Holocaust Book Review--Sebastian Haffner

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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