“Ghostly and unreal”

From Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. Oliver Pretzel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). “Sebastian Haffner” was the pseudonym of the German journalist and historian Raimund Pretzel. He is writing about what he calls “the Nazi revolution” of March 1933.

Among the events of that month: the leader of the German Communist Party was arrested and imprisoned; the National Socialist Party received a plurality of votes in federal elections; a first concentration camp was opened; and the Enabling Act was passed. As Wikipedia explains, it was “a law that gave the German Cabinet — most importantly, the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler — the power to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or President Paul von Hindenburg.”

I felt, intensely, the choking, nauseous character of it all, but I was unable to grasp its constituent parts and place them in an overall order. Each attempt was frustrated and veiled by those endless, useless, vain discussions in which we attempted again and again to fit the events into an obsolete, unsuitable scheme of political ideas. How eerie these discussions now seem when an accident of memory throws up a scrap of one of them. In spite of all our historical and cultural education, how completely helpless we were to deal with something that just did not feature in anything we had learned! How meaningless our explanations, how infinitely stupid the attempts at justification, how hopelessly superficial the jury-rigged constructions with which the intellect tried to cover up the proper feeling of dread and disgust. How stale all the isms we brought up. I shudder to think of it.

Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background. I still went to the Kammergericht, the law was still practiced there, as though it still meant something, and the Jewish judge still presided in his robes, quite unmolested. However, his colleagues now treated him with a certain tactful delicacy, like one does somebody suffering from a serious disease. I still phoned my girlfriend Charlie. We went to the cinema, had a meal in a small wine bar, drank Chianti, and went dancing together. I still saw my friends, had discussions with acquaintances. Family birthdays were still celebrated as they always had been. But while in February we could still question whether all this did not represent a triumph of indestructible reality over the Nazis’ carryings-on, now it was no longer possible to deny that daily life itself had become hollow and mechanical. Every minute merely confirmed the victory of the enemy forces flooding in from all sides.

[Kammergericht: “the highest state court, for the city-state of Berlin, Germany.”]