Quotes from Sebastian Haffner

Ama iÅŸte bu anda çok tuhaf bir ÅŸey oldu - ve böyle size zaman?m?z?n, hiçbir gazetede yazmayan, en temel siyasi hadiselerinden birini anlatabilme ÅŸans?m oluÅŸtu: Bu davete icabet etmedi insanlar?n çoÄŸu. Ä°stemediler bunu. Almanya'da koca bir neslin, kendilerine bahÅŸedilen bu kocaman hediyeyle, özgür bir özel hayat kurma imkan?yla ne yapaca??n? bilemediÄŸi ortaya ç?kt?.

wrote Haffner in 1940. This is startling to read now. Today, the

One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child's understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions.

The most important part of individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love. So comradeship has its special weapon against love: smut.

Comradeship always sets the cultural tone at the lowest possible level, accessible to everyone. It cannot tolerate discussion; in the chemical solution of comradeship, discussion immediately takes on the color of whining and grumbling. It becomes a mortal sin. Comradeship admits no thoughts, just mass feelings of the most primitive sort

A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.

Mass assemblies are quite incapable of independent action. Decisions that influence the course of history arise out of the individual experiences of thousands or millions of individuals.

The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities.

It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense catastrophes of civilization such as the rule of the Nazis in Germany.

What happened was a nightmarish reversal of normal circumstances: robbers and murderers acting as the police force, enjoying the full panoply of state power, their victims treated as criminals, proscribed and condemned to death in advance.

It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

Saint Marx, in whom one had always believed, had not helped. Saint Hitler was obviously more powerful. So let's destroy the images of Saint Marx on the altars and replace them with images of Saint Hitler. Let us learn to pray: "It is the Jews' fault" rather than "It is the capitalists' fault." Perhaps that will redeem us.

It took me quite a while to realize that my youthful excitability was right and my father's wealth of experience was wrong; that there are things that cannot be dealt with by calm skepticism.

If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness.

the slow approach of the dreaded event; the confusion of the forces opposed to it and their hopeless adherence to the rules of the game, which the enemy daily infringes; the one-sidedness of the contest; the sense of hovering between "peace and stability" and "civil war

it would probably be more correct, and certainly more important, to see not capitalism but individualism as the opposite of socialism.

Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a Fascist. Fascism is upper-class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm

Claro que tuvo que ocurrir algo más para que este mecanismo fuese perfecto: la traición cobarde de los dirigentes de todos los partidos y organizaciones en quienes confió el cincuenta y seis por ciento de los alemanes que votó en contra de los nazis el 5 de marzo de 1933.

Según la impresión general, los vencedores del día no fueron los nazis en absoluto, sino los de la derecha burguesa, que habían «pescado» a los nazis y habían ocupado todos los puestos clave del gobierno. Desde el punto de vista jurídico constitucional, aquel suceso fue mucho más normal y menos revolucionario que la mayoría de acontecimientos ocurridos el año anterior.