via Mannix Flynn Hannah Arendt People often think today that German Jews were shocked in 1933 because Hitler assumed power...[but this] is a curious misunderstanding. Naturally Hitler’s rise was very bad...[but] we didn’t need Hitler’s assumption of power to know that the Nazis were our enemies! That had been completely evident for ... years....We also knew that a large number of the German people were behind them. That could not shock us or surprise us in 1933. . . . [But then our intellectual and academic] friends coordinated or got in line. The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did but what our friends did....[The] wave of Gleichschaltung [conforming to the new regime],..was relatively voluntary -- in any case not yet under pressure of terror -- it was as if an empty space formed around one. I lived in an intellectual milieu, but I also knew other people. And among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule....I never forgot that. I left Germany dominated by the idea: Never again! I shall never again get involved in any kind of intellectual business. I want nothing to do with that lot. (Excerpted from Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, pp. 10-11.)
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 08:32:02 +0000
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