Flight from the Führer

How was Hitler possible? What went wrong with the Germans, that for 12 years from 1933 they surrendered themselves to him? For, as Haffner observes, in September 1930, when the Nazis suddenly became the second largest party in the Reichstag, Hitler "was still widely regarded as a somewhat embarrassing figure with a dismal past (his personal appearance was thoroughly repellent - the pimp's forelock, the hoodlum's elegance, the Viennese suburban accent, the interminable speechifying, the epileptic behaviour with its wild gesticulations, foam at the mouth, and the alternately shifty and staring eyes)".

Born in Berlin in 1907, Haffner wrote this brilliant account of the rise of the Nazis soon after he had emigrated to London in 1938, but it has only now been published. Here we read what it was like to be a law student in Berlin in 1933 as the Nazis took over. Men in brown uniforms came into the law library to throw out the Jews. They asked Haffner if he was an Aryan, and he answered, truthfully but unthinkingly, "Yes", and at once "felt the shame, the defeat - what a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace!"

Haffner saw from the first how evil and disgusting the Nazis were, and how their early crimes were bound to lead to ever greater monstrosities, but what was an insignificant young man like him to do? No retreat into purely private life was possible: "However far one retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life - it seeped through the walls like a poison gas."

Haffner suggests that one reason for the Nazis' success was that many Germans brought up during the First World War, with its daily bulletins from the Front, proved unable, in the 1920s, to accept the offer of an unfettered private life. They yearned for a "new collective adventure", for they "had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw materials for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills - accompanied though these might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos and peril".

Each of us sometimes asks what we would have done if we had been young and German in 1933. There could scarcely be a better way to explore this question than to read Haffner's book. All the other political parties had failed lamentably, their leaders showing no moral courage. The generals likewise showed no moral courage. In Germany and then in all Europe, politician after politician made the fatal miscalculation that the way to deal with Hitler was to give him some of what he wanted.

Some of Haffner's fellow law students seized the opportunities for rapid personal advancement offered by the new regime. When he objected to one of them that the Jews were having their livelihoods destroyed, the man replied: "Calm down, nobody starves in Germany. If a Jewish shopkeeper is really ruined, they will get social security payments."

Haffner rejected the temptation to give way to an almost "cosy" despair. He decided that for someone like him, the only option was to go abroad. In his books and journalism, he became a political writer of the highest class. He is vivid, concise, lucid, penetrating, humane, brave, playful and profound: a representative of the German civilisation which thuggish German nationalists tried to destroy.

If there is also a disembodied feeling to his prose, with Haffner as a free-floating intellect who sees into men's souls but seldom conveys much sense of place, perhaps that is German too.