like upper-class gentlemen! Some among
us wore SA uniforms. One of these, clearly a born leader, gave the
command “Form up in threes. Quick march!” and since none of us had a
better idea, we obeyed, and after a little jostling set off in the direction of
the highway. The situation had suddenly acquired a typically German air:
we were recruits marching to the depot.
The SA men, six or eight in number, formed the vanguard. The others
muddled along behind them, more or less in step: a picture full of
symbolism. Those up ahead tried to start up a song: at first they tried SA
songs, then infantry songs, and finally folk songs. It turned out that most of
us did not know the words, or at best just the first verse. So they finally
gave up singing and we marched along the highway in silence. To the right
and left of us the bare land lay in the autumn sun. During the march I let my
mind wander and marveled at the detours that would, I hoped, take me to
Paris.
 On arrival at the camp, we first had to wait. We stood “at ease,” but
perplexed, and watched other Referendars who were already installed there
sweeping the dust in the yard to and fro between the huts. (A week later we
knew perfectly well that this was called “cleaning the precincts,” and was
the normal Saturday occupation.) While they were doing this they sang
curious songs in a special, jerky, disjointed style that had been introduced
by the Nazis. I tried to understand the texts, and gradually recognized that
they were satirical verses on the “March casualties” — those people who,
after the Nazis had won, had suddenly become Nazis too. For a few
moments I yielded to uncomprehending, hopeful illusions. Then I realized
that the satire came from the opposite side to the one I had naively assumed.

In nineteen thirty-three
The battle had been fought...
In nineteen thirty-three
The gentleman went out
And from his tailor bought
An outfit, made to measure.
Now see the asshole strut about...

They were obviously pithy SA songs for the party faithful. It was ironic,
though, that most of those singing these songs were themselves “March
casualties” — or perhaps not even that... one could no longer tell the
difference. They were all wearing the same gray uniforms with swastika
armbands and they all sang equally jerkily. With hesitant glances, I tried to
gauge my neighbors, all still wearing civilian clothes, and not yet singing;
they were probably doing the same with me... “Is he a Nazi? Anyway, better
be careful...”
Thus we waited, waited with interruptions for three or four hours. In the
interruptions we were given boots, tin mess cups, swastika armbands, and a
ladle of potato soup... After each of these events we had to wait another half
an hour. It was as though we were inside a large, cumbersome machine that
creaked into movement once every half hour. Then there was a medical, one
of those rough and insultingly summary military checkups: “Stick your
tongue out. Drop your trousers. Have you ever had a venereal disease?” The
doctor briefly put his ear to your chest, shone a flashlight between your
legs, and hit you on the knee with a little hammer. That was all. Then we
were assigned to “dormitories,” large barrack rooms with forty or fifty bunk
beds, little lockers, and two long dining tables with benches on either side.
It was all very military; the only thing was, we were not training to be
soldiers, we just wanted to pass our Assessor examinations. Indeed, nobody
said anything about our becoming soldiers; even now it was not mentioned,
though we did get a speech.
Our dormitory headman made us form up. He was an SA man, but not
just an ordinary SA man, a Sturmführer. (He had three stars on the collar of
his uniform, and I learned that day that that denotes a Sturmführer, the SA
equivalent of a captain. Apart from that he was a Referendar just like us.) I
cannot say that he made an unpleasant impression. He was a small, dainty,
brown-haired young man with lively eyes, not a bullyboy. But I noticed a
peculiar expression on his face — it was not even particularly disagreeable,
but it reminded me of something and it bothered me. Suddenly I
remembered: it was exactly the expression of brazen audacity that Brock
had worn ever since he had become a Nazi.
He gave the orders “Attention!” and then “At ease!” — or rather he did
not give the orders, but spoke them in a gently cajoling tone, as though he
were saying, “Look, we are playing a game here, and in this game I have to
give the orders, so don’t be spoilsports and do what I say.” So we did him
the favor of obeying him. After that he gave a speech that made three
points.
First, since it still seemed to be unclear, here in the camp there was only
one form of address, namely the comradely Du and not the more formal Sie.
Second, this dormitory would be the model for the whole camp.
Third, “If one of you has smelly feet, I expect him to wash them
thoroughly every morning and every evening. That is a rule of
comradeship.”
And with that, he declared, our duties for today and tomorrow were over.
(It was Saturday afternoon.) Furlough would not be available yet, but we
could spend our time as we pleased inside the camp. “Dismiss!”
So, apart from all the obscure and disturbing impressions that the day
had brought, we now had the difficult task of filling one and a half days of
nothingness.
 We began to make hesitant acquaintances. Hesitant, because none of us
knew whether any of the others was a Nazi or not, and so caution was
necessary. Some people openly tried to strike up with the SA men, but they
maintained a proud reserve toward their civilian colleagues. They clearly
thought of themselves as a sort of aristocracy here in the camp. On the other
hand, I started looking for faces that did not have a Nazi air. But could you
rely on mere physiognomy? I felt uncomfortable and indecisive.
Then someone spoke to me. I glanced at him quickly. He had a normal,
open blond face — but sometimes one saw such faces beneath SA caps.
“I have the feeling that I have met you before,” he said, stumbling a little
because he started to say Sie and had to change to Du.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I have a bad memory for faces. Are you,”
stumbling in the same way, “a Berliner too?”
“Yes,” he said, and introduced himself with a little civilian bow,
“Burkard.”
I also gave my name, and then we tried to find out where we might have
met. That provided a safe topic of conversation for about ten minutes. Once
we had determined that we really could not have met anywhere, silence
descended. We cleared our throats.
“Well, anyway,” I said, “then we have met here.”
“Yes,” he said.
Silence.
“Is there a canteen anywhere around here?” I asked. “Shall we have a
cup of coffee?”
“Why not?” he said. We both avoided addressing each other directly.
“One has to do something, after all,” I said. Then tentatively, “Funny
setup here, isn’t it?”
He looked sideways at me and answered even more carefully, “I haven’t
formed a definite impression yet. Rather military, eh?”
We looked for the canteen, had coffee, and offered each other cigarettes.
The conversation dragged. We avoided saying “you,” and we avoided
saying anything compromising. It was a strain.
“Do you play chess?” he asked at last (correcting himself from Sie to
Du).
“A little,” I said. “Shall we play a game?”
 “I haven’t played for a long time,” he said. “But there seem to be
chessboards here. We can give it a try — ”
We borrowed a chess set at the bar and started to play. I tried to
remember what I could of opening theory. I had not played for a long time,
not for many years, and looking at the pieces and the development of the
game irresistibly brought back a long-vanished era, when I had been an
ardent chess player: my first student years, 1926, 1927, and the atmosphere
of the period with all its youthful, unquestioning radicalism, its freedom and
spontaneity, its open, heated discussions, its laughter and its exuberance...
For a moment I saw myself sitting here like a stranger, seven years older,
and playing chess again, for want of anything better to do, with an opponent
I did not know, but had to address with the familiar Du, in a strange, remote
place to which I had been ordered to go without knowing what for. I felt the
humiliation and also the outlandishness of my position as I carefully moved
a pawn, to prepare for castling. A giant Hitler portrait stared sullenly down
at me from the wall.
The radio crackled in the corner. Military music as usual. Six or eight
people were sitting at other tables, smoking and drinking coffee. The others
were probably strolling around the camp. The windows were open; autumn
sunlight slanted in.
Suddenly the radio broke off. The banal march tune that had been
playing seemed to stop with one foot in the air. There was a strained
silence, in which we still waited for the foot to make contact with the
ground. Instead, an oily-voiced announcer said, “Achtung, Achtung! Here is
a special announcement from the wireless service.”
We both looked up from our game, but avoided looking at each other. It
was Saturday, October 13, 1933, and it was the announcement that
Germany had walked out of the disarmament conference and resigned from
the League of Nations. The announcer used the style of speech that had
been introduced by Goebbels. He had the oily smoothness of a trainee actor
playing a conspirator.
There were a lot of other special announcements. The Reichstag was
dissolved: yes, the harmless, docile Reichstag, which had given Hitler every
dictatorial power. For what reason? At the new election there would only be
one party: the NSDAP, that is, the Nazis. This still astonished me, in spite
of all I had experienced. An election where there was no choice. An
audacious idea. I glanced briefly at my opponent’s face. It was as
noncommittal as he could possibly make it. The parliaments of the Länder
were also dissolved, but they would not be reelected. This piece of news
was an anticlimax after the others and seemed uninteresting, even though it
entailed the end of such historical entities as Prussia and Bavaria. Hitler
would make a speech to the German people that evening. My God, one
would probably have to listen to that here, in public, with everyone else.
“After that special announcement of the wireless service we return to our
regular program of music. Dadum-da-da, Dadum-da-da...”
No one jumped up and shouted, “Heil” or “Hooray.” Nothing else
happened either. Burkard bent his face so low over the pieces that he gave
the impression that nothing in the world interested him as much as our
game. At the other tables, people sat in silence and blew the smoke from
their cigarettes, their serious faces giving nothing away. But there was so
much to say! I felt sick with contradictory emotions. I was happy that now
the Nazis had obviously gone too far, and I felt a despairing rage that I was
caught on the wrong side, and I felt disappointed because the cause of the
Nazis’ downfall would be something where they were really in the right.
The good old republicans had also all wanted “equal rights” and the
“freedom to arm,” and that in itself would have been quite all right. I noted
with impotent irritation their cunning combination of a vote of confidence
with a motion that nobody could disagree with, while the announcement of
“elections” at which there would be only one party to vote for left me quite
speechless, helplessly searching for some expression adequate to express
their colossal effrontery and provocation. All that cried out for expression
and discussion. Instead I said, “Quite a lot at once, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Burkard, bent over the game, “the Nazis never take half
measures.”
Ha! He’d given himself away. He’d said “Nazis.” If you said “the
Nazis,” that meant you were not one of them. He was someone you could
talk to.
“I think they’ll fall flat on their faces this time,” I began eagerly. He
looked up with an expression of total incomprehension. He had probably
noticed that he had given himself away.
“Difficult to tell,” he said. “By the way, I think you’re going to lose your
bishop.” In his confusion he used the formal Sie.
 “Do you think so?” I said (also using Sie), and tried to concentrate on the
game. I had lost my thread.
We ended our game with no further conversation except the occasional
“check” or “gardez.”
That evening we all sat in the same canteen and listened to Hitler
speechifying on the radio, while his giant portrait stared sullenly down at
us. The dominant figures were the SA men, laughing or nodding at the
appropriate places almost as well as the members of the Reichstag. We sat
or stood closely packed, and this closeness contained a horrible
confinement. I was more at the mercy of the words that came from the
loudspeaker than usual, packed in between neighbors whose opinions I
could not be sure of. Some of us were obviously enthusiastic. Most were
inscrutable. Only one person spoke: the invisible man in the radio.
The worst came when he had finished. A fanfare signaled the national
anthem, and we all raised our arms. A few hesitated like me, it was so
dreadfully shaming. But did we want to sit our examinations, or not? For
the first time, I had the feeling, so strong it left a taste in my mouth, “This
doesn’t count. This isn’t me. It doesn’t count,” and with this feeling I, too,
raised my arm and held it stretched out ahead of me, for about three
minutes. That is the combined length of “Deutschland über alles” and the
“Horst Wessel Song.” Most of us sang along, droning jerkily. I moved my
lips a little and mimed singing, as one does with hymns in church.
But we all had our arms stretched out, and in this pose we stood facing
the radio set, which had pulled these arms out like a puppeteer manipulates
the arms of his marionettes, and we all sang or pretended to do so, each one
of us the Gestapo of the others.
 ~ 37 ~

