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ix PREFACE Peter Fritzsche The letters and diary entries that follow have profound things to say about the most brutal regime in the twentieth century. They are an indispensable source for understanding the Nazis. They shed light on the lives of individuals who lived in new, unexpected, and often terrifying times. A series of unlikely circumstances have made these sources available to contemporary readers. One hundred years have passed since the youngest Germans who voted freely for the Nazis were born. In the meantime, more has been written about Adolf Hitler and his supporters, about the National Socialist movement they built up, about the world war the Nazis set in motion in 1939, and about the murder of the Jews they planned and implemented than about almost any other topic in history. To this day, we continue to fold this succession of terrible events over and over again. Indeed, in his book The Writing of the Disaster, the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot refers to the Holocaust and, behind it, the strong-armed movement of perpetrators, the mute responses of observers, and the bewilderment and final silence of victims, as “the absolute event of history,” when “all history took fire,” when “the movement of Meaning was swallowed up.” This “utter-burn” of events—the word choice indicates the difficulty of description—is indelible but also datable.1 It originated in the most destructive war in modern history and still gives the present day its shape. It was 21 April 1944, when, from her Jewish family’s hideout in the “Secret Annexe” on Amsterdam’s prinsengracht, Anne Frank remarked on “the eighteenth birthday of Her Royal Highness princess Elizabeth of York,” that is, Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, who to this day is very much our contemporary.2 The events seize us, but what historians do not agree on is their meaning: the reasons why the Nazis garnered so much support among German citizens before the seizure of power in 1933 or the evolving nature of that support in the Third Reich and through the war years. Scholars continue to debate the extent to which Germans were fundamentally attracted to the revolutionary and specifically racial aspects of National Socialism and the extent to which Germans approved of the persecution of their Jewish neighbors. Was Nazism a meaningful part of people’s lives, or did Germans approach the regime in a more opportunistic, adaptive manner, and in what ways did citizens feel terrorized or ebullient as they participated in the course of events? Questions about the racial mindedness of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich and thus about the political malleability of lives in the twentieth century persist. Nazism poses Preface x fundamental questions about how people act as political beings—how they converge to make ideological commitments, how they respond to crisis and catastrophe, and how they understand power, entitlement, and injustice. The disasters of war and revolution in the twentieth century also indicate how little people actually see and how attenuated is their capacity for empathy. The events remind us that experience is always warped by expectation. For all these reasons, the attempt to understand the phenomenon of Nazism remains a compelling task. We can’t go back and interview Germans in the 1930s or 1940s about the Nazis or about the violence they saw around them or the complicity they might have shared. But thanks to an extraordinary cache of one family’s letters and diaries that encompass the entire period from the end of World War I to the aftermath of World War II we can come close to hearing the discussions and debates that a handful of people had about the rise and the rule of the Nazis. We can take some provisional measure of how politics and war embedded themselves in everyday life. The German Gebenslebens and the Dutch Bresters trade impressions of Hitler, tell jokes on Jews, prepare racial passports, and worry about their men in the war. What has now come to be understood as the Holocaust is just visible on the margins, evident in a remark about the murder of Jews in Kiev and in a few diary notations about “Eddy,” a Jew in hiding. The letters and diaries create a convoluted, but quite open space in which we gain sight of the members of one German-Dutch family moving about, creating intimacy, keeping distance, and trying to understand on-rushing events. We can make some sense of the small, but consequential ways...

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