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Defying Hitler: A Memoir ReviewThe 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.
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