There was no Allied reaction to Hitler’s resignation from the League of

Nations, or to German rearmament, which from this moment onward was
demonstratively pursued (though it was still occasionally denied in
speeches). In the following days I experienced that blend of cowardly relief
and deep disappointment that would become the common feeling of the
next few years for me and those like me. It was repeated ad nauseam, and
made life wearisome.
These days marked the beginning of our “ideological training.” It took a
remarkably indirect and subtle form.
We had been prepared for lectures, speeches, and interrogations in the
guise of discussion groups. None of that occurred. Instead, on the Monday
we were given proper uniforms — gray blowsy uniforms, rather like the
ones worn by the Russians in the Great War, with caps, belts, and shoulder
straps. In this military gear we tramped around the barracks yard, our only
duty being to take the written law examinations — martial, field gray
examinees.
Once that was over, something began that was called “drill.”
Superficially, it was a little like military drill, the more so since our
superiors — SA Sturmführers and the like — deliberately employed the
classical tone of army sergeant-majors. However, we received no weapons
training. We exercised a bit, and were taught to march and salute. Saluting
occupied a full morning in the following manner.
We formed up in threes. At a command each row in turn marched
forward. The platoon leader — as he was officially called — marched
backward a few steps in front of and to one side of the row, checking
posture and alignment. Suddenly the platoon leader would bark “Heil
Hitler!” in a voice like an exploding bomb. At that the three men had
simultaneously to snap their left thumbs under their shoulder straps,
spreading the other fingers of that hand, thrust out their right arms so that
the tips of the fingers of the right hand were exactly at eye level, and jerk
their heads to the left. Then, after mentally counting “two... three,” they had
to bellow “Heil Hitler! Platoon leader” in perfect unison, again as loudly as
an exploding bomb. If it was not satisfactory, the whole procedure was
repeated with the order “Repeat. Quick march!” Otherwise, it was the next
row’s turn, and the three who had just finished had no more to do for ten
minutes, until it was their turn again. This lasted two or three hours.
Or we just marched, marched around the countryside for one, two, three,
sometimes four hours. These marches had no aim or recognizable purpose.
While we were marching we sang. There were three kinds of songs, which
we were taught in lessons in the afternoons and sang on these marches. The
first were SA songs, literary constructs of the type that shop assistants
sometimes send in to local papers: usually they contained dire threats
against the Jews combined with sentiments like “The last few rays of / the
golden setting sun...” and so on.
Then there were infantry songs from the last war, gentle, sentimental bits
of nonsense, richly provided with obscene variants, but not lacking a certain
balladesque charm. Finally, there were strange lansquenet songs, in which
we might declare that we were Geyer’s black band and would put a red
cock on the monastery hall (Florian Geyer was a leader of the peasants’
uprising of 1525). These songs were the most popular and were more
ruggedly and more fiercely sung than the others. I am certain that at least
half these German Referendars and future judges marching through the
surroundings of Protestant Jüterbog really felt as though they were Geyer’s
black band, and would put a red cock on the monastery hall. Like children
absorbed in a game they sang these songs with wild delight. Sounding like a
troop of club-carrying ancient Germanic tribesmen, their gruff voices
roared:

Lord on high, we cry to you,

Hey-ho! Hey-ho!
To death the clergy we shall do.
Hey-ho! Hey-ho!
Up and at them!
One and all!
Put a red cock on the monastery hall!

Of course I sang along. We all sang along.

