Sebastian Haffner. Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. Oliver Pretzel. London: Phoenix, 2003 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002);
originally Geschichte eines Deutschen, rev. ed. (Stuttgart und Műnchen:
Deutsche Verlage-Anstalt GmbH, 2000). xii + 259 pp + 6 pp of b + w photographs.
A
young man, not Jewish, grows up in Germany during the opening three decades of
the twentieth century. Great events of world-importance are happening all
around him—war, revolution and economic crisis, but he is more concerned with himself,
making his way through school, finding a career, playing around with girls, and
finding out who he is. More and more around him, he starts to realize,
something terrible is happening. The people he knows, loves and respect start
to say and do things he finds unacceptable, stupid, even crazy. He has Jewish
class-mates, Jewish friends and a Jewish girlfriend. People are frightened and
worried, some disappear, start to lose their jobs, disappear and are shot while
resisting arrest. He refuses to become a Nazi. The young man tries to help
others and hold on to his ideals, but finds it increasingly difficult. Finally,
at the end of the 1930s, he cannot stand it any longer. He escapes to England
and writes this book.
Even
before we start a review of this book—and our comments are belated in the
perspective of newspaper reports on recently published titles; we take up older
books that help address current problems—we have to clarify who is the author
and when was this memoir written; then, being a decade or so behind the date it
first appeared, our review may be seen as relevant. Sebastian Haffner is the nom de plume of Raimund Pretzel, and
Oliver Pretzel the translator is his son. The book therefore begins at one
period of history directed at a specific historical audience, but now more than
a half century later takes on a new appearance and addresses itself to new
readers with different knowledge and memories. Sebastian Haffner, so naming
himself from Johann Sebastian Bach and Mozart’s Haffner Symphony, never published this book and left it for his son
to do the final editing and seeing it through the press after his death in 1999. It followed his very successful polemic Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, warning the
British and other western peoples what they were really facing in the
belligerency of Nazi Germany; not only in how ruthless and barbaric the
National Socialist regime was and how it would wage war as no civilized nation
ever did, but also who were the people in the Third Reich they could seek to negotiate
with and who were likely to replace the Nazis if the Allies and the USSR
succeeded in defeating Hitler. The success was with intelligent and influential
readers and initiated important discussions in Parliament and in the press over
how to conduct the forthcoming and inevitable war.
These
were timely issues at the close of the 1930s.
Haffner foresaw that both for the general public then and in the future
it was equally, if not more, important
to reveal how a great nation like Germany could fall prey to the evil
genius—the utter stupidity, glaring irrationality and disgusting bigotry—of
National Socialism. How ordinary citizens, in many ways no different than
Britons, Frenchmen and other west Europeans, could be sucked into the evil
morass of Hitler’s madness. To do this, the young German author who had finally
escaped to England in 1939, set out to write a disarmingly powerful
autobiography.
To
do this, Haffner would take his own life story precisely because it was in so
many ways ordinary and banal, and show how he experienced the great events from
before the First World War through the defeat of the Kaiser’s armies in 1918,
the confusions and upheavals of revolution and civil war that followed, and the
naïve and weak efforts to create a modern democratic state in the Weimar Republic.
To a child, the series of great events “was eerily unreal, and the details
remained unexplained” (p. 31), but upon later reflection they prove
illuminating, both for the adult world which responded politically and
economically, and for the child’s world wherein basic patterns of behaviour,
feeling and morality were being shaped. The young Sebastian overhears casual
comments in the grocery store, listens to the speeches by teachers at school
and overhears his parents’ worried whispering, all of which laid down the
essential matrix of his more mature ideas and emotions.
No other nation has experienced anything
comparable to the events of 1923 in Germany. All nations went through the Great
War, and most 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; nor has
experienced the gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending, bloody
Saturnalia, in which not only money but all standards lost their value. (p. 44)
The
first two sentences cited here could belong to any textbook history of
Germany’s experiences in the first two decades of the twentieth century. They
describe a normative situation, abstracted from the play of emotions and the
rupture of unconscious structures that hold social groups and personalities
together. The third long, rambling sentence, however, provides a qualitatively
different set of words, images and cultural phenomena. Things happen which are
dreamlike, or rather nightmarish, and thus fantastic and grotesque. These
events belong to shared fantasies and to cultural memories of ritual occasions:
to carnival and Saturnalia, to the dans
macabre of social panic and the collapse of moral codes, principles of
moral behaviour, and the logical perceptions of reality.
Haffner
offers a reason for what made it possible for German culture to fall apart so
quickly and so thoroughly. The repeated traumas that came in wave after wave
created a whole generation unable to cope with an inner life once a brief
respite came:
They had never learned to live from
within themselves, how to make it interesting….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. (p. 57)
In
fact, the Nazi revolution can be centred on how it “abolished the old distinction
between politics and private life” (p. 180). What was emptied of individual
feeling and thinking was filled with “sound and fury signifying nothing.” It
was this ‘colossal emptiness’ in many people’s lives that was filled with
street marches, huge rallies and militaristic songs, flags and banners, as well
as radio speeches. Unable to focus or even to hear the news of beatings,
torture and killings the masses were drawn into “cheering and jubilation” over nothing,
they drowned their own fears in paranoia and loyalty to the new regime (pp.
