Defying Hitler
by Sebastian Haffner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The only bad thing about Sebastian Haffner's posthumously released memoirs, "Defying Hitler," is the title. Published as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" ("A German's Story") in Germany in 2000, saying the book is about anti-Nazi defiance is roughly analogous to saying "Anna Karenina" is about a woman who throws herself under a train. In fact, Hafner's story is touching precisely because it is not simply one more story of standing up to Hitler.

Haffner, a renowned political commentator in Germany until his death in 1999, fled his homeland in 1938, living in England and writing for the Observer until his return in 1961. Haffner wrote extensively on the problem of Nazism and the decline of German democracy in the 1920s, but always in an abstract, historical sense. He never completed his memoirs, which his son discovered in 2000 and which sold more than a million copies in Germany.

Haffner's story is cut short in 1934, but the resultant text is surprisingly complete. Most of the early chapters are a summation of German politics during and after World War I, and as Haffner grows up his voice slowly enters the picture, until by the end the story has shifted from social generalities to the peculiarities of his life. What doesn't change, though, is Haffner's uncanny ability to relate what he observes and experiences to the book's underlying thesis, which is to parse out just why the German public gave into the Nazi takeover so easily.

What's most amazing about "Defying Hitler" is that Haffner wrote the entire text in 1939, shelving it in favor of more pressing topics once World War II began (his first book in Britain, a guide to Germany for English propagandists titled "Germany: Jekyll and Hyde," established him as a leading commentator on the Nazis). Nevertheless, the book is so prescient about things like the Nazis' anti-Semitic machinations and the coming war that a number of critics in Germany accused Haffner's son, Oliver Pretzel, of rewriting parts of it after his father's death. (Forensic tests of the original manuscript have since completely vindicated Haffner.)

But while Haffner's concern for the plight of Germany's Jews runs completely against what the world has come to expect from Germans of the era, what makes his critic's accusations themselves dubious is that Haffner does not, for all his anti-Nazi posturing, come across as a saint. It's not that he agrees with Hitlerian doctrine; on the contrary, he takes pains to separate himself from the SA and Hitler Youth at every opportunity. Nevertheless, he paints himself as a flawed protagonist, never agreeing but never speaking up, either. Until he left Germany, Haffner was an up-and-coming law clerk, and in one episode, toward the end of the book, he participates in an SA-run indoctrination camp for young lawyers in order to be allowed to take the test for junior judges.

What Haffner illustrates with this and other chapters, though, is much larger than his own plight. As an urbane bourgeois, he belonged to a class that had emerged in Germany relatively late for Europe, but that in the first three decades of the twentieth century had taken up the flag of democratic, civil society. What "Defying Hitler" shows, perhaps better than any history text (even Peter Gay's remakable "Weimar Culture"), is just how the supposed guardians of Germany's future could allow Hitler to take over not only the political state, but more importantly to utterly revamp the country's social structure. As an historical memoir, it ranks with Count Harry Kessler's "Berlin in Lights" and Victor Klemperer's "I Shall Bear Witness" in casting a bright light on a period of time which the world desperately needs to understand, if only to make sure nothing like the Nazi takeover happens again.

Much of what Haffner sees at the root of this failure parallels the mistakes that Germany's leadership made in the early 1930s in accommodating Hitler. Convinced that he could be harnessed, defanged and even used to further their own political careers, conservatives and Social Democrats alike made room for Hitler at the top, and for fear for their own careers turned their heads as he incited the public against the very democratic institutions they claimed to be defending.

In a similar vein, Haffner's cohorts stood by or, in large numbers, joined in with the Nazi Party as its popular component incited violence against Jews, Communists and anyone who disagreed with their platform. The Nazis opened doors for budding lawyers and bureaucrats, who saw in the party a way around the stodgy old system of slow progress through the ranks, all the while convinced that the movement had a short lifespan, that at some point the people would grow tired of Hitler's excess and throw him out. After all, the Nazis weren't bourgeois, they were uneducated and crass; who cared if they had followers, because in the end the resilient German rule of law would turn them back. Of course, not only did this not happen, but those who thought they had only loaned their souls to the devil soon found they had made a sale without knowing it, and that by compromising their own roles in upholding the law and social justice they were eviscerating the very institutions they had counted on to keep the Nazis at bay.

Haffner had intended "Defying Hitler" to be called "Dance in the Lions' Den"; it might not have sold as many copies, but that title is infinitely more accurate. Because rather than defiance, Haffner spends most of his time under Hitler pursuing the fleeting lifestyle that he, as a bourgeois intellectual, had always assumed would be there for him: café debates, newspaper columns and, yes, dancing. Not fighting the lion, but doing his best to avoid it. Haffner's sense of guilt over refusing to speak out, to do something against the SA raids and Nazi lynch mobs and forced "Sieg Heil"s, suffuses the pages of "Defying Hitler." What makes the book required reading for anyone trying understand Nazi Germany, though, is his anger with the German bourgeoisie for doing the same.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)