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2 | Growing Up under the Nazis: or, Why One Had to Be There to Understand It
- Brandeis University Press
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c h a p t e r 2 Growing Up under the Nazis or, Why One Had to Be There to Understand It The first major public event in the outside world I remember must have been the appearance of the dirigible Graf Zeppelin, noiselessly gliding over my hometown, light gray in color, nearly 800 feet in length. Flying was still something unusual and fascinating. Families went to the local airport for an outing on warm summer evenings and on weekends to see the small planes take off and land. The first major political event I remember, much more vividly, was the German general elections of 1930, in which the Nazis emerged as the second strongest political party. How did we hear about it? From the radio, but we had no speaker yet; we had only crystal sets and had to listen to broadcasts with earphones. The airship and the radio are appropriate first memories, for they signal commercial aviation and commercial broadcasting, two enterprises that shaped the era. They also forecast the style of warfare, propaganda, and mass politics shortly to come into everyone’s life. Air travel brought the rapid movement of people; radio brought the rapid movement of information. Adolf Hitler made effective use of both. They knit the world together, yet they also powered totalitarian movements. For the generation after me, the jet plane and television played the same role, and for my grandchildren, it is the computer and all its associated technology. As always , new technologies become weapons in political and military struggles. Political and Cultural Awakening, from Weimar to the Third Reich My parents, like most of their class and background, had no interest in politics and thought it an unhealthy and risky occupation. They voted (I think) for the small German Democratic Party. But as this center-left party got smaller and smaller, they shifted to the Social Democrats. They certainly did not encourage any interest on my part in politics. I often heard them say, “Politics spoil the character,” echoing a line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, written more than a century earlier: “A nasty song, ugh! a political song.” 34 best of times, worst of times Those about ten years older than I, born just before World War I and growing up in the Weimar Republic, were, most of them, heavily politicized. And to some extent they influenced my generation. But all things considered, I find in retrospect that among my contemporaries there was less interest and involvement in politics than might have been expected. Perhaps there was a feeling that the individual did not really matter, that he (or she) was at the mercy of anonymous powers. One of the Nazi slogans was, “The individual is nothing, the community—everything.” This was by no means a purely Nazi belief; it was part of the Zeitgeist. But in Germany it was particularly powerful. Individualism had never been considered a virtue in Germany. Today it is hard not to believe that there must have been a feeling of crisis in the early 1930s, of impending doom, of inevitability about the Nazi takeover. But it wasn’t like that really. People were greatly worried by the economic crisis that began with the collapse of big banks in 1929 and sank into the Great Depression, which had such a huge impact on other European countries and in the United States. My most vivid mental pictures are of unemployed people lining up in the streets, of field kitchens to feed the newly poor, of demonstrations. Politics was in the air, and there was a feeling of great uncertainty. But, after all, this had been the case since the end of World War I. I was an avid newspaper reader from the age of nine even though I cannot possibly have understood much of what I read. Since I could not afford to buy half a dozen papers a day, I went to the newspaper offices and asked for sample copies, which I usually got. On second thought, my political awakening must have begun before the German elections, for I remember that in the winter of 1928–29, the coldest in living memory, my father sent me to the corner shop on a Sunday morning to buy the Berliner Tageblatt. I froze horribly, but this did not prevent me standing for minutes in front of the shop studying the headlines of the other papers as well. People have asked me whether there was fear...