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The revolution became official.
It became a fact, something that a German is used to accommodating and putting up with.
The judges, who could now be ousted at a moment’s notice, were told that their powers had been immeasurably increased. They had become ‘people’s judges’, ‘sovereign judges’. They need no longer anxiously follow the letter of the law. Indeed, it was better if they did not. Understood?
There were, however, other cases – cases in which the newcomer did not back down but held eloquent speeches, in a somewhat over-loud voice, stating that here the paragraph of the law must yield precedence; he would then instruct his co-judges that the meaning was more important than the letter of the law. He would quote Hitler. Then, with the gesture of a romantic stage hero, he would insist on some untenable decision. It was piteous to observe the faces of the old Kammergerichtsrats as this went on. They looked at their notes with an expression of indescribable dejection, while their fingers
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I only experienced a few short months of the Kammergericht of the Third Reich. They were sad months, months of taking leave in more than one sense. I felt as though I were at a deathbed.
The Association of National Socialist Lawyers wrote us all (me included) the most flattering letters: we were the generation who would build the new German justice. ‘Join us. Help us in the historic task assigned to us by the Führer’s will!’ I dropped the letters in the wastepaper basket, but not everybody did that. One could sense that the Referendars felt their increasing importance.
One day – I do not remember what heresy I had just uttered – one of my co-Referendars took me aside, looked closely into my eyes and said, ‘A word of warning, colleague. I have your best interests at heart.’ Another close look. ‘You’re a republican, aren’t you?’ He put a placatory hand on my arm. ‘Shh. Don’t worry. I am one too at heart. But you must be more careful. Don’t underestimate the fascists.’ (He used the word ‘fascists’.) ‘Sceptical comments are no use nowadays. You’re only digging your own grave. Don’t fancy that there’s anything to be done against the fascists now! Certainly not by
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At some point in the summer the newspapers carried a list of thirty or forty names of famous scientists or writers; they had been proscribed, declared to be traitors to the people and deprived of their citizenship. More unnerving was the disappearance of a number of quite harmless people, who had in one way or another been part of daily life. The radio announcer whose voice one had heard every day, who had almost become an old acquaintance, had been sent to a concentration camp, and woe betide you if you mentioned his name.
The symbolic burning of the books in April had been an affair of the press, but the disappearance of books from the bookshops and libraries was uncanny. Contemporary German literature, whatever its merits, had simply been erased. Books of the last season that one had not bought by April became unobtainable.
It was wonderful to behold: the paper had the same typography, the same name – but without batting an eyelid it had become a thoroughgoing, smart Nazi organ. Was it a sudden conversion or just cynicism?
All the same, the temptation to seal oneself off was a sufficiently important aspect of the period for me to devote some space to it. It has its part to play in the psycho-pathological process that has unfolded in the cases of millions of Germans since 1933. After all, to a normal onlooker most Germans today exhibit the symptoms of lunacy or at the very least severe hysteria. If you want to understand how this came about, you have to take the trouble to place yourself in the peculiar position in which non-Nazi Germans – and that was still the majority – found themselves in 1933, and try to
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We were in the Nazis’ hands for good or ill. All lines of defence had fallen, any collective resistance had become impossible. Individual resistance was only a form of suicide. We were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas of life there was rout, panic and flight. No one could tell where it would end. At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege. Just a little pact with the devil – and you were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead you were one of the victorious hunters.
If you refused to become a Nazi you found yourself in a fiendish situation: it was one of complete and unalleviated hopelessness; you were daily subjected to insults and humiliations, forced to watch unendurable scenes, had nowhere to turn to mitigate your anguish.
One temptation, often favoured by older people, was the withdrawal into an illusion: preferably the illusion of superiority.
A few of them still hold the banner high. Even after all their defeats they still prophesy the inevitable collapse of the regime every month, or at least once a year. Their stand has a certain magnificence, you have to admit, but also a certain eccentricity. The funny thing is that one day, after they have stood fast through all their cruel disappointments, they will be proved right. I can already see them strutting around after the defeat of the Nazis and telling everybody that they had predicted it all along. By then, however, they will have become tragicomic figures. There is a way of being
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There is a third temptation I need to mention. It is the one I had to fight against myself, and again I was certainly not the only one. Its starting point is the recognition of the danger of succumbing to the previous temptation. You do not want to let yourself be morally corrupted by hate and suffering, you want to remain good-natured, peaceful, amiable and ‘nice’. But how to avoid hate and suffering if you are daily bombarded with things that cause them? You must ignore everything, look away, block your ears, seal yourself off. That leads to a hardening through softness and finally also to a
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I still think that there is some justification for this attitude; and I do not repudiate it. However, simply ignoring everything and retreating into an ivory tower, the way I imagined it then, was not the right thing to do. I thank God that my attempt to do so failed quickly and thoroughly. Some of my acquaintances’ attempts did not fail so quickly, and they had to pay a high price to learn that one can sometimes only save the peace of one’s soul by sacrificing and relinquishing it.
‘You,’ he said, ‘are always niggling and wilfully ignoring the monumental developments in the resurgence of the German people that are taking place today.’ (I can remember the very word ‘resurgence’ to this day!) ‘You grasp at every little excess and split legal hairs to criticise and find fault. You seem to be unaware, I fear, that today people of your ilk represent a latent danger for the state, and that the state has the right and the duty to react accordingly – at the very least when one of you goes so far as to dare to offer open resistance.’ Those were his words, soberly and slowly
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I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible to treat it merely as a ‘political event’. It took place not only in the sphere of politics, but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one option: to remove yourself physically – emigration. Emigration: that meant saying goodbye to the country of one’s birth, language and education and severing all patriotic ties.
had lost my friends, had seen harmless acquaintances changed into virtual murderers or enemies, threatening to deliver me to the Gestapo. I had seen all my small daily pleasures vanish. Solidly based institutions like the Prussian justice system had caved in before my eyes. The world of books and discussion groups had dissolved. Opinions, points of view, theoretical systems had had to be abandoned as never before. Where were the career plans and ideas I had so confidently entertained just a few months before?
the hysteria about ‘German’ thought, ‘German’ feeling, ‘German’ constancy, ‘German’ manhood, ‘being German!’ – all of that had long been abhorrent and repugnant to me. It was no sacrifice to forgo it. However, that did not prevent me from being a fairly good German, and I was conscious of it often enough, if only for the shame I felt at the excesses of German nationalism. Like most members of any nation I felt proud of the better points that one sees here and there in German history and the German character; offended by the insults in word or deed sometimes aimed at Germany by the nationalists
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I do not ‘love’ Germany, just as I do not ‘love’ myself.
the internal detachment of oneself from one’s country of one’s own free will, is an act of biblical savagery: ‘If your eye offend you, tear it out!’
Do they not owe it to their country to sacrifice their greater wisdom, their morals, their human dignity and their conscience? Does not what they call the ‘incredible rise of Germany’ show that the sacrifice is worth it and that it all adds up? They forget that it is no better for a nation than for a single man to gain the whole world if it loses its soul; and they also forget that they are sacrificing not just themselves for their patriotism (or what they think is patriotism) but also their country.
but in Germany nationalism kills the basic values of the national character.
A nationalist Frenchman can still be a typical (and otherwise quite likeable) Frenchman. A German who yields to nationalism is no longer a German. What he achieves is a German Empire, maybe even a Great or Pan-German Empire – but also the destruction of Germany.
