- Mayer, Milton.
They Thought They Were Free.
2nd. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1955] 1966.
ISBN 0-226-51192-8.
-
The author, a journalist descended from German Jewish
immigrants to the United States, first visited Nazi Germany
in 1935, spending a month in Berlin attempting to obtain,
unsuccessfully, an interview with Hitler, notwithstanding
the assistance of his friend, the U.S. ambassador, then
travelled through the country reporting for a U.S. magazine.
It was then that he first discovered, meeting with ordinary
Germans, that Nazism was not, as many perceived it then and
now, “the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless
millions” (p. xviii), but rather a mass movement
grounded in the “little people” with a broad
base of non-fanatic supporters.
Ten years after the end of the war, Mayer arranged a one year
appointment as a visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt
and moved, with his family, to a nearby town
of about 20,000 he calls “Kronenberg”.
There, he spent much of his time cultivating the friendship of
ten men he calls “my ten Nazi friends”, all of whom
joined the party for various reasons ranging from ideology,
assistance in finding or keeping employment, to admiration of
what they saw as Hitler's success (before the war) in restoring
the German economy and position in the world. A large part
of the book is reconstructed conversations with these people,
exploring the motivations of those who supported Hitler (many
of whom continued, a decade after Germany's disastrous
defeat in the war he started, to believe the years of his rule
prior to the war were Germany's golden age). Together they
provide a compelling picture of life in a totalitarian
society as perceived by people who liked it.
This is simultaneously a profoundly enlightening and disturbing
book. The author's Nazi friends come across as almost completely
unexceptional, and one comes to understand how the choices they
made, rooted in the situation they found themselves, made perfect
sense to them. And then, one cannot help but ask, “What would
I have done in the same circumstances?” Mayer has no truck with
what has come to be called multiculturalism—he is a firm
believer in national character (although, of course, only on the
average, with large individual variation), and he explains how
history, over almost two millennia, has forged the German
character and why it is unlikely to be changed by military defeat and
a few years of occupation.
Apart from the historical insights, this book is highly topical
when a global superpower is occupying a very different country,
with a tradition and history far more remote from its own
than was Germany's, and trying to instill institutions with no
historical roots there. People forget, but ten years after
the end of World War II many, Mayer included, considered the
occupation of Germany to have been a failure. He writes (p. 303):
The failure of the Occupation could not, perhaps, have
been averted in the very nature of the case. But it might
have been mitigated. Its mitigation would have required the
conquerors to do something they had never had to do in
their history. They would have had to stop doing what they
were doing and ask themselves some questions, hard questions,
like, What is the German character? How did it get
that way? What is wrong with its being that way? What
way would be better, and what, if anything, could anybody
do about it?
Wise questions, indeed, for any conqueror of any country.
The writing is so superb that you may find yourself re-reading
paragraphs just to savour how they're constructed. It is also
thought-provoking to ponder how many things, from the perspective of
half a century later, the author got wrong. In his view the occupation
of West Germany would fail to permanently implant democracy, that
German re-militarisation and eventual aggression was almost
certain unless blocked by force, and that the project of European
unification was a pipe dream of idealists and doomed to failure.
And yet, today, things seem to have turned out pretty well for
Germany, the Germans, and their neighbours. The lesson of this may
be that national character can be changed, but changing it
is the work of generations, not a few years of military occupation.
That is also something modern-day conquerors, especially Western
societies with a short attention span, might want to bear in mind.
September 2006 