Defying Hitler: A Memoir

16 hrs. 41 min.

Language Russian

Author Sebastian Haffner

Narrator Mikhail Roslyakov

Description

The memories of the German journalist and historian Sebastian Haffner (1907–1999), written in exile in 1939, cover the period from 1914 to 1933. The author tries to answer how the events of that decade prepared Germans to accept Nazi power—how the layered socio-political ground on which the Third Reich was built was created and cultivated.

The story I’m going to tell here is a story of a particular duel.

It’s a duel between two completely unequal opponents: an unbelievably powerful, ruthless state and a small, nameless, unknown private person. It plays out not on a battlefield, as people usually think politics does; the private person is by no means a politician—much less a conspirator or a “state enemy.” The private person is always on the defensive. He doesn’t want anything except to save what he considers his identity, his own private life, and his personal honor.

All of this is constantly subjected to unimaginably brutal, though rather clumsy attacks from the state in which the private person happened to live—and with which he must therefore deal. By the harshest threats, the state forces the private person to betray his friends, abandon the person he loves, reject his beliefs, and accept other ones imposed from above; to greet differently than he is used to, to eat and drink what he doesn’t like; to devote his leisure time to activities that disgust him; to allow himself, his identity, to be used in adventures he does not accept; and finally to discard his past and his “I”—and, in spite of all that, display boundless enthusiasm and endless gratitude.

The private person wants none of it. That’s why he decides on a duel—without any encouragement at all, rather with bewildered shoulder-shrugging, but with a secret determination not to give up.