Mayer's book was published in 1955 and consisted of post-war interviews with normal German people (janitor, baker, teacher) who had been Nazi party members. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your uld never have imagined.With an eye on the current political situations in the US, Turkey, Russia, and China, Cass Sunstein reviews three books that shed light on how the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century by Konrad Jarausch, and Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealti mes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone.you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. "What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people.Īnd it became always wider.the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think.for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.Įach step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'.must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.Įach act is worse than the last, but only a little worse.
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