I was raised a Baptist.  And in my family’s particular strain of the faith, I was pretty much constantly taught that the human race is no damn good.  My maternal grandmother was the most sour person you could imagine growing up with.  As long as I knew her, I never once saw her smile, unless it was at someone else’s misfortune.  But make no mistake, her pleasure did not arise from the sight of someone being brought down.  To her it was always more a matter of misfortune reminding us that we were all no good in the eyes of the Lord.  The instant you find yourself enjoying life, it could only have been because you were doing something wrong, and you needed to repent.  So…obviously my memories of her aren’t exactly joyful.  But one memory sticks in my mind as a time when I actually saw myself, very reluctantly, admiring her. 

We were waiting in a train station for my mom to come back from some trip…I forget what it was for.  It was sometime in the late 1950s and I was a very young child, holding on to grandma’s hand as we sat waiting for mom.  In those days there was still legalized and enforced race segregation and the station had separate areas for "whites" and "coloreds."  But grandma was tired that day, and had decided to take us to the first seats she saw available…in the colored section.

A kindly station manager came over and politely told grandma she had to move, she was in the wrong part of the station.  I forget now what exactly he said to her, only that it provoked one of grandma’s stock in trade fire and brimstone sermons.  How dare he, she thundered, set himself above anyone for the color of their skin!  How dare he tell people where they could sit because of the color of their skin!  I suppose if we were both black the police would have been promptly called and we’d have both gone off to jail.  But this guy just shook his head and walked away with grandma still sniping at him as he left.  The station was mostly empty anyway.

It was years later before I finally realized what it was that had so deeply offended grandma.  She wasn’t angry that this guy thought that black people were inferior.  What had pissed her off was that he thought because he was white, he wasn’t. 

I’m telling you this, because of an amazing book of history I’m reading now.  And like all truly amazing history books, this one is a personal account, told by an average everyday person who actually lived it, who saw it with his own eyes. 

How I came to find it: In comments to my post a few days ago on Why American News Sucks In A Nutshell, Peterson Toscano linked to this article on AlterNet, Creeping Fascism: From Nazi Germany to Post 9/11 America.  That article by Ray McGovern begins thusly:

Americans today are seeing the same sheepish submissiveness that characterized Germany after the burning of the Reichstag.

"There are few things as odd 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 … Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later …"

These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a firsthand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages — in English as "Defying Hitler."

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America … this is almost unbelievable."

At the end of the article, which mostly recounts the passivity of the press and congressional democrats to the Bush republicans in-your-face violations of constitutional law in order to spy on American citizens, McGovern turns finally to Haffner’s book and the parallels to what Haffner saw as the Nazis rose to power become scary…

In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German parliament building (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened and one’s desk might be broken into."

But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?

In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:

"It is in the final analysis only that 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 Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers — "for the most part decent, unimportant individuals." In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.

The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that "legalized" Hitler’s dictatorship.

As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: "Oh God," writes Haffner, "what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward. … They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. … They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested." In sum:

"There was not a 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. … 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 is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."

This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.

Our founding fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison wrote:

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. … The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."

Haffner’s words spoke to me…they grabbed me by the collar…

"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion…millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … 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 is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."

…and I had to get a copy of his book.  I’m reading it now.  I’m only into the opening chapters, where he relates his experiences growing up during the first world war, as a necessary background to understanding what came later.  But it is already an absorbing, disturbing read.  I find myself devouring it.

As usual, when reading a firsthand account of a period of history that you thought you knew from the books and grainy black and white newsreel footage, you discover quickly that what you thought you knew was only a small slice of the whole, and that you were missing things, many things, especially those little commonplace day-to-day things that fade with time and memory, allowing you to keep history’s terrible events at a safe distance from the present.  Oh…that could Never happen nowadays.  Already just a few chapters into his book, Haffner has obliterated that distance for me, and his past becomes all too real, all too immediate…

I need to show you this, from the third chapter of his book.  Here, Haffner is describing how the first world war affected him, and his childhood companions…

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. 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’s 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 then 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 worse then I was if I were to claim that I was caught up in 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 those were the necessary counterparts of my side’s victory and triumph.

What counted was the fascination with the game of war, in which, according to certain mysterious rules, the number of prisoners taken, miles advanced, fortifications seized, and ships sunk played almost the same 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 it’s 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 the streets and playgrounds nearby, that has left its dangerous mark on all of us.

Sound familiar?  Haffner goes on to say later, that the Nazi base came mostly from his middle class generation, untouched by war except as a series of army bulletins, seeing it only in the abstract, somewhat like a soccer game. 

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 then 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 is a spoilsport.  Ultimately that is 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, 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.

Sound Familiar? 

All my grade school life, and for decades after, I’ve been told that Hitler rose to power because of a character flaw of the German people, something specific to the German soul that the rest of humanity somehow naturally rose above.  I’ve never believed it.  Never.  Thanks I’m certain, to that Baptist upbringing I had, and my church’s constant drumming into my head that the human race was a pretty sad, sorry, good-for-nothing thing that no amount of fixing could improve, and the best we could do was beg God for forgiveness.  I’ve never believed that either I’m pleased to say, but at least I seem to have absorbed the lesson that, for good or ill, we’re all pretty much the same deep down inside.  The irrational passions that move your neighbors one day, might just as easily grab you by the collar the next if you’re not careful.  We are not fallen angels, but risen apes.  Our line is legitimate, and thoroughly anchored to the natural world, and to that ancient past from which we emerged so many millions of years ago.  Old…very old…tides pull and tug at our consciousness.  We are capable of great things, but also terrible things.  All of us.  What happened to the German people could just as easily happen to us.  Maybe it already is.

I’ll probably be posting more about Haffner’s book as I continue reading it.  But you should go buy it.  Sit down with it and read it.  Let it transport you back to a time and place you only think you know about.  Then lift your eyes from its pages, and look around.