Kingdom of the Blind:
WERNER, ALFRED
Kingdom of the Blind They Thought They Were Free. By Milton Mayer. Chicago. 346 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by Alfred Werner Editor and critic; Associate Editor, "Chicago Jewish Forum'' HAROUN...
...But he could not foresee that, two or three decades later, the majority of his compatriots would show the mentality of brainless, spineless, emasculated helots...
...America is proud of the boom in West Germany, created with millions of U.S...
...Apparently not, for several years later, when Mayer interviewed them, they still thought that Hitler had been good for Germany (even though they did not dream of reviving Hitlerism...
...Even a Thomas Mann could write, during the First World War, that the German people would never be "able to love political democracy," and that the "much-decried authoritarian state" was "the form of state most suitable to the German people...
...Associate Editor, "Chicago Jewish Forum'' HAROUN al-Raschid disguised himself as a commoner and mingled with the crowds in order to conduct his own Gallup Poll...
...He succeeded, however, in concealing his Jewish origin...
...Did they know of the atrocities that occurred in the concentration camps...
...He might be here [i.e., in America] under certain conditions...
...The American army of occupation, we are told, failed because it did not understand and reckon with the German character, and because it helped, in some ways, to perpetuate Nazi features...
...John's "escape" to East Germany, we must recall that he had reason to look askance at the U.S.-financed espionage group in the Bonn Republic, directed by a Nazi general who had been the Nazi intelligence chief in Soviet Russia during the war...
...but could not disguise that he was an "Ami" and a "professor...
...They did not find it difficult to believe that those Jews who were taken to concentration camps were traitors...
...But did these Germans at least realize in 1945 that they had been misled...
...those who were not were allowed to leave Germany with all their property—and this thought numbed whatever twinge a bad conscience might have caused...
...In the 1933-45 period, they were motivated partly by fear, partly by expediency...
...To transform first-class totalitarians into first-class freemen, to use his phrase, is an almost hopelessly difficult task...
...It is true that the spiritual climate of Germany favored the rise of totalitarianism...
...They Thought They Were Free is a sincere book...
...Since they all got jobs through the pseudo-prosperity of the Third Reich, they did not care about the form of government...
...Mayer's report on the burning of the Kronenberg synagogue in 1938, based on recollections of those who had a hand in the crime or at least were in the town, may in part be fiction...
...yet, they wholeheartedly accepted what Nietzsche called the "anti-Semitic swindle" and even tried to convince Mayer that the Jews were as bad as the Nazis said they were...
...Judging from Mayer's book, there simply were not many such individuals in Hitler's Germany...
...Anyone so much as hinting that there might be something wrong about the action was told by Mayer's "friend," Sturmfuhrer Schwenke: "You heard the Standartenfuhrer...
...He might, under certain conditions, be I." Giving us the case histories of ten average "Kronenbergers" with whom he had many lengthy conversations, Mayer tries to make us understand why in 1933, or shortly thereafter, these ten endorsed Nazism (several of them with mental reservations, or even with a slight revulsion...
...He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions...
...They did not, Mayer asserts, because they did not want to know...
...Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed" is his perfect summary...
...They might admit that some Nazi leaders were evil, but not Hitler—who, alas, in his innocence, had selected bad advisers...
...They could have found out only if they had made an effort, but they conveniently did not bother...
...I felt—and I feel," he writes in the introduction, "that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man...
...Without condoning Dr...
...Every informed person knows that in Mussolini's Italy individuals, from the philosopher Croce down to plain laborers, brazenly ignored the tenets of Fascism and got away with it...
...None of the ten ever interfered with the anti-Semitic activities of the state, not even clandestinely, although all of them admitted to having known at least one "decent Jew...
...Milton Mayer, while a visiting professor of the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt University, lived for a year in a nearby Hessian town which he calls "Kronenberg" (Marburg...
...Mayer would like to be optimistic about Germany's future, but he is honest enough to concede that the situation is a rather bad one...
...dollars...
...As a Jew, he might not have made friends of the ten Germans of Kronenberg who opened their hearts to him...
...If these ten Germans are typical (and we hope they are not), then there is very little good to be expected from the new Germany...
...and the very mention of the Party bigshot suppressed whatever doubts might have existed...
...still—se non e vero e ben trovato...
...Yet, the unflinching obedience of little men like these permitted the core of Hitlerite criminals to carry out shootings and gassings...
...Of the ten, only one, the Sturmfuhrer who participated in the destruction of the Kronenberg synagogue, committed an act that was evil...
...They had no personal experiences to support anti-Semitism...
...We are glad that Mayer recalls a 1952 episode, almost forgotten by now: Democratic Germans in Hesse uncovered a fascist youth group, which had been established with American taxpayers' money for the purpose of "removing" undesirable politicians, among them many Social Democrats, in an emergency...
...While written in a light, conversational style, it is based on a lot of hard thinking...
...He describes them as decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest individuals, but somehow fails—through no fault of his own —to exonerate them...
...but while there are mink coats and Mercedes limousines, there are also men scavenging among the garbage cans...
...The Germans among whom he lived always addressed him by his title...
...Worst of all, our conduct has produced widespread cynicism in German youth...
...Mayer did his utmost to meet the Germans of this small college town with impartiality, even sympathy, perhaps leaning a bit backward to prove his lack of bias...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 17