 That was the sum of our ideological training. By acceding to the rules of
the game that was being played with us, we automatically changed, not
quite into Nazis, but certainly into usable Nazi material. Why, then, did we
accede to them?
There were a whole bunch of reasons, some major and some minor,
some mitigating and some aggravating. The most superficial one was that
we wanted to pass our examinations, and that this had become a
requirement to do so. Certainly, the mysterious hints that the “camp report”
would play a major part in determining the outcome of the examinations,
and that weak performance in the written papers could be compensated for
by keenness in marching and singing, must have increased the motivation
of some of us. It was more decisive that we had been caught completely off-
guard, and had had no idea of what would be done with us, or how to resist
it. Mutiny? Simply leaving the camp and going home? That would have
needed to be organized, and, under a thin coat of rough and hearty camp
comradeship, we all mistrusted one another deeply. Finally, there was a
typically German aspiration that began to influence us strongly, although
we hardly noticed it. This was the idolization of proficiency for its own
sake, the desire to do whatever you are assigned to do as well as it can
possibly be done. However senseless, meaningless, or downright
humiliating it may be, it should be done as efficiently, thoroughly, and
faultlessly as could be imagined. So we should clean lockers, sing, and
march? Well, we would clean them better than any professional cleaner, we
would march like campaign veterans, and we would sing so ruggedly that
the trees bent over. This idolization of proficiency for its own sake is a
German vice; the Germans think it is a German virtue. In any case, it is
deeply ingrained in the German character. We could not help ourselves. We
are the worst saboteurs in the world. If we do something it has to be done
scrupulously. The voices of conscience and self-respect are powerless
against this attitude. We find a deep, numbing, sinful pleasure in doing
anything, be it a decent and important job, a wild adventure, or a crime, as
well as can be. This feeling robs us of the ability to think about the
significance of what we are doing. Faced with a particularly thoroughly and
methodically burgled house, a policeman may say admiringly, “That’s a
first-class piece of work.”
That was our weakest point — whether we were Nazis or not. That was
the point they attacked with remarkable psychological and strategic insight.
 It came into full effect only when after one or two weeks the training
personnel was changed. The SA Sturmführers who had been in charge of us
so far left to go for further “training” in some “camp” themselves; in their
place there appeared a lieutenant of the Reichswehr with a dozen petty
officers.
One morning this attractive young man suddenly appeared just as we had
formed up for a march in the pouring rain. “What dismal faces you’re all
making,” he said, “in such glorious weather — and with such a satisfying
occupation!” That had a friendly, human sound. He even used the formal
Sie. He left us in no doubt about his opinion of the SA in general and our
previous SA leaders in particular. The petty officers were even more
outspoken. “Now we’re going to do something sensible here,” declared
Corporal Schmidt that very afternoon, as he took charge of our platoon. We
were handed rifles, and were quickly taught their seven component parts,
and then how to use them. That was a real relief. Now we really were
recruits, and we were inclined to view that as an improvement. At least we
knew what was going on, and what we were supposed to be learning. The
implicit general humiliation of doing senseless things, whose purpose was
unfathomable, all day long, was over. How glad we were! Our ideological
training really was already taking effect.
There is a saying ascribed to Hitler: “I will press my opponents into
service — in the Reichswehr.” There is more truth in this than in most of
Hitler’s sayings. The Reichswehr has indeed become the great collection
point for almost all of non-Nazi Germany: here, average Germans can
follow their instinct for proficiency, their need for action, and also their
intellectual and moral cowardice. Here is an arena where you do not
continually need to raise your arm, where you can even let yourself go a
little and permit yourself a coarse word or two about Hitler or the Nazis in
general without too much danger; an arena where you are effectively and
thoroughly kept occupied, where everything runs like clockwork and you
do a “good job”; best of all, you need only do your duty in silence and so
you are relieved of the need to think or take moral responsibility for your
actions; you do not have to ask yourself for whom and for what you will
one day have to use your weapon. For many years, those who needed an
additional sedative also persuaded themselves that “one day the Reichswehr
will make an end of the whole sham.” They carefully failed to see that it
was just the Reichswehr that formed the channel through which their
capabilities were pressed into Hitler’s service. This is an important, decisive
process. In Jüterbog I experienced a tiny sliver of it, but I saw it in
magnified close-up, with all its psychological details.
We were eager recruits. After a couple of weeks we had almost entirely
forgotten how strange it was that we should be learning to shoot in order to
pass our legal examinations. Military life has its own rules. Once you are
immersed in it, you are no longer free to ask why you got there in the first
place. We were fully occupied in cleaning our rifles and our boots, aiming
and taking cover properly, marching in proper formation and in step.
Besides, we were far too exhausted to think. The petty officers were
extremely kind — the opposite of the harsh sergeant-majors of tradition. We
were heartily glad to have escaped Nazi lectures, and felt we had gotten off
very lightly. Indeed, when one afternoon (it was even a Saturday afternoon)
a co-Referendar, who occupied some middling position in the party, tried to
organize such a lecture, there was a riot. The lecture was continually
interrupted by foot scraping and restless shuffling, and that night the
Referendar was almost beaten up. Quite open criticisms in unparliamentary
language were voiced, not quite of the content of the lecture itself, but
certainly of its quality, which was called an insult to our intelligence. Being
soldiers, we could say such things. In the first few days, when we had only
been Referendars, we would not have dared to.
Thus we believed we had escaped ideological training, even while we
were thoroughly immersed in it. Then one day we had a lecture that capped
it all. This time it was not party propaganda, nothing about the Jews, or the
“System,” or the Führer’s magical powers, or the shameful peace treaty of
Versailles. None of all that. No, it was something much more effective. Our
lieutenant and commander in chief gave us a talk about the Battle of the
Marne.
Had he been a professional propagandist, he could not have made a more
subtle or cunning choice. Probably he acted entirely instinctively in
choosing his topic and honestly believed the opinions he wanted to impart.
The Germans have a very different picture of the Battle of the Marne
from the rest of the world. Elsewhere, people argue whether the victory was
primarily due to Gallieni or Joffre or Foch, but that question is completely
meaningless in Germany, because there it is not even admitted that it was an
Allied victory. Rather, the picture that is firmly fixed in the German mind is
one of a battle where a German victory was prevented only by abandoning
the field, because of unfortunate misunderstandings, just as the decision
was going their way. What is more, without these misunderstandings, not
only the battle but the whole war would have been irrevocably won. It was
because of these misunderstandings that the war now became one of
attrition, in the trenches. The Germans would have won that, too, if it had
not been for... At this point further legends set in.
This picture, which they have drawn for themselves, tortures the
Germans. It is like a thorn in their flesh.
They are not nearly as interested in the question of war guilt, which is so
important for other nations. Secretly, they would not mind being guilty of
starting the war, though they will not, of course, publicly admit that. What
vexes and torments them is that they lost the war. They try to explain away
the final collapse — either by the legend of the “stab in the back” or by
claiming that Germany voluntarily laid down its arms, trusting in Wilson’s
fourteen points, only to find itself shamefully betrayed. Yet that does not
pain them as much as the loss of the Battle of the Marne. For at that
moment, so the German legend goes, the Germans let slip the glorious final
victory that was already within their grasp, all because of stupid
misunderstandings, confusion, and ridiculous little errors of organization.
That they cannot bear. Almost every German has the battle sketch of the
positions of the armies on the fifth and sixth of September 1914 before his
inner eye, and almost every one of them has desperately moved the black
marks this way or that: if only the second army had turned just a little — or
if only the reserves had been brought up this tiny bit — the war would have
been won! Why did the generals fail to make these moves? Even today they
discuss whose fault it was, that the disastrous, unnecessary order to retreat
was issued, General Moltke’s, Colonel Hentsch’s, or General Bülow’s... An
inevitable consequence of this picture is the idea: “That must be corrected...
We must start the contest over, just as it was then, and this time we will
make no mistakes...” Not even the shameful Treaty of Versailles calls as
strongly for a rematch and revenge as this technical incompetence, this
accidentally lost battle that was really a victory.
Our lieutenant let the whole affair roll past our eyes, just as the German
legend describes it. He let the first army make its famous maneuver,
wheeling away from Paris. He described Gallieni’s flank attack from that
city and how the first army turned to the northwest in forced marches and
brought Gallieni to a standstill, but how in doing that it opened the
infamous gap between itself and the second army — at this point the second
army’s reserves should have... Instead, there was the infirm commander in
chief, far from the front and ill-informed, Colonel Hentsch had a crisis of
nerves, and so on, right up to the unbearable incorrect and unacceptable
end.
In this mood, tormented and dissatisfied, he left us. Immediately,
military discussions broke out. “If Bülow... If Hentsch... If Kluck... At this
point the second and third armies should have started a pincer movement
against Foch...” We were all eagerly correcting the Battle of the Marne,
nineteen years after the event. Almost unnoticeably the discussion moved to
the prospects for a new war, and how it would be done better next time.
“Just wait till our rearmament is complete!” “But they won’t let us complete
it,” someone said. “Oh yes, they will,” said another. “They know only too
well that we may not have enough soldiers yet, but we do have enough
airplanes, so that before we are done for, we can mount a night attack on
Paris and flatten it.”
And we thought that we had not been undergoing ideological training —
that we had not become Nazis!
 ~ 38 ~

