In I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer’s memoir about Holocaust Germany, the people who, because he’s a Jew, take away his office at the university, his right to shop at certain shops, his job, his home, do so politely, even apologetically. (It’s not their idea; it’s coming down from those boneheads in Berlin. But what’s a person to do?) They seem to like Klemperer, they aren’t anti-Semites, but they’re also not, in those moments, anti-anti-Semites. They’re well-mannered, abashed-but-willing parts of the Nazi machine.
