Defying Hitler: A Memoir

by Sebastian Haffner

No other nation has experienced anything comparable to the events of 1923 in Germany. All nations went through the Great War, and most of them 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; none has experienced the gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending, bloody Saturnalia, in which not only money but all standards lost their value. The year 1923 prepared Germany, not specifically for Nazism, but for any fantastic adventure. The psychological and political roots of Nazism reach further back, as we have seen, but that year gave birth to its lunatic aspects: the cool madness, the arrogant, unscrupulous, blind resolve to achieve the impossible, the principle that ‘Might is right’ and ‘“Impossible” is not in our vocabulary’. Nations, it seems, cannot go through such experiences without spiritual damage. I shudder to think that after the next war the whole of Europe will probably experience a magnified 1923 – that is, unless very wise men make the peace.