What about me? I notice that I have not had occasion to use the word “I”
in my story for quite a while. I have used either the third person or the first
person plural; there has been no opportunity to use the first person singular.
That is no accident. It was one of the points — perhaps the point — of what
was happening to us in the camp that the individual person each of us
represented played no part and was completely sidelined. That just did not
count. Things were quite deliberately arranged so that the individual had no
room for maneuver. What one represented, what one’s opinions were in
“private” and “actually,” was of no concern and set aside, put on ice, as it
were. On the other hand, in moments when one had the leisure to think of
one’s individuality — perhaps if one awoke at night in the midst of the
multifarious snoring of one’s comrades — one had a feeling that what was
actually happening, in which one participated mechanically, had no real
existence or validity. It was only in these hours that one could attempt to
call oneself morally to account and prepare a last position of defense for
one’s inner self. Perhaps thus:
Well, this will last another four, six, or eight weeks. I have to get through
it without drawing attention to myself, then there will be the exams. After
that I shall go to Paris, and it will all be forgotten, as though it had never
happened. In the meantime, it is a kind of adventure and certainly an
experience. There are some things I must never do: never say anything that
I would be ashamed of later. Shooting at targets is all right. But not at
people. I must not commit myself, or sell my soul... Anything else?
Oh dear! It dawned on me that I had already relinquished and lost
everything. I wore a uniform with a swastika armband. I stood to attention
and cleaned my rifle. But that did not count; I had not been asked before I
did it; it was not me that did it; it was a game and I was acting a part.
Only what if, dear God, there was some court that did not recognize this
defense, but simply wrote down everything as it happened; that did not look
into my heart, but simply noted the swastika armband. Before that court I
was in a wretched position. Dear God, where had I gone wrong? What
should I say to the judge who asked, “You wear a swastika armband and say
that you do not want to. Then why do you wear it?”
 Should I, perhaps, have refused on the very first day, when the armbands
were handed out? Stated immediately, “I will not wear such a thing,” and
trampled it under foot? That would have been sheer madness, and
ridiculous as well. It would only have landed me in a concentration camp,
and not in Paris, and I would have broken my promise to my father to take
my exams. I would probably die — for nothing, for a quixotic gesture, not
even made in public. Ridiculous. Everybody wore the armbands here and I
was certain that there were many whose private views on the matter were
the same as mine. If I had made a fuss, they would only have shrugged their
shoulders. It was better to wear the armband and maintain my freedom for a
later, greater purpose. It was better to learn how to shoot. That way I might
be able to use the skill in a more important cause...
But the nagging voice remained. “All that does not change the fact that
you have worn the armband.”
My comrades snored, tossed and turned in their sleep, and made other
noises. Only I was awake and alone. The air was stuffy. I ought to open a
window. The moon shone in. I ought to go back to sleep.
Getting back to sleep was no longer easy. It was not good to wake up in
the dormitory. I rolled over. My sleeping neighbor’s breath smelled bad, and
I rolled back.
Different thoughts, more night thoughts. When that was said about
“flattening Paris,” didn’t you feel a stab in your heart? Why didn’t you say
anything?
What should I have said? Perhaps “That would be a pity”? I might
actually have said that. Did I? I’m not sure anymore. Anyway, the answer
would only have been, “Of course it would be a pity.” And what then?
Saying something as mild as that was more cowardly and dishonest than
silence. What should I really have said? “That’s dreadful, it’s inhuman. You
don’t know what you’re saying... “? That would have had just as little
effect. They wouldn’t even have been angry, just irritated. They would have
laughed or shrugged their shoulders. What should I have said that would
really have been appropriate, really effective, that would have broken
through their armor of deafness and saved my soul?
I strained to find something, without success. There was nothing. Silence
was better.
 Or the other day when somebody else — otherwise a pleasant comrade
— had talked about the trial of those accused of starting the Reichstag fire
and said, “I don’t really believe they’re guilty. But what does that matter?
There are enough witnesses against them. So why not just chop off their
heads and be done with it. A few more or less don’t make any difference.”
(He said it pleasantly, without rancor.)
What can one say to that? There is no answer. The only reaction is to
take an axe to the person’s head who said it. Just so. But me with an axe?
Besides, the man who said it is quite decent otherwise. The other day when
I felt sick, he got up and helped me to the latrines and hung a bathrobe
around my shoulders. I can’t take an axe to his head... Anyway, who knows
if that is his “real,” “private” opinion? Perhaps it just slipped out... What
great difference is there between saying something like that, as he did, and
listening to it without retort, as I did? It’s almost the same.
I tried another position and my thoughts shifted a little. What if you
actually had to do something? Yes, that is the decisive point... Would any of
us, would I, find a way out, if actions were demanded of us? If the war
suddenly did break out, and we were ordered into battle, just as we were
now — into battle, where we would be required to use our rifles for Hitler?
... Well? Would you throw aside your rifle and desert? Or shoot at your
neighbor, who only yesterday helped you clean your weapon? Well, would
you? Would you?
I groaned and tried to force myself to stop thinking. I realized that I was
well and truly in a trap. I should never have come to the camp. Now I was
in the trap of comradeship.
 ~ 39 ~

During the daytime you had no time to think, no opportunity to just be

yourself. During the daytime comradeship brought contentment. It is
indubitable that a certain kind of happiness thrives in such camps; it is the
happiness of comradeship. It was a pleasure to go for a cross-country run
together in the morning, and then to go naked into the communal hot
showers together, to share the parcels that one or another received from
home, to share also responsibility for misdemeanors that one of your
comrades had committed, to help and support one another in a thousand
little ways. We trusted one another without reserve in all the actions of the
day, and had boyish battles and fights. We were all the same. We floated in
a great comforting stream of mutual reliance and gruff familiarity... Who
would deny that that brings happiness? Who would deny that men yearn for
this, a yearning that is rarely satisfied in ordinary, peaceful, civilian life.
I, for my part, do not wish to deny it. And yet I know for certain, and
emphatically assert, that this very comradeship can become the means for
the most terrible dehumanization — and that it has become just that in the
hands of the Nazis. They have drowned the Germans, who thirst after it, in
this alcohol to the point of delirium tremens. They have made all Germans
everywhere into comrades, and accustomed them to this narcotic from their
earliest age: in the Hitler youth, the SA, the Reichswehr, in thousands of
camps and clubs — and in doing this they have driven out something
irreplaceable that cannot be compensated for by any amount of happiness.
Comradeship is part of war. Like alcohol, it is one of the great
comforters and helpers for people who have to live under unbearable,
inhuman conditions. It makes the intolerable tolerable. It helps us cope with
filth, calamity, and death. It anesthetizes us. It comforts us for the loss of all
the amenities of civilization. Indeed, that loss is one of its preconditions. It
receives its justification from bitter necessities and terrible sacrifices. If it is
separated from these, if it is exercised only for pleasure and intoxication,
for its own sake, it becomes a vice. It makes no difference that it brings a
certain happiness. It corrupts and depraves men like no alcohol or opium. It
makes them unfit for normal, responsible, civilian life. Indeed it is, at
bottom, an instrument of decivilization. The general promiscuous
comradeship to which the Nazis have seduced the Germans has debased this
nation as nothing else could.
Observe how centrally and fatally this poison attacks the soul. (I reiterate
that poisons can bring happiness, body and soul can crave for them, they
can even be indispensable in their place. They are, nevertheless, poisons.)
To start with the essential point, comradeship completely destroys the
sense of responsibility for oneself, be it in the civilian or, worse still, the
religious sense. A man bedded in comradeship is relieved of all personal
worries, and of the rigors of the struggle for life. He has his bed in the
barracks, his meals, and his uniform. His daily life is prescribed from
morning to night. He need not concern himself with anything. He lives, not
under the severe rule of “each for himself,” but in the generous softness of
“one for all and all for one.” It is one of the most unpleasant falsehoods that
the laws of comradeship are harder than those of ordinary civilian life. On
the contrary, they are of a debilitating softness, and they are justified only
for soldiers in the field, for men facing death. Only the threat of death
justifies and makes this egregious dispensation from responsibility
acceptable. Indeed, it is a familiar story that brave soldiers, who have been
too long bedded on the soft cushions of comradeship, often find it
impossible to cope with the harshness of civilian life.
It is even worse that comradeship relieves men of responsibility for their
actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences. They do
what all their comrades do. They have no choice. They have no time for
thought (except when they unfortunately wake up at night). Their comrades
are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do
what everybody else does.

