“The illusion of superiority”

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 describes four responses to the Nazis’ rise to power: the reluctant capitulation of “a little pact with the devil,” bitter hopelessness, willful ignorance, and “withdrawal into an illusion: preferably the illusion of superiority”:

Those that surrendered to this clung to the amateurish, dilettantish aspects that Nazi politics undoubtedly exhibited at first. Every day they tried to convince themselves and others that this could not continue for long, and maintained an attitude of amused criticism. They spared themselves the perception of the fiendishness of Nazism by concentrating on its childishness, and misrepresented their position of complete, powerless subjugation as that of superior, unconcerned onlookers. They found it both comforting and reassuring to be able to quote a new joke or a new article about the Nazis from the London Times. They were people who predicted the imminent end of the regime, at first with calm certainty, later, as the months went by, with ever more desperate self-deception. The worst came for them when the Nazi Party visibly consolidated itself and had its first successes: they had no weapons to cope with these.

Haffner’s response was to leave Germany.

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