Book Time #25: Ordinary Germans
Hey everyone,
Something weird happened with the last email I sent where a lot of people didn’t get it. I have no idea why! Hopefully that won’t happen with this one. So I’m linking to it here because it had a few announcements.
Thanks as always for reading.
Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century, Konrad Jarausch
Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945, Florian Huber
I have become interested in the experience of ordinary Germans during the rise of Nazism. You know, for no particular reason whatsoever. There are classics in the field I could have tackled, but I chose to read two lesser known and more recent works on the subject. It was a harrowing couple of weeks but well worth the intellectual adventure.
I felt compelled to read Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself based on the title alone (browsing library stacks is the original and undefeated recommendation algorithm). I have read far more about World War II—my very first intellectual passion—than I care to admit, but I had never heard of this mass suicide of Germans in 1945. One could dismiss the title as literary clickbait, but it provides a key service: dissuading the faint of heart from going anywhere near it. Some of the anecdotes in this book are among the most horrific I have ever encountered. And Huber handles such a morally complicated subject with care. That being said, I found the second half of the book to be weaker than the first. Here, Huber tries to explain how the experiences of ordinary Germans during Nazism could have left them feeling that the end of the regime should mean the end of their own lives. I don’t feel satisfied by the answers given, but perhaps that’s inevitable.
Jarausch’s Broken Lives takes a far more enlightening approach to a similar theme. Jarausch studied some 80 memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories, and other detailed accounts created by the “Weimar Generation,” or Germans born in the 1920s (In the acknowledgements he gives credit for this whole project idea to the random reader who posted a critical review of his previous book on Amazon). These Germans came from a variety of social classes, religions, and regions of the country. Some resisted the Nazi regime. Most did not. Some fled communist East Germany, many didn’t. Some were Jews persecuted by the Nazis, most weren’t. What ensues in Broken Lives is not an oral history or emotional narrative Warmth of Other Suns style, but a synthesis passing little to no judgment on what is probably the most judged generation in history.
Some might prefer a more tactile history of the close-your-eyes-and-you-can-smell-it type. But I for one am grateful Jarausch eschewed that approach, which is butchered far more than it is pulled off (Huber has short sections that were almost too much for me; one of my deepest held beliefs is any piece of writing that begins with a weather report is bad writing). Instead, his method is to draw broad insights that apply to most of his subjects, while picking a handful of examples to highlight each point. The effect is often devastating. It creates an episodic relationship with each person. We experience them as different people at different times in their lives. This is fitting, considering these people found themselves in such vastly different circumstances from one decade to the next.
The end result is one of the most intellectually and emotionally challenging books I have ever read. All anyone ever wants to know about Germans under Nazism is: How could they? But this question is usually posed rhetorically, to ascribe guilt or to suggest we would never do such a thing. It is rarely asked with sincerity.
Most of the memoirists wrote their reflections late in life, largely to process the trauma they had experienced and then typically repressed. What did they find when they looked deep inside themselves? Some remained in denial. Others accepted total guilt by association even if they hadn’t personally “done anything.” But most occupied some sort of middle ground: they couldn’t control when and where they were born; they thought it was all talk until it was too late; they knew about the camps but not what happened there; they served just like any soldier in their country’s army during war; they were duped by a gang of criminals that took over the government; they were told the enemy was doing things that were even worse; they looked the other way so they didn’t have to resist; they were lied to by the media.
To be sure, some did fight back. Some did dissent. They are largely not among the voices in this book, because dissenters rarely lived long enough to write their memoirs.
What was so challenging about this book was how it forced me to view the memoirists not as “Former Nazis” - as Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself and nearly every other book about the period frames them - but as people whose lives spanned much more than that 12-year period. By not defining their long lives by the period under Nazism, one reaches an uncomfortable but inevitable conclusion. There was nothing terribly distinctive about these people. They all hoped for the same things we do: Happy, healthy children, prosperity, peace. They were promised these things - and thought they were getting them, and indeed were for a short period—by a regime that ultimately left them with the opposite.
At one point in my life I may have found it unfathomable how a nation of people could be so wrong about what their government would provide them, how they could have spent so long going in the opposite direction of what they wanted. This is getting less and less difficult for me to imagine. I recognize how we are all captives of our own time and place. The scope of personal agency in a big, complicated world is very narrow. My fear is not the lack of control we have over such things. It is that the lessons learned painfully and at terrible cost by previous generations will be lost along with them.