Then the friends took the jug

And bewailed the sorrowful ways of the world
And its bitter laws,
And threw the boy down.
Close, foot by foot, they stood
At the edge of the chasm
And threw him down, closing their eyes,
None more guilty than his neighbor.
 And they threw sods of earth
And flat stones
After him.

That is by the German Communist poet Brecht, and it is meant as praise

and commendation. In this, as in so much else, the Communists and the
Nazis are of the same opinion.
It was comradeship, which in a few weeks in a camp at Jüterbog had
molded us — Referendars, after all, with an intellectual, academic
education, future judges — into an unthinking, indifferent, irresponsible
mass, in which sayings like those about Paris or the Reichstag fire were
commonplace, went unanswered, and set the intellectual tone. Comradeship
always sets the cultural tone at the lowest possible level, accessible to
everyone. It cannot tolerate discussion; in the chemical solution of
comradeship, discussion immediately takes on the color of whining and
grumbling. It becomes a mortal sin. Comradeship admits no thoughts, just
mass feelings of the most primitive sort — these, on the other hand, are
inescapable; to try and evade them is to put oneself beyond the pale. How
familiar were the attitudes that governed our camp comradeship absolutely
and irrevocably! They were not really the official Nazi party line, but they
certainly had a Nazi character. They were the attitudes we had had as boys
during the Great War, which had dominated the Rennbund Altpreussen and
the athletics clubs in the Stresemann era. A few Nazi-specific ideas had not
yet taken root. For instance “we” were still not virulently anti-Semitic. But
“we” were not prepared to make an issue of it. That was a trifle. Who could
take it seriously? “We” had become a collective entity, and with all the
intellectual cowardice and dishonesty of a collective being we instinctively
ignored or belittled anything that could disturb our collective self-
satisfaction. A German Reich in microcosm.
It was remarkable how comradeship actively decomposed all the
elements of individuality and civilization. The most important part of
individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love. So
comradeship has its special weapon against love: smut. Every evening in
bed, after the last patrol round, there was the ritual reciting of lewd songs
and jokes. That is a hard and fast rule of male comradeship, and nothing is
more mistaken than the widely held opinion that this is a safety valve for
frustrated erotic or sexual feelings. These songs and jokes do not have an
erotic, arousing effect. On the contrary, they make the act of love appear as
unappetizing as possible. They treat it like digestion and defecation, and
make it an object of ridicule. The men who recited rude songs and used
coarse words for female body parts were in effect denying that they had
ever had tender feelings or been in love, that they had ever made
themselves attractive, behaved gently, and used sweet words for these same
parts... They were rough, tough, and above such civilized tenderness.
Naturally, it fitted the style that civilian courtesy and manners were an
easy prey to comradeship. Gone were the times when, blushing and
awkward, we had bowed and displayed our good upbringing. Here the
normal expression of disapproval was “Shit!” “Well, you assholes,” was a
friendly form of address and “ass kicking” was a popular pastime. The need
to be an adult had been dispensed with here, and replaced by an obligation
to be childishly boyish. For example, it was customary to attack a
neighboring dormitory at night with “water bombs,” drinking mugs filled
with water to be poured over the beds of the defenders... A battle would
ensue, with merry “Ho”s and “Ha”s and screaming and cheering. You were
a bad comrade if you did not take part. If the night patrol appeared,
everyone disappeared into their beds as quickly as possible. There we lay,
snoring and pretending to sleep. It was taken for granted that comradeship
prevented those who had been attacked from telling tales. They would
declare to the authorities that they had seen and heard nothing, and would
rather admit to having wet their beds than accuse their comrades. The next
night, however, we had to be prepared for a revenge attack...
This leads me to certain dark and bloody aspects of comradeship that
could not be absent. If someone committed a sin against comradeship, or
“acted superior” or “showed off” and exhibited more individuality than was
permissible, a nighttime court would judge and condemn him to corporal
punishment. Being dragged under the water pump was the punishment for
minor misdemeanors. However, when one of us was proved to have favored
himself in distributing butter rations — which were still quite adequate at
that time — he suffered a terrible fate. Darkly, the procedure to be used was
debated in his absence. That evening there was a heavy atmosphere of
anticipation in the dormitory. The evening round passed. Even the
obligatory smut was recited only briefly and halfheartedly, and did not raise
the usual titters.
 Suddenly, the fearsome, wrathful voice of the self-appointed chief judge
intoned, “Meier, we have something to say to you!” Before much could be
said the unfortunate man had been dragged from his bed and spread-eagled
on a table. “Every man will whack Meier once, no one is excused,” the
judge thundered. From outside I heard the slapping noise of the blows. I had
gotten myself excused after all. I had claimed not to be able to stand the
sight of blood, and had been graciously allowed to be the lookout. The
victim seemed to accept his destiny. By the dark laws of comradeship that
governed us, independently of our individual wills, a complaint would have
put him in danger of his life. Somehow, the matter was allowed to be
forgotten and a few days later he was one of us again, almost as though
nothing had happened. Even the rules of honor and self-respect were no
match for the corrosive power of comradeship.
It is clear that there is something demonic, deeply dangerous, in this
widely praised, harmless male comradeship. The Nazis knew what they
were doing when they made it the normal way of life for an entire nation.
And the Germans, with their lack of talent for individual life and happiness,
were so dreadfully ready to submit to it, so willing and eager to exchange
the delicate, hard-to-reach fruits of freedom for the juicy, swelling, close-at-
hand intoxication of general, undiscriminating, vulgar comradeship.
It is said that the Germans are subjugated. That is only half true. They
are also something else, something worse, for which there is no word: they
are “comraded,” a dreadfully dangerous condition. They are under a spell.
They live a drugged life in a dream world. They are terribly happy, but
terribly demeaned; so self-satisfied, but so boundlessly loathsome; so proud
and yet so despicable and inhuman. They think they are scaling high
mountains, when in reality they are crawling through a swamp. As long as
the spell lasts, there is almost no antidote.
 ~ 40 ~

