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p480 ...Since the end of March -- it is now the 25th of April in this year of destiny 1945 -- our resistance in the west has been visibly disintegrating. The papers, already half-unmuzzled, register the truth. Rumour, fed by enemy announcements on the radio and stories told by fugitives, knows no censorship, but carries the individual details of swift spreading catastrophe about the land, into regions not yet swallowed, not yet liberated by it, and even hither into my retreat. No hold any more: everybody surrenders, everybody runs away. Our shattered, battered cities fall like ripe plums. Darmstadt, Wurzburg, Frankfurt are gone; Mannheim and Cassell, even Munster and Leipzig are in foreign hands. One day the English reached Bremen, [they finally get credit for something] the Americans were at the gates of Upper Franconia; Nuremberg, city of the national celebrations so uplifting to unenlightened hearts, Nuremberg surrendered. The great ones of the regime, who wallowed in power, riches, and wrong, now rage and kill themselves: justice is done.
...They [Russians] are now approaching the centre of Berlin. Last year the horrible man escaped with his life -- by now surely only an insanely flaring and flickering existence -- from the plot of desperate patriots trying to salvage the future of Germany and the last remnant of her material goods. Now he has commanded his soldiery to drown in a sea of blood the attack on Berlin and to shoot every officer who speaks of surrender. And the order has been in considerable measure obeyed. At the same time strange radio messages in German, no longer quite sane, rove the upper air; some of them commend the population to the benevolence of the conquerors, even including the secret police, who they say have been much slandered. Others are transmitted by a “freedom movement” christened Werewolf: a band of raving-mad lads who hide in the woods and break out nightly, they have already deserved well of the Fatherland by many a gallant murder of the invaders. The fantastic mingles with the horrible: up to the very end the crudely legendary, the grim deposit of saga is the soul of the nation, is invoked, with all its familiar echoes and reverberations.
p481 A transatlantic general has forced the population of Weimar to file past the crematories of the neighboring concentration-camp. He declared that these citizens -- who had gone in apparent righteousness about their daily concerns and sought to know nothing, although the wind brought to their noses the stench of burning human flesh -- he declared that they too were guilty of the abominations on which he forced them now to turn their eyes. Was that unjust? Let them look, I look with them. In spirit I let myself be shouldered in their dazed or shuddering ranks. Germany has become a thick-walled underground torture-chamber, converted into one by a profligate dictatorship vowed to nihilism from its beginnings on. Now the torture chamber has been broken open, open lies our shame before the eyes of the world... is it hypochondria to say to oneself that everything German, even the German mind and spirit, German thought, the German Word, is involved in this scandalous exposure and made subject to the same distrust? Is the sense of guilt quite morbid which makes one ask oneself the question how Germany, whatever her future manifestations, can ever presume to open her mouth in human affairs?
Let us call them the sinister possibilities of human nature in general that here come to light. German human beings, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them it is, who have perpetrated what humanity shudders at; and all that is German now stands forth as an abomination and a warning...
p482 Curses, curses on the corrupters of an originally decent species of human being, law-abiding, only too docile, only all too willingly living on theory, who thus went to school to Evil! How good it is to curse -- or rather how good it would be, if only the cursing came from a free and unobstructed heart! We are present at the last gasp of a blood state which, as Luther put it, “took on its shoulders” immeasurable crimes; which roared and bellowed to the ravished and reeling masses proclamations cancelling all human rights; which set up its gaudy banners for youth to march under, and they marched, with proud tread and flashing eyes, in pure and ardent faith. But a patriotism which would assert that a blood state like that was so forced, so foreign to our national character that it could not take root among us: such a patriotism would seem to me more high-minded than realistic. For was this government, in word and deed, anything but the distorted, vulgarized, besmirched symbol of a state of mind, a notion of world affairs which we must recognize as both genuine and characteristic? Indeed, must not the Christian and humane man shrink as he sees it stamped upon the features of our greatest and mightiest embodiments of our essential Germannness? I ask -- and should I not? Ah, it is no longer in question that this beaten people now standing wild-eyed in face of the void stand there just because they have failed, failed horribly in their last and uttermost attempt to find the political form suited to their particular needs.
We have the advantage -- such as it is -- of being able to view these events from the perspective of the next century. The good news (for someone concerned that the Nazi drama was distinctly German) is that people all over the globe have generously demonstrated that this horror was not uniquely German but only human -- which is also the bad news. That a nation so representative of European civilization should also become the gold standard of barbarism remains something of a shock, but perhaps it shouldn't be. Perhaps Mann is right in stressing the degree to which Germans still lived, in spirit, in the Reformation. That we always risk disaster when we ignore the darkness and pretend there is only light -- whether the “light” is religious or scientific.
Viewed in this way, and once again with the post about Dark Goddesses from the last blog in mind, aren't today’s Islamic Fundamentalists merely taunting Christian Europe to come out and dance?
There are a couple other things in this section I need to comment on. I have said (I'm pretty sure) in other posts that I think the fire bombing of Japanese cities was a war crime, but that the nuclear bombing most certainly saved Japanese culture. (If the Japanese true believers had had their way the nation would have been exterminated rather than surrender). And while I think there was no military or moral justification for those acts of terror against Japanese civilians (which, by the way, make the efforts of today's "terrorists" look like child's play), I also think it was not a bad thing to have happened.
Similarly, I have an odd way of viewing the plots against Hitler by both his officers and his foreign service. Suppose the plot to kill Hitler in 1944 had been successful. Suppose more rational men had come to the fore to negotiate or merely accept the long standing unconditional surrender terms. Would justice have been served... would the world be a better place if Germany had not been physically conquered and occupied by the armies of four (plus) nations?
I guess here I have to come down on the side of the brothers Tietjens (Parade's End reference). Surrender, at least in this instance, was not sufficient. In another book I've read about the intelligence and counterintelligence aspect of the 2nd World War -- I'm not sure which one -- it seemed that MI5 and MI6 were reluctant to believe that their counterparts in German service were attempting, from very early on and continuing well into the war, to give them information so as to undermine the Nazi regime. (It seems that Hitler had good reason for never trusting those people.) But suppose the Brits had gone along; suppose Hitler could have been overthrown or assassinated early on... would that have been a better outcome? From the point of view of millions of individual humans: Jews, Soviets, Brits, Americans, even Germans, the answer would be yes. But over all, wasn't this the case of a boil that had to be lanced at just the right time and lanced decisively? Not a choice I would want to make.
Russia
Previously I have made comparisons between the paranoid psychology of Germany that Zeitblom describes, and Islamic State and other Islamic Fundamentalist groups, but the most obvious comparison is with Russia. The psychology of being surrounded by hostile nations and struggling for mere existence certainly applies to Russia even more than it does to Germany. Russia has always struggled with fear of being buried alive in Asia. St Petersburg and Murmansk were never adequate points of contact with the outer world, which is why the Russian Empire went to so much trouble to obtain Vladivostok and, especially, the Crimea and Sevastopol. It was Khrushchev who gave the Crimea to the Ukraine in 1954. I'm not sure why but he was raised around Kursk and what is now Donetsk. And I was very surprised that Russia didn’t fight for it when the USSR broke up. Why someone hasn’t proposed a quid pro quo, where Russia gets the Crimea and a land-bridge connecting it to the rest of Russia in return for Ukraine getting permission to make whatever deals they wish with Europe, is beyond me. Perhaps Russia isn’t willing to give up that much.
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