Soldaten

Despite the extreme nature of National Socialism, the citizens of Germany did not wake up in a completely new world on the morning of January 31, 1933. The world was the same—only the news was different. Sebastian Haffner, the well-known German journalist and historian, for instance, described the events of January 30 as a change of government, not a revolution, and the Weimar Republic had seen more than its fair share of changes of government. Haffner’s experience of January 30, 1933, consisted of “reading the newspapers, and the feelings they engendered.”³² German newspapers discussed the possible consequences and significance of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, but they did much the same with all other newsworthy stories as well. Haffner recounts conversations he had with his father, discussing what percent of the populace was truly Nazi, how foreign countries were likely to react, and what the working classes would do. In other words, the two men talked about all the things politically interested citizens discuss when confronted with unwelcome events whose ultimate ramifications are unclear. Haffner and his father, in any case, came to the conclusion that the Hitler government had an extremely weak foundation and thus a poor chance of lasting for long. All in all, they found, there was little real reason to worry.

To put the matter in different words: large parts of the existing frame of reference continued to function, and “life carrying on as usual” could be interpreted as a triumph over the Nazis. How could people have hit upon the idea in early 1933 that they needed an entirely new interpretation of reality, that what was happening was not something one could evaluate using customary criteria? Even if someone had sensed that the times were different, where would he have gotten the instruments to decode this new reality?

Social psychologists have clearly defined the phenomenon of “hindsight bias” for the belief, once the end of a social process is determined, to have known from the beginning how things would turn out. In retrospect, one can always find scores of indications for a nascent collapse or disaster. Contemporaries interviewed after the Third Reich all tell of their fathers or grandfathers exclaiming on January 30, 1933: “This means war!”³³ Hindsight bias allows people to position themselves on the side of foresight and knowledge, whereas in reality people who are in the midst of a process of historical transformation never see where that process is headed. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, people who share an illusion can never recognize it. Only from a great distance can we achieve a perspective from which we can identify the misunderstandings and mistakes of historical actors. Even when one, two, or three levels of functionally differentiated social structure change, countless other ones remain exactly as they were before. In the early Third Reich, there was still bread in the bakeries, and the streetcars still ran. People were still studying toward university degrees and worrying about their sick grandmothers.

The inertia of a society’s infrastructure, the way its daily life is experienced, comprises one major part of split consciousness. Another part consists of what is changing and, in particular, of whatever modifies people’s frame of reference. That includes the actions of a government that operated with propaganda, restrictions, laws, arrests, violence, and terror as well as opportunities for entertainment and identification. In reaction to those changes, there were changes in the perception and behavior of a populace that, while by no means universally politically engaged, did participate in social affairs and tried to make sense of what was happening. For example, anti-Jewish measures such as the state-encouraged boycott of Jewish businesses in late March and early April 1933 were perceived in contradictory ways within the German populace, as were later anti-Semitic initiatives as well. As paradoxical as it may sound, the capacity for Nazism to engender contradictory responses was an integrating force. National Socialist society still retained enough discrete spaces and parts of the public sphere for people to debate the pros and cons of government measures and actions among like-minded peers.³⁴