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Defying Hitler: A Memoir

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The title of my review is a paraphrase of Haffner's description of Hitler's sinister accomplishment. He certainly doesn't pull any punches, and is unsparing on the moral failings of his fellow Germans in the early 1930s. This book was written in 1939, shortly after the author's escape to England. Although Haffner became a distinguished journalist and historian, he never published this book during his lifetime; it was discovered by his son and published after the author's death at the age of 91. Perhaps, like many war veterans, the experiences tangled up with the manuscript were so painful and so personal that the author couldn't bear to revisit them (a chapter was published on the 50th anniversary of an event that it describes).

What Haffner--and his son, who is the assured and elegant translator--have given us is one of the most compelling and insightful descriptions of the period that has been written. It can only be compared to the diary of Otto Klemperer as a revelatory description of how a nation of people, not so different from other nations at the time or indeed of any nation today, could descend into barbarism and criminality on the vast scale of the Third Reich.

From the opening sentence the 1920s and 30s in Germany is evoked: "This is the story of a duel." Specialists will be aware of the importance of actual duelling in middle and upper class German society as late at WWI, and its endurance as a symbol thereafter, and with this characterisation of his personal struggle against the Nazi State, Haffner seductively invites his reader into the authentic atmosphere of the period.

Scholars who have thought deeply about the Nazi period recognise it as the final culminating phase of a second Thirty Year's War that began in 1914; indeed, Haffner's explanation for the Nazi catastrophe is based upon his view that the generation who grew up during WWI, NOT the soldiers but the children who experienced the excitement but not the misery and death, were the key constituency for the Nazis.

Haffner's use of generational analysis is a powerful conceptual tool that is much more understood and accepted these days--Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation", however correct or incorrect it may be, has been a huge best seller--and Haffner in 1939 stumbled upon this type of analysis as he sought to describe how Hitler had come to power.

"Defying Hitler" is also the intense, personal description of the crisis that Haffner and his family and friends underwent during the rise of Hitler, conveyed with the power of a novelist. Haffner succeeds in humanising the Germans he knew and lived among without ever downplaying the horror of the decisions that they made, as he shows that it was all too clear what the consequences of those decisions were likely to be.

This is a unique book and it is highly recommended for both readers who have read almost nothing about the period, as well as readers who are thoroughly familiar with the subject, and yet are still trying to come to terms with how such a terrible catastrophe could occur in a civilised nation.

Sebastian Haffner was the pen name of a German-born journalist named Raimund Pretzel who fled Germany for England in 1938 and became known as a "British" journalist and historian during and after the war. This manuscript, which describes the Germany of his youth and the rise of Hitler, was written shortly after his escape, but filed away when the war broke out. His son discovered it only after Haffner's death in 1999 and it was a smash bestseller in Germany the following year.

The author describes what it was like for thoughtful, liberal Germans to see their country taken over by monsters, and explains how so many "ordinary" Germans could have failed to resist, and even participated. (I'd be curious to know whether the title is his; Haffner is very hard on his fellow Germans and himself, and it would not have surprised me, now that I've read the book, if he would have settled for something closer to "Succumbing to Hitler" or "Marching In Step." There's precious little defying of Hitler in this account, as Haffner would be the first to admit.)

It starts slow by analyzing German politics and society after the First World War -- few readers aside from German history nuts will recognize names like Rathenau, Stresemann, and Bruening -- and I expected to have to give it three stars, despite the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the writing.

But try not to let that discourage you. When Haffner gets to the personal narrative about his Jewish friends and girlfriend, the changes in his Berlin society and neighborhood, and the grotesque "training camp" which he and other aspiring lawyers were forced to attend before being allowed to take their qualifying exam, the book becomes gripping. (And he takes a few pages to apologize and justify this very aspect!)

His description of the rationalizations, the delusions, the mutual suspicions and pressures on ordinary Germans -- even the intellectual elite -- is most illuminating. Haffner beautifully describes the poisoned pill of "comradeship," which was imposed on the German populace at more or less every level, just as it is in any military organization or religious cult, and how Germans were, in his estimation, particularly susceptible to it.

The account ends rather abruptly, and one wonders what happened to some of the players, but there is quite enough here to offer something new indeed about the history of Nazi Germany ... from the inside, on the street.

