history
...e them a taste for excitement, for marching, for militarism. When Hitler came, his silent promise to repeat the great war game, and win it, easily found a receptive audience. Haffner had lost his jingoism by the decade after the war, though his contemporaries had not. He was able to watch as troops of brownshirts began to follow a leader with "exciting coarseness of his speeches, which reached new levels of vulgarity in the extravagance of their threats and their unconcealed sadism." His "personal appearance was thoroughly repellent - the pimp's forelock, the hoodlum's elegance... the endless speechifying, the epileptic behavior with its wild gesticulations and foaming at the mouth." It was obvious to Haffner even in the 1930s that "Hitler wanted to bring about the millennium by a massacre of all the Jews," an intention that was not kept secret. These words are written in defiance of historians who say that genocide was begun only as the total war enwrapped Hitler and his loyal followers. At his father's suggestion, Haffner began to study law and became a law clerk in Prussia's courts, with the promise of rising in the legal ranks. Haffner loved the legal system for many reasons, not the least of which is that the law functioned from day to day, undisturbed by the moral tangle caused by the Nazi revolution. He thought this a victory over the Nazis. But one day, while he was going through legal documents within the quiet and solemn library of the court, he heard a growing disturbance in the corridor and doors being banged. A Jewish clerk packed his papers and left. There were shouts of, "Out with the Jews!" and a few of the clerks giggled that they were already gone. A Jewish attorney, a wounded veteran of the previous war, "caused a fight" and was beaten up. Soon a brownshirt was inspecting the nose of Haffner himself and asking if he was an Aryan. "Before I had a chance to think, I said 'Yes.'... What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace!... I had failed my very first test." Haffner asks in the book why anyone ought to be interested in him; there are huge events happening around him, but he is a minor law clerk. He reflects that reading ordinary history books may give the impression that generals and heads of state make decisions that turn into history, but that it is wise to examine the experience of the "anonymous others" which seem to be only the objects of history. Looking at the individual is a way of looking at defiance, he seems to say, although in the memoir as far as it goes, he is not proud of the limited defiance he showed. In addition to going along at the law court, he is ashamed of how he had to participate in a training camp for ideological indoctrination because he, along with all law candidates, had to do so before taking exams. The young men with him halfheartedly joined in the military instruction, singalongs, and coaching on how to give a proper "Heil Hitler!" But in the weeks that followed, while they didn't get indoctrinated into true Nazis, they did become comrades, a comradeship that the Nazis would use. "By acceding to the rules of the game that was being played with us, we automatically changed, not quite into Nazis, but certainly into usable Nazi material." He recounts how at the end, the national anthem was struck, and "...we all raised our arms. A few hesitated like me, it was so dreadfully shaming, but did we want to sit our examinations or not? For the first time, I had the feeling, so strong it left a taste in my mouth, "This doesn't count. This isn't me. It doesn't count,' and with this feeling I, too, raised my arm and held it stretched out ahead of me." As one can see he fell into the trance. The incidents Haffner describes, like violence in the streets, intimidation of Jews in their homes, or the attempts of others to flee, are familiar to anyone who has read about the period, or even merely seen movies. They are newly seen by Haffner...