Secular Days, Sacred Moments: The America Columns of Robert Coles

March 1, 1997. “The Third Reich was a product of German history, but it was not the only possibility open to the country at that time.”

18  march 1, 1997 “The Third Reich was a product of German history, but it was not the only possibility open to the country at that time.” A gain and again in Middlemarch George Eliot warns against our inclination to be “theoretic,” to embrace various absolutes, to lose thereby our sense of life’s complexities, the ironies and paradoxes that inevitably present themselves to us, the fatefulness of things, theroleofaccidentandincident(“circumstance,”assheputsit)inshaping our destiny—be it that of individuals or nations. But it is in our nature to be tempted by generalizations of our own making, by formulations in which we invest everything we’ve got. Our egoism, our yearnings for power and authority, our understandable wish to live forever through our ideas—these become for others laws or a received truth. For some of us, still interested in a biblical way of seeing the mind’s activity, such a faith in theory, such a disposition to turn concepts or constructs into reifications, such a yen for determinisms (be they social , biological, political, economic, historical, psychological) tells of our boundless ambitiousness, our wish to be, as it were, larger than life, godlike—our ideas become ideologies, our words worshipped. In the first story of the Old Testament, Adam’s headlong, heedless  19 pursuit of “knowledge” defined him (and us): original sin. Since then we have continued to show one another how much we want to know, can know, have come to know—to the point that time seems our only real problem. Over the years that become decades, centuries, all that is elusive, enigmatic, hard to figure, will yield to our explorations first, then to our conclusive categorizations. No wonder Flannery O’Connor observed that “the task of the novelist is to deepen mystery, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.” The above line of thought kept crossing my mind recently as I read a book titled Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, which tells of what happened in January 1933, during those last critical days of the Weimar Republic. I had long believed that there was something inevitable about Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial control over Germany, that for a combination of political and cultural reasons, not to mention his own charismatic brilliance and ruthlessness, he had become by the early 1930s hard if not impossible to stop—a man who had maneuvered his way to the top and awaited the fall of one or another last obstacle so that he could become chancellor.ButHenryAshbyTurnerJr.,aprofessorofhistoryatYale,tells quite another story in this book—and by its end the reader is face to face with the kind of uncertainty and indeterminacy that makes so many of us nervous as we contemplate human affairs. On January 1, 1933, we are reminded, Hitler was on the brink of losing everything he once thought he had a chance of gaining. His National Socialist Party had suffered a major defeat in the last election; the devastated German economy seemed, finally, ready for an upturn; and the president of the nation, the old general and war hero Paul von Hindenburg, in his eighties, had as much contempt as ever for Hitler and the Nazi thugs who accompanied him on his never-ending circuit of hate—one stop after another given to 20  speeches fueled with the hysteria of prejudice—a source of satisfaction for some who were socially down on their luck, for others who were psychologically vulnerable. Yet four weeks and two days later Hitler had been summoned to the president’s office, given the chancellorship—and the rest is the twentieth-century disaster we all know, or ought to know and never forget. ToreadProfessorTurner’schronicleistogobackintime,toholdone’s breath as the world itself (its decent side) hangs in the balance—to hope against hope that somehow the then-chancellor, Kurt von Schleicher, would prevail in his earnest efforts to rescue a badly wounded economy. Allthewhile,ofcourse,oneknowswhatwillhappen—evenasahistorian’s narrative gifts keep one very much interested and constantly instructed. In a last, Tolstoyan meditation on history (“Determinacy, Contingency , and Responsibility”) that belongs to the speculative tradition of the long, reflective epilogue on the last pages of War and Peace, Turner makescleartheroleofluck,goodandbad,inthefortunesofHitler,notto mentiontherestofuswhostillhavetoconsiderwhathisrulemeant—that one of the great, so-called “civilized” nations could make a mockery of that adjectival description of it, and that a campaign of gutter hate could eventually enlist the support, in one rationalized form or another, of the philosopher Martin...