Haffner purposely does not give the "big picture" of the 19 years between 1914 and 1933. The general outline of German / European history during and after WW I should be known to the reader from elsewhere to get more out of reading "Defying Hitler". But what Haffner does provide is an excellent account of those years from the perspective of the educated middle class during the last years of the German Empire and the years of the Weimar Republic. He speaks of the daily struggles, the daily compromises, the tragic inabilities.
Key to understanding Nazism (and, as Haffner points out repeatedly, Communism) is, in my opinion, Haffner's account of the future judges' and attorneys' mandatory stay at a paramilitary training camp. He and other attendees critical of the Third Reich expected brain-washing lectures and seminars to get them and the Nazis on the same page. They are surprised to find that none of this happens. Their daily mind-numbing and de-individualizing camp routines (marching, singing nationalistic marching songs, cleaning the camp, shooting, cracking dehumanizing jokes with their "comrades") do the brain-washing in a much more subtle and effective way than lectures. The latter could have been countered by these future jurists with intellectual arguments, the former could not. As has been noted by other reviewers, the Nazis militarized the German people as a whole and exposed it thus to the entoxicating fumes of comradery that dissolved thinking individuals in a brainless mass.
Haffner's perspective often led me to ask myself: What would I have done? It was the little daily compromises he writes about that made me think this. E.g., in the camp: Should he, a firm anti-Nazi, refuse to wear the swastika, or was that too small a cause to die for as a martyr, right at the beginning of camp? How about using the "Hitler Gruss" (outstretched right arm), or laughing when "everybody" was laughing? At the end of a list of compromises, Haffner asks himself: Well, I thought I could make all these compromises because "my real self" wasn't really involved here, I was just acting -- but will that really be a valid excuse?
Nazis today, 60, 70 years after the events, often look like evil monsters. Haffner's contemporary perspective shows: It was more difficult to sort through all this, especially in practical terms, in camp and in "normal life". Nazis were also friendly to their "Aryan" peers, could be funny and quite likable. This is to say, under peer pressure and against acquaintances it was more difficult to resist than it often appears today. This is why this book has lessons for today and every time: It takes extreme courage to go against the stream of public opinion, for teenagers as well as adults. And there are only very few people who have the character and conscience to rise to that challenge.
A final question stuck in my mind: What really made Haffner different? Why did he not become a Nazi like so many of his friends and fellow lawyers?
Five stars for this fine account of a German who explains but does not excuse his fellow Germans.

This is an elegant book, written in 1939 but not published till after its author's death in 1999. It throws light on the endlessly absorbing question: How could Hitler take over the country so completely as he did. I found absorbing the account of the child growing up during the first World War, living thru the inflation of 1923, attaining manhood in the 1920s, and then all at once the ridiculous Nazis are in power and the nightmare begins. This is a well-told account, and of great insight.

How did it happen that Germany elevated the Nazis to power, and allowed them to create the worst nightmare of the last century? It is a question that has been argued about ever since, and as with all such big questions there are lots of answers and the sum of them always prove unsatisfactory; a mystery still remains. Nonetheless, a new part of the answer was published in Germany in 2000, and caused a sensation. The book, _Defying Hitler: A Memoir_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), was actually written in 1939 and had remained secret. It was written by Sebastian Haffner, the pen name of Raimund Pretzel, while he was in English exile from Germany. The manuscript was interrupted by the outbreak of war, at which time Haffner put it away in order to write a more urgent book on how the English might best win the war. Haffner went on to become a highly respected British journalist and man of letters. He forbade his son from looking through his old papers until after his death. He died in 1999, and his son, Oliver Pretzel, found the manuscript in a drawer. Having published it in the original German, Pretzel has now translated it into English. A valuable work, it not only throws fresh light on the rise of Nazi power, but gives vivid pictures of how life was lived as the dictatorship progressed.

Haffner traces some of the roots of the rise of Nazism come from The Great War. He was seven years old when the war erupted, and he recalls how invigorating the time was for him. The schoolboys' experience of war at home, Haffner says, gave them an indifference to lack of food, but more importantly it gave them a taste for excitement, for marching, for militarism. When Hitler came, his unspoken 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. 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 morass caused by the Nazi revolution. He thought this a triumph 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 fuss" 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." It is this sort of detail and introspection that make this book so valuable.

Regrettably, this is an unfinished narrative. How we would like, after such a memoir, to hear about how he became a novelist and journalist, and insisted on writing things he would not be ashamed of when the Nazis were defeated. He met a Jewish woman and married her, becoming guilty of violation of the race laws but somehow evading prosecution. He eventually arranged a visa to go work on articles about England, where he arranged to stay, even though he was interned in the camps for Germans. His son and translator has provided a small amount of this story to add to the truncated memoir, but Haffner's words speak in clear horror of the threat going on around him, and within him. It is an unforgettable addition to the histories of the time.

