the state depended. Everyone who had been affected by such troubles feared falling even deeper into the abyss. In addition, there were the ideological conflicts of the body politic and the trend of the time to totalitarian or at least dictatorial systems—especially when a master ofmoods and demagoguery like Hitler was staging his oratory so attractively and powerfully. Consequently, broad but fickle sections of the population, who were essentially well disposed to the republic, believed themselves to be threatened by radicals of the right and left; they increasingly surrendered to the idea that nothing less than the spirit of the age was against them. With Hegel in one’s intellectual baggage one was even more susceptible to such thinking. 1
The author in 1946 as a prisoner of war, drawn by Alfred Sternmann
Nevertheless, the question still being asked is how these ideas were capable of driving such an old and civilized nation out of its mind. How was it possible that the leaders of the National Socialist movement were able to overcome the constitutional safeguards with so little resistance? And, furthermore, how was so much disregard of the law possible in an order-loving country? I once heard my father say that the Germans were no longer German: “They have lost their passion for introspection and discovered their taste for the primitive. Their model is no longer—as it once was—the reflective scholar type of the nineteenth century. He prevailed for a long time. Today, however, it is the tribal warrior, dancing around a stake and showing his chief a painted grimace. So much for the nation of Goethe!”
The most obvious explanation for the success of National Socialism was that—like all groups ready to use force and then endowed with funds—it attracted opportunists. That is attested to by the mass defections of spring 1933, when hundreds of thousands went over to the Nazi Party after the seizure of power, as well as by the almost instantaneous and complete disappearance of the party in 1945. No one wanted to admit to having supported a lost cause. For years people had ignored the atrocities of the regime and fawned on those in power: senior civil servants, employers, generals, and the rest. Each person soothed his conscience in his own way. The conduct of the actress Adele Sandrock will always represent the exception. At “afternoon tea for ladies” at the Reich Chancellery, when Hitler burst out with invective against the Jews, she supposedly interrupted him: “My Führer! In my presence not a word against the Jews, please! All my life they have been my best lovers!” But perhaps that was only an anecdote passed on in a whisper. Then one put the party badge in one’s buttonhole and went to cheer along with the rest. Then there followed, after 1945, the Great Denial.
The attitude in the early years after the war was later described as a “communicative silence,” which was not simply a form of repression. Disillusionment, shame, and defiance combined to form an opaque refusal of guilt. In addition there was a tendency to belatedly construct heroes. Some invented acts of resistance; others (as part of the game of contrition) sought out a prominent place on the bench of the self-accusers. But in all theirlamentation, they were very ready to defame anyone who didn’t do as they did and constantly beat their sinful breasts. When Günter Grass or any of the other countless self-accusers pointed to their own feelings of shame, they were not referring to any guilt on their own part—they felt themselves to be beyond reproach—but to the many reasons which everyone else had to be ashamed. However, the mass of the population, so they said, was not prepared to acknowledge their shame. 2
Seen as a whole, what I had experienced was the collapse of the bourgeois world. Its end was already foreseeable before Hitler came on the scene. Solely individual characters survived the years of his rule with integrity—no
The author in 1946 as a prisoner of war, drawn by Alfred Sternmann
Nevertheless, the question still being asked is how these ideas were capable of driving such an old and civilized nation out of its mind. How was it possible that the leaders of the National Socialist movement were able to overcome the constitutional safeguards with so little resistance? And, furthermore, how was so much disregard of the law possible in an order-loving country? I once heard my father say that the Germans were no longer German: “They have lost their passion for introspection and discovered their taste for the primitive. Their model is no longer—as it once was—the reflective scholar type of the nineteenth century. He prevailed for a long time. Today, however, it is the tribal warrior, dancing around a stake and showing his chief a painted grimace. So much for the nation of Goethe!”
The most obvious explanation for the success of National Socialism was that—like all groups ready to use force and then endowed with funds—it attracted opportunists. That is attested to by the mass defections of spring 1933, when hundreds of thousands went over to the Nazi Party after the seizure of power, as well as by the almost instantaneous and complete disappearance of the party in 1945. No one wanted to admit to having supported a lost cause. For years people had ignored the atrocities of the regime and fawned on those in power: senior civil servants, employers, generals, and the rest. Each person soothed his conscience in his own way. The conduct of the actress Adele Sandrock will always represent the exception. At “afternoon tea for ladies” at the Reich Chancellery, when Hitler burst out with invective against the Jews, she supposedly interrupted him: “My Führer! In my presence not a word against the Jews, please! All my life they have been my best lovers!” But perhaps that was only an anecdote passed on in a whisper. Then one put the party badge in one’s buttonhole and went to cheer along with the rest. Then there followed, after 1945, the Great Denial.
The attitude in the early years after the war was later described as a “communicative silence,” which was not simply a form of repression. Disillusionment, shame, and defiance combined to form an opaque refusal of guilt. In addition there was a tendency to belatedly construct heroes. Some invented acts of resistance; others (as part of the game of contrition) sought out a prominent place on the bench of the self-accusers. But in all theirlamentation, they were very ready to defame anyone who didn’t do as they did and constantly beat their sinful breasts. When Günter Grass or any of the other countless self-accusers pointed to their own feelings of shame, they were not referring to any guilt on their own part—they felt themselves to be beyond reproach—but to the many reasons which everyone else had to be ashamed. However, the mass of the population, so they said, was not prepared to acknowledge their shame. 2
Seen as a whole, what I had experienced was the collapse of the bourgeois world. Its end was already foreseeable before Hitler came on the scene. Solely individual characters survived the years of his rule with integrity—no
Similar Books
