With shadows of authoritarianism rising around the world, Cass R. Sunstein reviews three books on life in Nazi Germany for the New York Review of Books.
The books, They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner, and Broken Lives by Konrad Jarausch, do not focus on the well-known historic figures, but explore how ordinary people navigated such a terrible time. The contemporary parallels are chilling:
With evident fatigue, the baker reported, “One had no time to think. There was so much going on.” His account was similar to that of one of Mayer’s colleagues, a German philologist in the country at the time, who emphasized the devastatingly incremental nature of the descent into tyranny and said that “we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.” The philologist pointed to a regime bent on diverting its people through endless dramas (often involving real or imagined enemies), and “the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise.” In his account, “each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’” that people could no more see it “developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
(via Kottke)