Nevertheless, the condition of comradeship, dangerous as it is, has its

weak point — as does every condition that is based on deception, doping,
and mumbo-jumbo. The moment, namely, that its external requisites are
missing, it disappears into thin air. That has been observed many thousand
times, even with genuine, legitimate, wartime comradeships: men who in
the trenches would have given their lives for one another, and more than
once shared their last cigarette, feel the greatest shyness and inhibitions
when they meet again as civilians — and it is not the civilian meeting that is
deceptive and illusory. Our comradeship at Jüterbog had been an artificial
fit of drunkenness fabricated by the Nazis, and it evaporated with eerie
rapidity — in the space of a single week between two parties.
The first was our leaving party at Jüterbog. It was, to put it briefly, an
orgy of comradeship. There was an alcoholic, heightened atmosphere of
community and if we had not already used Du to greet one another, we
would have sworn brotherhood and started doing it that evening. There
were speeches, and in his the camp commandant, an SA Standartenführer
who had survived the departure of his men and the arrival of the
Reichswehr, finally revealed the secret of our “ideological training.” We did
not need great orations, he said, or interminable lectures and explanations.
Being young German men, all that we needed to show, quite automatically,
that we were at heart National Socialists, was to be removed from our
deceitful bourgeois environment and our dry-as-dust legal files, and put in
the right surroundings. That was the secret of the success of National
Socialism, that it appealed to something that was part of every German’s
makeup. Those of us who were not yet National Socialists knew now that it
was in their blood. The rest would look after itself.
The appalling thing was that there was some truth in this speech, if you
interpreted it correctly. It really was true that you had only to place us in the
right circumstances for a kind of chemical process to corrode our
individualities and turn us into an unthinking mass, easily arousable for any
cause whatever... This process reached its climax that evening. There was
universal brotherhood. Everybody praised and proposed toasts to everybody
else. The lieutenant praised our military prowess. We praised the
lieutenant’s strategic genius. A petty officer, replying humorously to a toast,
stated in his gruff manner that he had never dreamed that lawyers and
academics would make such good soldiers. “Sieg Heil.”
There were humorous poems written for the occasion, and read out by
their authors to general acclaim from the undiscerning, tipsy audience. We
sang that we were Geyer’s black band one last time, and at the “Hey-ho”s,
beer glasses and chairs were smashed. We were like a tribe of self-satisfied
cannibals at a victory celebration. Then some dormitory or other was
attacked with water bombs and there was a battle royal. Suddenly some of
us had the drunken idea that somebody ought to be dragged under the water
pump — not because he had committed an offense, just as a kind of
symbolic human sacrifice to the god of comradeship. The chosen victim
demurred, and several others immediately offered themselves, but that did
not satisfy the sacrificial priests. So they started to persuade him that he
should accept it, of his own free will, for his comrades’ sake, and so that the
party would not end on a sour note. It was rather spooky, but also
transfigured by high spirits, alcohol, and madness. The victim finally
agreed. “I’ll do it. But only douse my head,” he said. “I don’t want to sleep
in wet pajamas again.” They promised, but of course, once he was under the
pump they doused his whole body. “You assholes,” he shouted, but the
Homeric laughter that greeted this left him no choice but to join in. It was
an orgy of barbarity.
The next day we left for Berlin, and during the following week we took
our oral examinations. Everything was different. We wore civilian clothes
again, used flushing toilets, and knives and forks at table, and said, “Thank
you” instead of “Shit.” We bowed to the old gentlemen who were our
examiners, and answered their questions in educated, literary German,
mentioning such things as the law concerning mortgages or joint property.
Some failed their examinations and some passed. A deep gulf opened up
between these two groups.
We saw our own acquaintances again, and greeted them with “Good
day” rather than “Heil Hitler.” We had conversations again, real
conversations. We rediscovered our own existences, and got to know
ourselves again. Asked about our experiences in the camp, we felt
embarrassed, mumbled, “It could have been worse,” and explained briefly
that we had learned to shoot and been taught strange songs. I began to think
of Paris as though it actually existed. In the camp, it had had no reality. On
the other hand, the camp itself receded like a dream... With mixed feelings I
made my way to the beer hall on the Kurfürstendamm where we had agreed
to meet for our farewell party. I felt uneasy, but I did at least go. The spell
was still strong enough for that.
That was an uncomfortable evening. It was only one week since the orgy
in Jüterbog had taken place and the same people were there — except those
who had failed, who stayed away in bitterness — but it was as though we
were meeting for the very first time. We all looked different in our civilian
clothes. Indeed, there were a few I did not recognize at all. I noticed that
some of us had intelligent, sensitive faces while others looked coarse and
brutal. The difference had not been visible in the camp.
Conversation was slow to start. We did not want to talk about the
examinations (nobody likes talking about examinations once they are safely
over), but strangely we also did not want to reminisce about the camp. A
few who made hearty remarks in this vein found little resonance or
understanding, and soon gave up. It was a little like the first day at Jüterbog.
The most awkward thing was that we still felt obliged to use the familiar
Du. It would have been easier if we could have addressed one another as
colleagues with the customary Sie.
We made enquiries about plans for the future and proposed halfhearted
toasts. There was a rather loud band and its rattling, sentimental music
filled the long gaps in the conversation. Soon the SA men formed a group
of their own, and started discussing higher SA politics. They grumbled
about the party and the paper work and toasted Gruppenführer Ernst.[xxxiv]
We others kept aloof. We saw no reason to participate.
It was not long before the whole company had split into little groups. I
sat with a young man with whom I had occasionally had pleasant
conversations about music, outside the camp at Jüterbog on Sundays. It
turned out that we had both been to the Furtwängler concert the Sunday
before. We exchanged our views. “Look at those eggheads,” said somebody
who had observed us for a while. We just looked at each other and ignored
it.
The evening became gloomier and gloomier and by midnight we were
all surreptitiously looking at our watches. Then it fell apart completely. A
group of girls of doubtful virtue settled down at the next table and some of
us began to flirt with them and gradually moved over to that table or drew
the belles over to our table... “Now it’s getting boring,” somebody said
loudly, and as he prepared to leave several of us joined him. I went too.
On the street, one person suggested that we should move on somewhere,
but his suggestion was met with total silence. As for me, I saw a bus
approaching. “That’s my bus,” I shouted, “Goodbye,” waved, and jumped
aboard.
I left the group still standing around. I never met any of them again. The
bus carried me swiftly away. I felt cold, ashamed, and relieved.
 AFTERWORD

With this humiliating and disheartening experience, the manuscript

breaks off. In a notebook of jottings written by my father in 1946 I have
found a list of section headings for a possible revision of the book, to be
entitled “Dance in the Lions’ Den.” They give a tantalizing hint of what
might have followed. The headings are:

Catastrophe as Adventure (1933)

Glorious Failure (1934)
Resignation with Obstacles
Unwanted Career
Escape in Slow Motion

My parents did not speak much about this period of their lives, so it is a
lasting sadness to me that the later chapters were never written. I can only
add very little to flesh out the details.
My father had intended to follow a career in law, devoting his spare time
to literature. By 1933 he had already written two novels and many shorter
pieces, a few of which had been published in the intellectual press. But he
abandoned this plan in 1933 and at his father’s suggestion decided to write
his Ph.D. thesis in Paris, away from the Nazis and close to the girl he loved,
Teddy. It was intended as a first step toward emigration, but Teddy had
married another man, and my father failed to gain a foothold in Paris. So he
returned to Berlin in 1934.
He made his living by writing for the arts pages of the better newspapers
and for nonpolitical magazines. Many of these had been owned by Jews and
were now controlled by the Nazis, but the censorship was subtle. The
political pages were, of course, heavily censored, but the arts pages could
completely ignore the Nazis if they wished. They must only avoid direct
criticism. In this atmosphere my father wrote harmless, slightly snobbish
(his own word) pieces about fashion, or horses, or places he had visited.
When talking about this period he used to say that he had seen no
possibility of direct resistance to the Nazis, but that he was determined to
write nothing that he would have to be ashamed of when they had been
defeated. In the editorial offices, almost all of his colleagues were anti-
Nazis; initially there were even still some Jews among them. They relished
the sly hints of opposition that they smuggled into their texts, but when the
paper appeared the following day, it was evident that the insider references
failed to subvert the Nazi impression of the paper as a whole.
Sometime after his return from Paris my father met my mother, who was
Jewish (by race, though not by tradition or religion) and had recently
separated from her first husband, a press colleague of my father’s. She had
a young son, my half-brother, Peter. Although he was of Jewish descent,
Peter was blond and blue-eyed and was quite often photographed as the
ideal “Aryan” child. My mother had been the librarian of the Hochschule
für Politik (an institution a little like the London School of Economics) and
had lost her job because of her race. My father soon moved into her flat but,
of course, they could not marry because of the race laws. Indeed, even
cohabiting with a Jew was an offense, but for some reason the Nazi block
warden responsible for their flat liked and protected them.
My father made a good living and even became editor of one of the
magazines he had been writing for. Politically, however, life became
progressively more difficult. The ambivalence of his position rankled more
and more and the free space for maneuver became ever narrower.
Early in 1938 my mother became pregnant (with what would become
me) and this made my parents’ situation truly dangerous, quite apart from
the fact that the war was looming. I think my father had been planning to
emigrate, but his experience in Paris in 1934 had caused him to hesitate.
Now hesitation was no longer an option. The clock was ticking. My
mother’s brother, Kurt Hirsch, had emigrated to England in 1934 and had
completed a Ph.D. at Cambridge and embarked on a university career there.
I am not absolutely sure of the details of my mother’s emigration, but I
believe she first tried to get a visa for Britain armed with a phony job
invitation and a promise from her brother to cover her costs. I know that she
was flatly turned down and came home in despair. My father comforted her
and told her to try again with a direct appeal to the truth. She might come
before a sympathetic official. So a little later she made herself up to look as
smart as she could, took Peter along, and tried again. This time she was
successful and at the beginning of June she left for England.
 My father remained in Germany and had to find a different method of
escape, without acknowledging his liaison with my mother. He arranged for
a commission to write a series of articles on some harmless English topic.
On the basis of this commission he obtained a six-week visa and arrived in
England on August 29, 1938. The first thing my parents did was to marry,
and I was born a few weeks later, in October 1938. I have a letter in which
my father reveals to his mother (living as a widow in Berlin) first that he
has married, then that he has a son, then that his wife is Jewish, and finally
that he has left Germany for good.
British officials did not view the manner in which my father had come to
England with favor and he had difficulty renewing his visa, even though, by
marrying my mother, he had lost his German nationality and committed a
felony under German law. It was at first renewed for a month or two at a
time, but by the winter the excuse about the series of articles had worn thin,
and there was a real possibility that he might be deported.
In the meantime he had to make a living. In the spring of 1939 he wrote
to Frederic Warburg with a synopsis of this book. In the second volume of
his memoirs, Warburg recalls:

