Sebastian Haffner - Defying Hitler: A Memoir

Defying Hitler: A Memoir

by Sebastian Haffner

translated from the German by Oliver Pretzel

Published by Plunkett Lake Press , April 2014

Sarah Haffner and Oliver Pretzel

Translation copyright Oliver Pretzel

First published in Germany by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt as Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914-1933

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For more information, visit www.plunkettlakepress.com

Contents

Chapters

Chapters

Chapters

Germany is nothing, each individual German is everything.

GOETHE, 1808

But first the most important thing:

What are you doing in these great times?

Great I say; for times seem great

to me, when each man, driven

half to death by the eras hate,

and standing in the place hes given,

Must willy-nilly contemplate

no less a thing than his own BEING!

A little breath, a seconds wait

May well suffice you catch my meaning?

PETER GAN, 1935

INTRODUCTION

My father, Sebastian Haffner, might not have been pleased to see this book published. He died in 1999 at the age of ninety-one, a celebrated German author and historical journalist with a reputation for books containing highly original, coolly and lucidly argued insights into the history of Germany in the twentieth century. This book, the first political book he wrote, was started in exile in England early in 1939. Abandoned in the autumn of that year, it may be original and lucid, but it is not cool. It is the passionate outburst of a young man whose career has been cut off and whose life has been turned inside out by his own countrymen, following a leader and an ideology he views only with contempt and disgust. In his old age, my father tended to be slightly ashamed of the early works he had published in England. What would he have thought of this one, unfinished, raw, and revealing so much of his inner self?

It describes his life and the political events in Germany from 1914, when he was seven years old, until 1933. The original plan was to continue the narrative up to the time of his emigration to England in August 1938, but the advent of the war caused him to stop working on the book, presumably because its theme is the question of how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power. Instead he started another one, whose subject was the more urgent question of how to deal with Nazi Germany.

The memoir deliberately avoids the use of my fathers real name, Raimund Pretzel, and so it seemed reasonable to publish it under his pseudonym, Sebastian Haffner. It is a mixture of autobiography and political analysis. Today the very reason that caused my father to lay it aside, together with its closeness to the events it describes, seem to me to give it its particular interest.

OLIVER PRETZEL

LONDON, NOVEMBER 2001

PROLOGUE

~ 1 ~

This is the story of a duel.

It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable, and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown private individual. The duel does not take place in what is commonly known as the sphere of politics; the individual is by no means a politician, still less a conspirator or an enemy of the state. Throughout, he finds himself very much on the defensive. He only wishes to preserve what he considers his integrity, his private life, and his personal honor. These are under constant attack by the government of the country he lives in, and by the most brutal, but often also clumsy, means.

With fearful menace the state demands that the individual give up his friends, abandon his lovers, renounce his beliefs and assume new, prescribed ones. He must use a new form of greeting, eat and drink in ways he does not fancy, employ his leisure in occupations he abhors, make himself available for activities he despises, and deny his past and his individuality. For all this, he must constantly express extreme enthusiasm and gratitude.

The individual is opposed to all of that, but he is ill prepared for the onslaught. He was not born a hero, still less a martyr. He is just an ordinary man with many weaknesses, having grown up in vulnerable times. He is nevertheless stubbornly antagonistic. So he enters into the duel without enthusiasm, shrugging his shoulders, but with a quiet determination not to yield. He is, of course, much weaker than his opponent, but rather more agile. You will see him duck and weave, dodge his foe and dart back, evading crushing blows by a whisker. You will have to admit that, for someone who is neither a hero nor a martyr, he manages to put up a good fight. Finally, however, you will see him compelled to abandon the struggle or, if you will, transfer it to another plane.