106-107.) The fecklessness and inadequacy of various opposition groups, along
with the individual weakness of most people, Haffner suggests, was what allowed
the Nazis to form their insane state and act out their barbaric programme of
hatred and cruelty: the old regime died in a “nervous collapse” (p. 111) or
“break down” (p. 112). Individuality was replaced by what he calls “a
promiscuous “comradeship” (p. 232), a false sense of togetherness and loyalty.
Seen
through this psychohistorical lens of such metaphors of social implosion and
analogies to mental illness, there was nothing inevitable in the way Germany
acted out its early twentieth-century history. As an adolescent and as a young
adult, Haffner could not fully understand or appreciate the ideological,
political, economic and social transformations, but he could feel around him
and in his own blood “chemical processes” that transformed everyday people and
everyday experiences into a toxic mix of fear, hatred, loneliness and unruly crowd
behaviour. He could, moreover, see friends, colleagues and respected people in
all walks of life find themselves unable to resist the force of the new regime.
It became increasingly difficult for him to maintain his own private integrity
and sense of moral outrage at what was happening on the streets, in
professional organizations and in all institutions of authority and power. In some
situations, he could not trust those friends and school mates around him, let
alone himself when confronted with this manifestation of sheer evil. When the brown shirts burst into the law
library where he is studying and he is asked point blank whether he is an
Aryan—and thus entitled to be there, unlike the Jews and Communists—he weakly
says “yes” he is. When he is drafted into a three-week indoctrination camp to
prepare him to be recognized as a courtroom officer, he cannot refuse to wear
the swastika on his arm or to give the Nazi salute and scream “Heil Hitler!”
Drawing
another analogy between mass and child psychology, the book approaches
psychohistory, that variant of Freudian psychoanalysis that focuses on three
central issues: first, the importance of child-rearing practices in shaping the
formation of individual personalities, with shared cultural norms creating larger
or smaller cohorts who tend to behave, feel and think in similar ways; second,
the existence of group fantasies—from sleeping and waking dreams to the root
phenomena of mirror neurons, through to ritualized and codified rhythmic
patterns, matrices of traditional imagery and verbal formulae—both respond to
and reshape external events, both historical and natural; and third, the
effects of deliberate interventions to breakdown normative minds and crush resistance by violence and intimidation—the
kind of brain-washing Haffner sees in the
figure of chemical processes. Rather
than discussing ideologies and political philosophies, Defying Hitler (the original title is simpler, Geschichte eines Deutschen, History of a German Man) tries to
describe the way the Nazis immersed a whole nation in the stinking swamp of
their cruelty and loyalty to the Fűhrer. If only a small part of the population
were fully absorbed into this mental state of abject evil, almost everyone to
some degree or other found their will collapsing, their capacity to think
critically and logically suppressed, and their grasp of reality distorted. Or
the very few who could not stand what was happening there were the passive acts
of withdrawal into sentimental dream-worlds of sheer fantasy, escape into
internal isolation in out-of–the-way parts of the Fatherland, actual emigration
by legal means or otherwise, or
suicide. The very few individuals
who openly opposed the regime by word or deed were quickly disposed off—beaten
up, sent to concentration camps or summarily executed.
As
the narrator grows up, he notes the disparity between what he sees and hears
going on in the world and what grown-ups tell him. Teachers, relatives, school
mates, newspapers and the radio keep weaving a web of deceit; if not denial and
outright lies, then dubious rationalizations and empty promises that things
will get better. Because many of his friends and fellow university students are
Jewish, the otherwise distant threats to his own well-being and safety are
sensitized to the utter darkness of what is closing in on all Germans. The
threats, intimidations and disappearances come close to home and he
increasingly considers his future in the new Germany. He helps his persecuted
friends and his girlfriend escape and dreams of his own relocation to
Paris. However, with a sense of
obligation to his own family and a residual Germanic loyalty to the ideals and
institutions which have been destroyed, he waits until almost the last moment
before fleeing, not to France which was too difficult resettle in, but to
London, There he marries, finds a place among journalists and editors, and
works against his usurped homeland.
Unlike
the earlier book he wrote and published on the cusp of the war, Germany:
Jekyll and Hyde, which was of immediate and strategic use to the British in
preparing to confront the Nazi Reich, this more personal book, not available
until long after the defeat of Hitler, appears with a new urgency in the
twenty-first century. In fact, there is
a disturbing trend in many countries to adopt dictatorial and tyrannical
powers—from Syria, Turkey, Brazil and the Philippines, as well as in the three
super powers, China, Russia and the United States. If we were to take the negative
attitude towards Jews and Israel as a bellwether theme, the analogy with the
rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe during the late 1920s and early 1930s is
most alarming; and hence another reason to return to Heffner’s posthumously published
autobiography.
