‘The defeat of 1918 did not depress me as deeply as the present situation. It’s really shocking how day after day naked force, violations of legality, the most terrible hypocrisy, a barbaric frame of mind, express themselves as decrees completely without any concealment.’ The atmosphere, he noted despairingly on 30 March, two days before the boycott, was like the run-up to a pogrom in the depths of the Middle Ages or in innermost Tsarist Russia ... We are hostages ... ‘We’—the threatened community of Jews. Actually I feel more ashamed than afraid. Ashamed of Germany. I truly have always felt
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