By the spring of 1939 he [Haffner] was almost at his wits’ end,

and in desperation had written to me, sending the synopsis of a book
he planned to write... Haffner’s book was to be a political
autobiography. I remember it as the most brilliant synopsis ever put
before me.[xxxv]

In spite of the financial difficulties his publishing house, Secker &

Warburg, was experiencing, Warburg offered my father a retainer of two
pounds per week to complete the book. After the war my father wrote to
Warburg, “Never in my life, before or after, did I feel such relief.” Warburg
also helped with the problem of my father’s visa. In a family letter of June
13, 1939, my father writes:

Today I have been rescued from great fear and depression. The
Home Office has relented after representations by Ursel [a sister of
my mother’s] and a “very strong letter” from Warburg “in praise of
my literary capacity and sterling character (!).” They have given me a
 year on condition that I “do literary work solely on behalf of Messrs.
Secker & Warburg.”

With the outbreak of the war, understanding why the Germans had
become Nazis became a somewhat academic question. More urgent was the
problem of how to deal with them. My father abandoned this project and
started a new book. It was written in German but from an English point of
view. Its subject was how the war might be won, and what should be done
after victory had been achieved.
Warburg writes:

This book [Defying Hitler] was never completed. When Haffner

was halfway through it, the war broke out, and he felt he must write
something less private and more directly political.
In the late autumn of 1939, he sent me several chapters of A
Survey of Germany... I also suggested a change of title to Germany:
Jekyll and Hyde, which suited the book to perfection.[xxxvi]

A letter of my father’s dated October 6, 1939, gives more detail:

Personally, I have now started a second book of at most 200 pages

beside my main one [Defying Hitler] which is already 270 pages
long. It is to be called “Germany: a survey”... It is intended as a
handbook for English propagandists, who have to know about
Germany, but also for the general reader. I will keep the tone calm
and unpolemical and not make my heart a nest of vipers. What do
you think?

At that time my parents were living in a tiny terraced house in

Cambridge. Soon the Germans in Britain, now “enemy aliens,” were
interviewed and categorized according to the danger they might represent.
My uncle and my mother came into the safest category, C, but because of
the manner of his entry my father was classed in the riskiest category, A,
and was interned in a holiday camp in Seaton in south Devon at the start of
1940. It was run by the army, who appointed the only real Nazis among the
internees as block leaders. That was the most unpleasant thing about
internment: living under the very people he had emigrated to get away
from. It was well organized and the detainees were well fed, but the camp
was designed for summer vacations; it was January and the chalets in which
they were housed were unheatable. In February 1940 during a morning
muster my father was called forward and handed a telegram announcing the
birth of my sister, Margaret (now Sarah Haffner). My father was released
from Seaton in April, after Warburg had made representations to the Home
Office. Not long afterward the Battle of Britain began and enemy aliens of
all categories living within a certain distance of the coast were interned, this
time on the Isle of Man. Organization was a shambles, because the island
was not prepared for such a large influx. The men and women were at
opposite ends of the island and had little communication. However, the
atmosphere appears to have been friendly, and the weather was warm.
My father had completed the new book just before his internment in
January, and Warburg published it in June. Because he feared reprisals
against his relatives in Germany, my father dropped his real name, Raimund
Pretzel, and chose a pseudonym, Sebastian Haffner, which he kept for the
rest of his life. When asked about it, he would explain that the name had to
satisfy three conditions: it must be clearly German, not Jewish, and easy to
pronounce for English speakers. The names themselves are from Johann
Sebastian Bach, and Mozart’s Haffner Symphony.
Germany: Jekyll and Hyde was a critical success. There were even
questions in the House of Commons as to why the author of such an
important work was still interned. My father was one of the first internees
to be released, in August 1940, arriving in London on the night of the first
air raid on the city.
On September 9, 1940, Hans Lothar (also a liberal German journalist)
and my father sent a “Memorandum on Die Zeitung” to the Foreign Office,
proposing that the government subsidize the publication of a German-
language paper for emigrants. It appears that the idea came from Lothar,
who also became editor in chief, while my father became its main political
commentator. Although the paper was primarily aimed at German
emigrants, it was also intended to be air-dropped over Germany. At that
time my father dreamed of forming a German exile faction, like the Free
French, which would help the Allies and eventually play a role in rebuilding
Germany after the war. My father left Die Zeitung after sixteen months
because of internal differences, perhaps also because he saw that his dream
would not become reality.
A little later David Astor invited him to work for the Observer. This
offered the opportunity to influence British policy far more directly than
with Die Zeitung. My father used to say that at the Observer he became a
“virtual Englishman.” He learned to write a beautiful, clear English, and
analyzed events from the British point of view. He rose rapidly and from
1942 onward wrote most of the editorials and many policy articles under
various pseudonyms. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he
determined the paper’s political line. David Astor himself was in the army
and could not play a part in the normal running of the paper. By the late
forties the name Sebastian Haffner was very well known and respected in
British journalism.
In the early 1950s political differences with David Astor arose, and in
order to stay with the Observer but avoid conflict, my father returned to
Germany as a foreign correspondent. Generously, the paper continued to
pay him his full salary. He sent reports back to London, but also made
occasional forays into the German press and television. Gradually these
became more frequent and he became quite well known in his own country
as a “British journalist.” He left the Observer in 1961 over differences in
policy toward the Soviet Union in general and the British stance on Berlin
in particular. A year later he began to write a series of popular political
columns in Stern magazine. These and further television appearances made
him really famous. He could no longer travel by train or bus in Germany
without being accosted by name and drawn into political discussions.
For Stern he also wrote features on historical topics, such as why
Germany had lost the First World War, or the abortive 1919 revolution in
Germany. These were subsequently published as books, which were widely
read and translated. In 1978, a publisher asked him to write a short book on
Hitler. This he did, with the title Anmerkungen zu Hitler (Notes on Hitler).
The book was an outstanding success and sold nearly a million copies. It
was translated into English (as The Meaning of Hitler, a title he did not like)
and many other languages. In the 1980s he continued to write books on
history, but age was beginning to creep up on him.
Reunification in 1989 found my father a sick and weary man. He was
profoundly uneasy about the way in which East Germany was “annexed,”
and worried about the stability of Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans.
The article in which he expressed his concerns was almost his last. It ran
against the grain of the general euphoria of the time, and was not well
received, but it showed once again his sound instinct and political foresight.
After 1990 he became progressively weaker and stopped writing
altogether. He was frail and housebound, his main pleasure intellectual
discussions about history, the world, and the politics of his (short) century
(1914-89). He was not much given to personal reminiscence, but he did
refer to the manuscripts that he kept in a side cupboard of his desk. He was
particularly keen on one of his early novels, which he thought showed signs
of talent. He suggested I should go through his papers after his death, but
forbade me to read any of them during his lifetime.
When he died in January 1999, I started looking through the
manuscripts, mainly searching for the novel. It was not among the papers in
his desk, but later turned up serendipitously, hidden in a chest of drawers.
While searching for the novel, I stumbled across the manuscript of this
book. It came as a complete surprise. I was immediately fascinated by it and
read it in a single sitting, but I was unsure whether my interest was due to
personal involvement. So I gave it to a German journalist friend, Uwe
Soukup, to read. He was equally enthusiastic and that convinced me to
publish it in Germany. There were, however, two large gaps in the
manuscript, covering the whole of chapters 10 and 25. Uwe told me he
knew what had happened to chapter 25. It had been published in Stern in
1983 on the fiftieth anniversary of the events it relates. No doubt the other
chapter had been cannibalized similarly, but I was unable to find where it
had been published. Luckily my father’s papers also contained a clumsy
translation of the first third of the manuscript into English. It was written in
an unidiomatic style through which one could almost hear the original
German. I retranslated chapter 10 back into German from this source,
completing the manuscript for publication.
When the book appeared in Germany in the summer of 2000 it had an
astonishing reception, received extremely positive reviews, and went
straight to the top of the nonfiction bestseller list, where it stayed for forty-
two weeks. This completely confounded my expectations and it was some
time before I found a plausible explanation. Now I think it was because 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.
Some Germans appear to have found that unpalatable, for a year after its
publication, allegations began to appear in the press that the book had been
assembled or modified after the war. At first they were based on claimed
anachronisms in the text. One by one, these claims were refuted. But then a
more vicious attack appeared, asserting, on the flimsiest grounds, that the
text had been extensively rewritten and engineered in the final years of my
father’s life in order to secure his posthumous reputation. It provoked a
flood of articles in his defense. Nevertheless, the archives holding the
original felt that the charge was too serious to ignore. They sent the
manuscript to the German state forensic laboratories for analysis. After two
months, during which they examined every page, the laboratories issued a
report. It completely vindicated my father, confirming that the typescript
had been entirely produced before the war and showed no signs of any later
manipulation.
Had my father really made any later changes, they would have been the
opposite of those alleged by his critics. He would have toned the text down,
removed some of the more personal passages, and generally lowered its
temperature. He would, however, I am certain, not have revised his
conclusions.
I thought that would be the end of the excitement and that the book was
now settled in its final form. Then, in March 2002, a young historian,
Jürgen Peter Schmied, working on my father’s papers in the German state
archives, made two discoveries. The first was the complete manuscript of
Chapter 25. My father had obviously just pushed it in a drawer with other
papers when it was returned by Stern magazine. The second was really
thrilling — it was a handwritten draft of six additional chapters (35 to 40),
which bring the manuscript to the 270 pages mentioned by my father. The
manuscript now really is, I believe, in its final form, as my father
abandoned it in 1939.
 Although still incomplete, the book also has a more satisfactory ending.
Instead of the earlier final note of unreal bliss, it now concludes with a
powerful close-up of Nazi methods in action.

