In the Belly of the Beast

...In fact...

...Initially "the Jewish judge" who ranked as chief justice of the court Haffner worked for "still presided in his robes," although "his colleagues now treated him with a tactful delicacy, like one does somebody suffering from a serious disease...

...Haffner testifies that a good many of those he knew who went over to the Nazis expected the resurgence of Germany to occur in "the humane forms usual to a civilized nation," and would have been shocked to hear that "torture chambers and officially decreedpogroms" were in the offing...

...anger and humiliation over Germany's collapse in World War I; resentment at being blamed for starting the War and then being saddled with huge reparations payments...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "American Jewish Year Book...

...In August 1938 a young German lawyer and journalist with the unlikely name of Raimund Pretzel arrived in England, ostensibly to write a series of articles for a German newspaper...

...He feels that a perverse "fascination with the boggy, dripping cesspool [Hitler] represented," combined with the lethargy of the opposition—"'We' had no alternative party, no banner to carry"—produced "the hypnotic trance" which led Germany to perdition...

...Haffner makes much of his generation's inability to cultivate an inner life...

...When civil war broke out in the aftermath of the Kaiser's abdication, and "power lay in the streets," Haffner and his friends, "middle-class boys, who moreover had only just been roughly jolted out of a four-year-long patriotic intoxication," were "naturally against the Red revolutionaries...

...The book's high point is Haffner's firsthand account of the slow yet inexorable moral corruption of the judiciary after Hitler came to power...

...Defying Hitler adds a new voice to the debate...

...Instead of developing their own personalities, as he believed non-Germans had no trouble doing—the Frenchman "eating and drinking," the Englishman cultivating gardens—his German peers needed "the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere...

...Oliver Pretzel had his father's work published in German in 2000, under the title Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914-1933 (The Story of a German: Memoirs 1914-1933), and it topped the nonfiction best-seller list for 42 weeks...

...Perhaps defeat and re-education have truly changed the national psyche—though the possibility remains that the postwar experience is an anomaly, doomedtogo the way of Weimar...

...And with each Nazi success, more of the recalcitrants caved in, arguing, "But he has achieved what no one else achieved...

...Embarrassed, the other judges "coughed," but hastened to say, '"Of course we agree with your opinion....'" One of Haffner's young fellow lawyers was more cynical, explaining why he, an opponent of Nazism, was going along with the regime: "Don't fancy that there's anything to be done against the Fascists now...

...More important, he surveyed the scene from a comfortable position in German society...

...and, finally, the evil genius of Hitler...

...disgust with the democratic Weimar Constitution, seen as having been imposed on the nation...

...A rough outline found with the typescript indicates that Haffner intended the narrative to go up to his departure from Germany...

...It was not the generation that fought and lost World War I that brought Hitler to power, claims Haffner...

...His memoir, therefore, is a sober report from one who lived physically unscathed in the belly of the beast...

...Among the eccentric "saviors' who stepped forward that year was one Adolf Hitler, whose attempted coup in Munich was quickly put down, though not before Haffner's classics teacher told his pupils "that within a few years we would all be soldiers again...

...This memoir has interesting implications for historians of the Nazi ascension to power...

...Choosing a new name—Sebastian Haffner—to keep the Nazis from retaliating against his relatives, he went on to a distinguished career as a journalist and historian in England, where he died in 1999...

...Historians have suggested several factors that are not mutually exclusive: an ineradicable German penchant for authoritarian leadership and/or anti-Semitism...

...That judge was soon transferred to an administrative position...

...Once Hitler became chancellor the claim to be playing for time was another way to rationalize acquiescence...

...Pretzel, a non-Jew, was fleeing to join and marry a Jewish woman pregnant with their first child (they were not allowed to marry in Germany, according to the Nuremberg Laws), who had already managed to escape...

...But he left off writing after getting to the events of fall 1933, because at that point the Seeker and Warburg publishing house commissioned him to write a book on Germany "for English propagandists...

...After believing his government's propaganda about victory upon victory, Haffner recalls, "the merciless language of defeat" in 1918 "just would not fit into my head...

...Before Hitler took power in 1933, people in Haffner's bourgeois circles did not see anti-Semitism as intrinsic to Nazi ideology, but as Hitler's own personal eccentricity...