Sebastian Haffner's "Defying Hitler" is a rare gem that explains what is was about those in Germany between 1918 and 1933 that found a hearth in Hitler's promise of a glorious Fascist future.

1933 is the story's kernel when, as Haffner says, the dual begins. Hitler comes to power. It's the state versus the individual; the struggle for one's soul. It's the ordinary person (Haffner) up against Big Brother, Nazi style, with fangs exposed, talons sharpened, ready to strike.

Haffner probes the riddle of motivation and explains how for some Hitler was the hero for the hour to restore German's stature among the leading rank of nations. For others, it was join the cause or to yield to the alternative temptation of rejection or resistance. For Haffner himself the Nazis are a deadly pestilence that overturns the individual's capacity to live, to love, and enjoy life as one wants. For Haffner, this foot soldier for nondescript humanity, what does he do?

This is the real tease. Haffner later becomes a celebrated German writer and commentator. Written in 1939, he never actually completes this early work which his son Oliver only discovers after his father's death in 1999. Thankfully Oliver fills in the blanks and we are not going to spoil the story by revealing the outcome here.

Despite the abrupt end, it's not hard to see why this book became a best seller in Germany. Haffner writes with a beautiful cynical wit and has a grasp for history and the human condition. Champollion's Rosetta Stone provided a key to unlocking the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs. In its own way Haffner's "Defying Hitler" is the Rosetta Stone for Nazi Germany. It's a carriage for meaning and insight into not just a dark chapter of German history, but perhaps our own.

I found this to be an absorbing and moving account of one fairly ordinary person's experience in Germany of the 1920's and 30's. From a historical vantage point, it provides one valuable perspective of the rise of Hitler and why it was allowed to happen --- I'm reminding of the quote from Edmund Burke about evil triumphing because good people do nothing. Several times, Haffner apologizes for providing so much of his personal opinions and stories, but for me, the story of him and his friends was the most rewarding part of the book.

This memoir ends fairly abruptly, in late 1933, so we are left hanging, though the author's son, who translated the book into English, includes an afterward with details of the Haffner's life after 1933. Unfortunately, the abrupt ending leaves us in the dark about the fate of my favorite of Haffner's friends, his Carnival girlfriend Charlie, who was Jewish. I was very moved by the brief glimpses of their short romance and her devotion to her family.

I read the German version of Haffner's wonderful little book, Geschichte eines Deutschen (Story of a German). Sebastian Haffner uses his personal life story to explain the inexorable march of the German people into the catastrophe of the second World War, the Final Solution of the Jewish problem, the Holocaust.

The book ends with the end of 1933, one year after Hitler's Machtergreifung. The book is unfinished, eleven years of the history of the Third Reich remain to be told, but everything that will follow already seems inevitable, just weeks after the Nazis seized power. It is terrifying to see how easy it was to tear down the Weimar Republic, to suspend individual freedoms, to take away human rights.

I can't vouch for the quality of the English translation - judging by what is available at Amazon, it is excellent - but the German original is possibly the best that Haffner ever wrote.

Haffner spares nobody,least himself.The story encompasses the years 1907-1933,and in all fairness,I have to state,that I read the complete story,in a German edition,so I know what happened afterwards.
the author explains,taking himself and the people about him as living examples,how Hitler and his gang could seize power,and,subsequently,sink the German ship as deeply,as it sunk,morally,ethically,politically.
Most explanatory is the phase of 1933,when haffner describes how he,his decent friends,his father,tried to retire to small niches,to live some sort of biedermeier,and were uprooted by the nazi machinery,washed out of their holes of seeming innocence,
deprived of all means and space for inner emigration.
I don't want to spoil the exquisite joy,that reading Haffner's account provides,so in conclusion,let me say that Haffner is a journalist of a kind not found anymore,short,concise,to the point,in the original at least,of a unique style,that does not require a thousand words to draw a pandemonium of unheard of proportions.
Be sure to read the book,all books,by Haffner,if they do not enlighten you to their subjects,they will do your style a world of good.

If you are like me and you've always wondered just how an insane madman like Adolf Hitler came to power in a modern country like Germany than read Defying Hitler. The author, who describes his personal experiences of the time, pulls no punches and makes no excuses for the shift to radical nationalism in Germany in the 1930s.

The book is presented much like a diary recounting the author's life at specific times in Germany between WWI when he was a small child and 1933 when the Nazi regime began to reveal it's true face to the German people.

Sebastian Haffner presents his own theory about where this radical nationalism first developed and supports his theory with what he experienced.

It's an excellent book and a great read.