OLIVER PRETZEL

[i] SA (Sturmabteilung), Nazi storm troopers; NSV

(Nationalsozialistische Volkfürsorge), National Socialist Society for the
Welfare of the People.
[ii] The German revolution started with a naval mutiny in the final week
of October 1918. It spread across Germany and by November 9 had forced
the abdication of the Kaiser. In the spring of 1919 it was bloodily put down
by the right-wing mercenaries (the so-called Freikorps — Free Corps)
brought in by the Social Democrat government, usually led by ex-army
officers and often supplied with army weapons.
[iii] Gustav Noske, a leading Social Democrat, was responsible for
organizing the Free Corps to fight against the revolution in 1918-19. He
was minister of defense at the time of the Kapp Putsch in 1920.
[iv] The Spartacus League was a left-wing faction of the socialists,
which later became the German Communist Party. Its leaders, Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered while under arrest in
January 1919.
[v] Friedrich Ebert had been the leader of the mainstream Social
Democrats since before the First World War. Ebert became chancellor in
November 1918 and was the first president of the Weimar Republic. He
died in 1925.
[vi] Paul von Hindenburg was born in 1847. In the first year of the First
World War he returned from retirement to lead the German army in the east
and later became commander in chief. After the war he came to symbolize
the aristocratic prewar world and was elected president after the death of
Ebert in 1925. He remained in office until he died in 1934.
[vii] Philip Scheidemann was deputy leader of the Social Democrats. He
proclaimed the German republic on November 9, 1918.
[viii] Emil Eichhorn was a member of the USPD (a party to the left of
the Social Democrats and to the right of the Spartacus League), and
president of the Berlin police during the revolution.
 [ix] On June 30, 1934, “the night of the long knives,” Hitler, having
summoned the leaders of the SA to a meeting in Bavaria, had them arrested
and executed. On the same day many nationalist conservative leaders,
among them the ex-chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, were also rounded up
and killed. Ernst Röhm was shot the following day.
[x] Noske estimated the number of workers killed by his Free Corps in
Lichtenberg between March 11 and 13, 1919, at twelve hundred. Other
sources give slightly lower estimates.
[xi] The Kapp Putsch, an attempt to institute a military dictatorship, took
place on Saturday, March 13, 1920. It was answered by a general strike
throughout Germany on Monday, March 15. In the Ruhr it turned into an
armed revolt. After Kapp resigned at the end of the week, the reinstated
government used the very troops who had supported him to put down the
revolt. The exact number of dead never came out.
[xii] Walther Rathenau, one of the most successful industrialists before
the First World War, was made responsible for organizing the supply of raw
materials in 1914 and his brilliant planning ensured that Germany suffered
no shortages of war materials throughout the war. In 1921, as minister of
reconstruction, he negotiated a treaty for payment of reparations in kind. In
1922, as foreign minister, he concluded the Treaty of Rapallo with Russia.
He was assassinated on June 24, 1922.
[xiii] A play by Friedrich Schiller about the founding of Switzerland by
William Tell.
[xiv] This book uses prewar British number terminology. Milliard =
1,000 million; billion = 1 million million.
[xv] The progression of ranks in the German civil service is Referendar,
Assessor, Regierungsrat, Oberregierungsrat.
[xvi] Stresemann was chancellor from August 13 until November 2,
1923, and thereafter foreign minister until his death on October 3, 1929. He
negotiated the Locarno Treaty and the entry of Germany into the League of
Nations.
[xvii] Indoor sports stadium in Berlin, scene of many political speeches,
notably by Hitler.
[xviii] A semimilitary nationalist (non-Nazi) organization.
[xix] Schleicher (see next footnote).
[xx] From June to November 1932 Franz von Papen was chancellor; he
was succeeded in December by Kurt von Schleicher, whose government
lasted until January 30, 1933. Both politicians were authoritarian
conservatives. Both thought they could tame Hitler by offering him power.
Schleicher was one of the right-wing conservatives murdered on July 30,
1934.
[xxi] This is a reference to the illegal dismissal of the Prussian regional
government, of which they were representatives, by the chancellor of the
time, Franz von Papen.
[xxii] This is a reference to the murder of Kurt von Schleicher on July
30, 1934 (see last footnote in chapter 6).
[xxiii] Werner Finck, comic actor and satirical cabaret performer,
founded the Katakombe in 1929. It was closed by the Nazis in 1935. Finck
survived the war and died in 1978.
[xxiv] The progression of ranks in the German law courts is: Referendar,
Assessor, Amtsgerichtsrat, Kammergerichtsrat.
[xxv] Editors of Die Tat.
[xxvi] Macbeth, Act 5, scene v.
[xxvii] A viciously sadistic, pornographic, anti-Semitic propaganda
paper, on display in bright red glass cases throughout Nazi Germany.
[xxviii] In prewar Berlin the city center was where Friedrichstrasse and
Unter den Linden intersected. The Kurfürstendamm to the west was an area
of nightlife.
[xxix] A left-of-center semimilitary organization formed by uniting the
armed wings of all the left-of-center parties except the Communists.
[xxx] Ludwig Müller, a former naval chaplain, chosen as prospective
“Reich bishop” by Hitler in May 1933. He failed to gain the position in the
church elections of May 26, 1933, but his election was forced through on
September 27, 1933.
[xxxi] A Protestant movement upholding the traditions of scripture and
the confessions of the Reformation against the Aryanizing changes
proposed by the German Christians under Müller.
[xxxii] Edouard Herriot, French politician, variously foreign minister
and prime minister in the 1920s.
[xxxiii] Engelbert Dollfuss, right-wing chancellor of Austria, suppressed
the Austrian Nazis in June 1933 and was assassinated in a botched Nazi
coup attempt on July 25, 1934.
[xxxiv] Gruppenführer Karl Ernst (1904-1934), leader of the SA in
Berlin, was executed in the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934).
 [xxxv] Frederic Warburg, All Authors Are Equal (London: Hutchinson,
1973), p. 6.
[xxxvi] Ibid., p. 7.