Defying Hitler: A Memoir

by Sebastian Haffner

Book Overview

Written in 1939 and unpublished until 2000, Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany offers a unique portrait of the lives of ordinary German citizens between the wars. Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait of a country in constant flux: from the rise of the First Corps, the right-wing voluntary military force set up in 1918 to suppress Communism and precursor to the Nazi storm troopers, to the Hitler...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312421133
• ISBN13: 9780312421137
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A book about then -- and now?

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 st

a life in Germany from 1914 to the 1930s

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.

Moving Personal Story

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.

The Growth of Nazism, Told First Hand

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.Re

How Germans were turned into wolves who hunted other humans

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