After
a long period when anti-Semitism and fascist authoritarianism seemed to have
almost disappeared from the western world, the phenomena associated with
Jew-hatred have reappeared in very dangerous forms. Therefore what Haffner was
alerting Britons and other Europeans to be wary of in the opening years of
World War Two—and to be prepared to fight a war against the German attempt at conquest of civilization
itself—is again extremely pertinent. Haffner (Pretzel) sought to warn Hitler’s
adversaries of the formidable and yet vulnerable foe they were facing;
attempting to explain what military and diplomatic strategies would undermine
the power of National Socialism and gain the support of many Germans opposed to
the regime. It is important for us to note the reasons why the German people
seemed unable by themselves to oppose, let alone bring down the Nazi regime
during the 1930s, even though only a very small proportion of the population
were ideologically aligned with Hitler’s fantastical racist agenda and plans
for world conquest. As abhorrent as hitlerian policies were, Haffner wished to
show another side to the German character, not least through his own memories
as a boy growing up during and immediately after the Great War. Presenting
himself as a naïve—but sensitive and intelligent—boy from ages seven through to
fourteen, the narrator exposes the childlike attitudes and actions of ordinary
Germans to the events around them from 1914 through 1918 and then on into the
early 1920s.
While
confessing to his own stupid misunderstandings and immature responses, he
nevertheless points to the vicious, cruel and belligerent attitudes lurking
alongside popular views of the war, Germany’s defeat and the revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary fighting after the Armistice was signed. Most Germans were
more or less opposed—or numbed or indifferent—to those dark forces that could
have proclaimed themselves Nazis a dozen years before Hitler’s assumption to
power; but for reasons of moral cowardice, only a very few of them dared to
stand up for the ideals that the previously self-proclaimed revolutionaries
identified with and that were enshrined in the Weimar constitution.
Until
1942, when the nature of the war shifted from being about the expansion of
German hegemony, the enslavement and exploitation of labour and wealth from
conquered states and the control of international trade, finance and industry,
which meant the crushing of the Soviet
Union and the taking over of the French and British Empires, all of which
depended on German military might and the collusion of neutral and allied
states, Haffner believes there could be a negotiated settlement of the war with
the internal cooperation of large parts of the population and participation of opposition
political parties. So long as the western allies and together with Russian partners
sought the total destruction of Germany, most ordinary citizens would see no
advantage in working towards Hitler’s defeat. But once the murder of Jews
became the ruling passion for the conduct of belligerency, with all other
strategic and diplomatic goals set aside almost completely, there could be no
compromise with a murderous and fanatical enemy. The Nazis were prepared to
fight to the death so as to exterminate the Jews, as well as Gypsies and other untermenschen—in a suicidal race to Gotterdammerung. From then on their
could be no conditional end to the fighting and the German people as a whole
would have to share the burden of guilt for the Holocaust. Haffner does not see
that denouement because he ended his book before the unimaginable became real.
Another
reason to re-examine his Defying Hitler
in our own time is because it gives us, albeit in an incomplete form, a child
and a young man’s experiences during the very dangerous opening years of the
twentieth century, of being born into what was considered—and considered itself
to be—one of the most civilized, industrialized and cultured nations in the
world, but which in just a matter of decades transformed itself into one of the
most barbaric, vicious and cruel regimes ever seen. What happened in Germany
stands as an object lesson to what could , did and is once again happening to
others, and to the whole of civilization. The example of the Third Reich
shows how ridiculous the attitude
is…that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is a small side-issue… In reality these
[other] ‘great national issues’ are unimportant day-to-day matters…while the
Nazis’ anti-Semitism is a fundamental danger and raises the spectre if the
downfall of humanity” (p. 119)
The
study of the Holocaust as a “psychopathological” (p.165) drama—or rather,
trauma—an event which worked as much from the inside but as from the outside
in, necessitates an attention to the life stories of non-Jews, including those
children who grew up to be Nazis and thus active participants in the Final
Solution, not merely passive observers and beneficiaries of its cruel and
inhuman techniques. Civil and social manners, language and images, gestures and
attitudes to time and space were also transformed, in ways that increasingly
excluded and invalidated normative experiences both for the Jews who lost their
rights and sense of integrity or dignity, as well as for the Aryans whose
perspectives on reality, morality and legality were distorted. Although Haffner
ends his memoirs before the Wannsee Conference and the official organization of
the Shoah, he does intuit what lies ahead in the immediate future—and what that
implies for the future of the entire world.
These
transformations, distortions happen less in the minds and words of a few
political leaders than in the “anonymous masses” which constitute a nation and
its culture, and much more in the “inner processes” of individual
personalities, the approach to which is through such confessional and
meditative wrings as the book now under review (pp.152-153). “The private lives, emotions and thoughts” (p. 154) of the many
are encountered in the ordinary, banal and yet sensitive memories of one individual.
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