I don’t know how I feel about this one.
The effort and research are great. Milton Mayer has the patience of a saint to be able to put up with it. I think in finally reading this (which I’ve been meaning to do for a while), I’m dealing with a It’s Not You It’s Me situation.
There was a time pre-Covid where I really believed most Trump-loving people in my life would get over it. That they’d see the error of their ways, their hearts would fill with regret and even if they didn’t become super progressive, they’d work to make the world a better place.
Yeah that didn’t happen. And I think people who think it happened with Germany might be in for a rude surprise.
Generations after WWII certainly felt repentant, at least until these last ten years with the rise of Alternative fur Deustchland. But this image we have of a repentant post-war Germany is not accurate. By interviewing ten people in the town of Hesse (listed here as Kronenburg for reasons I don’t fully understand), Mayer presents a picture on the religious, sociological, and personal reasons these ten people went Nazi and never really looked back.
There are a lot of incongruities: the anti-Nazi pastor who everyone hates because he’s boring, the guy who never joined the party but was a devout rule follower and had no problem diming out others, the ones who truly believe that by joining the party, they were making the world safer because had they not joined…things somehow would have been worse by the Nazis acting aggressively within the state.
Reading it made me more frustrated, not at the people (though they suck and it kind of annoyed me that Milton Mayer, no matter how well-intentioned, kept referring to them unironically as his “Nazi friends”) but at myself and my own situation. Yeah I’m firmly anti-MAGA. Yeah it bothers me that so many people I know and like — or once liked — are bear-hugging a chance to go Nazi. And yet, as Mayer challenges us on how easy it is to slip into patterns: I wake up every morning, put on clothes made in inhumane conditions, burn the planet with fossil fuels, tacitly endorse a government that’s been conducting borderless global war since 1946, bypass the continually rampant racism and xenophobia, sit by while women make pennies on the dollar and suffer in silence. No I’m not a Nazi. Yes I’d like the world to be a better place. But how does one stand up to all of it?
And I think that’s where the rub is for this book because it’s not like most books that examine Nazi Germany: you’re going to read into it even more your own experience because any one of these people can be you. The challenge is to know where the line is.
I will continue to be hurt and disappointed in my MAGA friends and family. And others will continue to be hurt by and disappointed in me. The writer concludes with the rise of communist leanings in Western German youth by saying he hopes the Germans he knows do not take their fears of communism out by electing another militaristic nationalist government. There is not much we can control in the States but we do have a say over that.