...He recalls that as late as 1930 Hitler was "still widely regarded as a somewhat embarrassing figure," despite the fact that Nazi representation in the Reichstag jumped from 12 to 107 in the first elections held since the onset of the Depression...

...He was replaced by a young Nazi lawyer who opened each court session with the Nazi salute and "Sieg heil" and the veteran jurists "thereupon made a vague gesture with their right arms" and mumbled something inaudible...

...Not long after, Haffner learned that all those in his job category...

...Haffner dismisses the Nazi platform as promises of "everything to everybody," except for two things Hitler really meant: restoring Germany as a world power through war, and "anarchic looting...

...Looking back at the paramilitary Free Corps, who did the dirty work of putting down the Communists for the benefit of the Weimar regime, Haffner now saw "the later Nazi storm troopers...

...As a young Prussian studying to become a lawyer and civil servant like his proudly patriotic and moderately liberal father, he could easily have done what many of his close friends and colleagues did—become a Nazi, or simply gone along with the regime...

...Associate Director of Research, American Jewish Committee One of the unresolved puzzles of 20th-century history is how the Nazis, the personification of barbarism, were able not only to attain power in the citadel of Western culture that was Germany, but also to maintain it till military defeat...

...Decent Germans convinced themselves that "the amateurish, dilettantish" aspects of the regime could not last—the Nazis would surely be forced out and responsible conservatives would replace them...

...Pretzel assures the English reader that "the German state forensic labo ratories" spent two months examining each page of the original, and concluded that the entire work was completed before the War...

...Ominous words, and prophetic...

...Neither a Jew nor a Leftist—not politically active at all, in fact—he wasn't personally threatened by the Nazi revolution...

...Afterward, while perusing his father's papers, Oliver Pretzel, Haffher's son conceived in Germany and bom in England, found a fascinating typescript in German...

...The hyperinflation of 1923, in Haffner's experience, "prepared Germany, not specifically for Nazism, but for any fantastic adventure" by destroying the traditional values of thrift, savings and hard work...

...A voice from the grave, it has something urgent to say...

...It was then that he knew he had no future in Germany...

...Refendais—the lowest rung on the German judicial ladder—would have to attend "training camps" for "military and sporting exercises and ideological indoctrination sessions to prepare them for their great task as German people's judges...

...He never completed the memoir...

...He is sure that most of those who voted for Hitler's party "would probably have avoided asking him for a light if they had met him on the street...

...Skeptics charged that alterations must have been introduced into the type script after 1945...

...Perhaps, he speculates, the "colorless towns and their all too industrious, efficient, and conscientious businesses and organizations" engendered a boredom so deep that the only escape was "overpowering, cheap mass intoxication...

...How, then, does Haffner's psychocultural determinism square with the stable and democratic Germany that has lasted now for more than 50 years...

...In an Afterword to his English translation, titled Defying Hitler (which is more dramatic but less accurate, since defiance is not the theme), Pretzel suggests that the book was popular in Germany because it "makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible, and it shows how difficult resistance was, but it also demonstrates that it was plain from the outset what they stood for...

...Rather, it was the author's own generation, bora in the first decade of the century and thus too young to fight, "who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities...

...On the other hand, Haffner certainly implies that only the German people, with their allegedly empty inner lives and need for some public force to endow their existence with meaning, could have produced a Nazi regime...

...Haffner had a keen journalistic eye and a gift for language that survives in translation...

...most of the veterans, unlike Hitler himself, were disillusioned with the rhetoric of struggle and battle...

...economic chaos —first the wild postwar inflation, then the Great Depression...

...Haffner beautifully captures the change in tone from the "calm certainty" of predictions of the Nazi downfall in the early days, to the "ever more desperate self-deception" that marked the same sentiment as time went on...

...Indeed, so clearsighted is Haffner's account that soon after the German edition came out doubts were raised about its authenticity...

...The "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has attributed to the German people to explain Hitler's triumph—in hindsight, after the Holocaust—is nowhere to be found in Haffner's account, written prior to World War II...

...The Nazi chief judge began ignoring precedent— something utterly alien to his legalistically trained Prussian colleagues—and cited Hitler instead...

...We republicans must howl with the wolves...

...It was Haffner's unfinished memoir about his early years, begun in 1939, that sought through autobiography to understand how Hitler came to power...