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Werner Seldte.
Laser Oppenheimer,
Gert Jeschonnek.
Columbus Haus.
Prime Minister.’ ‘Goering?
Sachsenhausen.
a bowl of Quaker Quick Flakes (‘For the Youth of the Nation’)
Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933.
the Queer Squad, the Department for the Suppression of Homosexuality:
Neumann,
Frau Stock
Beobachter,
‘Wet as a poodle, Max,’
Charles Lindbergh
Muller,
Kapp Putsch.’
Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.
That was Berlin under the National Socialist Government: a big, haunted house with dark corners, gloomy staircases, sinister cellars, locked rooms and a whole attic full of poltergeists on the loose, throwing books, banging doors, breaking glass, shouting in the night and generally scaring the owners so badly that there were times when they were ready to sell up and get out. But most of the time they just stopped up their ears, covered their blackened eyes and tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Cowed with fear, they spoke very little, ignoring the carpet moving underneath their
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I had no more reaction than if I had been looking in the window of my local ‘German’ butcher’s
Sometimes I was surprised at the totality of my own indifference to the sight of the stabbed, the drowned, the crushed, the shot, the burnt and the bludgeoned, although I knew well how that insensitivity had come about. Seeing so much death on the Turkish front and in my service with Kripo, I had almost ceased to regard a corpse as being in any way human.
One wonders ever so slightly if there's a latent comment here about the ability of anyone to become desensitized
And then that this is part of how something like nazism can come about
‘The last time I came across body odour this bad, a horse was sitting on my face.’
I’m not much interested in The Past and, if you ask me, it is this country’s obsession with its history that has partly put us where we are now: in the shit.
Hauptsturmfuhrer
Loud songs do not a patriot make.
Arthur Nebe,
‘But isn’t that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn’t give a shit who was running the country? The
who controls Kripo. It gets very confusing when
But come to think of it, political parties were always big on salutes in Germany: the Social Democrats had their clenched fist raised high above the head; the Bolshies in the KPD had their clenched fist raised at shoulder level; the Centrists had their two-fingered, pistol-shaped hand signal, with the thumb cocked; and the Nazis had fingernail inspection. I can remember when we used to think it was all rather ridiculous and melodramatic, and maybe that’s why none of us took it seriously. And here we all were now, saluting with the best of them.
swanktail,
Max Schmelling.
Emil Jannings,
BdM, the Women’s League,
Josef and Magda Goebbels
lady wife.
‘Do you like jazz?’ she said, changing the subject. ‘Oh, it’s all right, it’s not negro jazz. I love it, don’t you?’ Only non-negro jazz is permitted in Germany now, but I often wonder how they can tell the difference.
At least until Hermann’s first wife died. By then I’d been seeing him for some time.
Hjalmar Haupthandler
‘There are an awful lot of dead people in Germany looking very serious.’
spoon-ears.
Walther Kolb,
Oberinspektor Tesmer,