I'm always on the lookout for terrific books by authors I don't know and I recently hit the jackpot. I was having coffee with a German Studies professor just back from research in Berlin. We were talking about Günter Grass and she said, "But everyone here knows him. You should read Kempowksi.
"Who?"
"He's the real deal," she said. "He's the one we'll be reading years from now, not Grass."
Well I wasn't going to wait after that kind of sales pitch, so I picked up the book she said I should start with, Did You Ever See Hitler? translated by Helen Wolff, it's perfect reading in the month marking the anniversary of the start of World War II. And history doesn't get much more intimate than Kempowski's slim volume of interviews with German citizens in the mid-1970s. He asked them just one brief question: "Haben Sie Hitler gesehen?" Did you ever see Hitler?
A prolific German author who died in 2007, Kempowski compiled the book from over 300 interviews with people of all ages and professions, and the project gives you a crowd's-eye view of Hitler from the 1920s through the end of World War II, concentrating on the effect he had on people, and was still having decades later.
Several threads emerge. Some saw him only once, or barely at all in a motorcade rushing past. Others saw and heard him often in Berlin. The older respondents were the generation that "had fallen for Hitler" and tried to make sure that "the memory of this fall -- and the memory of the man -- died out."
There are plenty of Germans answering Kempowski who claimed that they weren't impressed by Hitler, or that they found his manner or face weird ("like a pink marzipan pig"), or who said they couldn't imagine he was going to be so powerful. Some of these same people report many public appearances in the 1930s that were less than crowded, and cities where Hitler was not wildly popular. Though as one man notes wryly, after the war, every German city claimed it had disappointed Hitler with small crowds.
But there are far more accounts of the elaborately stage-managed productions that thousands swarmed to, even if the school children or Hitler Youth were required to be there. And one after another, people talk about the hysteria Hitler evoked in women and girls: "The women were howling with delight," "They were peeing in their pants with excitement, and the older women were moaning as if the Savior were coming," "The women turned their eyes up so that the whites showed, and dropped like flies. Like slaughtered calves they lay there, breathing heavily," "We hardly dared wash our hands for three days, we were so affected simply because he had touched them."
And then there are those who blame others for his mistakes or the war, and still believe in him. A number of Kempowski's respondents refer to crowd psychosis and tell him that nobody today can imagine what it was like to be there, whatever one felt about Hitler. Even opponents could feel swayed by the spectacle and apparently by the man.
The volume is illustrated with photos that don't appear in the German edition. These were propaganda shots that made Hitler out to be avuncular, friendly, approachable, human. And they were designed to fill albums which were printed in the hundreds of thousands, then given to students and youths who won prizes for filling them up.
Famed translator Helen Wolff herself saw Hitler herself in the late 1920s and found him both boring and gross. But in the introduction to her translation, she chillingly records being trapped by the SA at a beer hall speech of Hitler's and observes that fundamental human decency
...can be erased by private megalomania, fusing with public megalomania, releasing, when it does, all that is bloody-minded in the human race. And by the time you realize what is happening, you and your fellows may be powerless in a space the exits of which are manned by thugs."
Though so many would claim to Kempowski that Hitler didn't move them, the main impression this amazing book leaves is the strange mixture of the quotidian and the bizarre. You can almost feel people waiting for hours, feet hurting, hungry and thirsty, and then see Germany's new God appearing, blocking out the sun.
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I do think each country has its own dark side that erupts in unique ways, though we all risk being swept away by war fever or the fear of terrorism or any number of fears that a government wants us to feel so as to manipulate us.
Pre-US American Wars - 6 Wars between 1675 -1761
6 Wars (including the American Revolution) between 1776-1836
1846-48 Mexican-American War
1860-65 US Civil War
1776 -1896 - American Indian Wars
1898 Spanish American War
20th Century Wars, Occupations, and Invasions - 11 Wars, Occupations, and Invasions between 1917 - 1996
WWI - 1916-1918
US secret invasion of Soviet Union - 1923
WWII 1941-1945
Korean War 1948-1953
Vietnam War 1956-1975
Bay of Pigs Invasion 1961
Dominican Republic Occupation - 1965
Grenada - 1983
US Invasion of Panama - 1989
Persian Gulf War - 1990-1991
Intervention in Bosnia - 1995-96
21st Century Wars - 2 Wars between 2001 - 2010
2001- ???? Afghanistan War
2003 - ???? Iraq War
From 1675 to 2010 America committed war, occupation, or invasion 30 times. This averages out to approximately 1 war or invasion every 11 years, or one war in every generation. There have been a few wars that have gone on for generations, and one, the American Indian Wars that lasted more than a century. And these are only the wars history will admit publicly. Americans are a warrior people and have been from before they became a sovereign nation. It has always been a country dedicated to war as a primary tool of political power, even as it claims to be dedicated to peace. The real miracle is that a Hitler hasn't already happened here.
I found it fascinating to read this book in English and German and compare the two texts. The translation seemed exemplary and I want to read more of Kempowski. Apparently his oeuvre is huge.
I knew my Mother had seen him from a distance in some sort of parade, riding in a car down the street. But my Uncle wrote a short, self-published biography and in it I read that he had actually met Hitler right before being shipped to the Russian Front. He was 16 and it was shortly before the war was over.
They are both in the 80s and just didn't talk about it.
I applaud the author for being able to find people willing to talk on record.
BTW both of my paretns were born in the U.S. The family went to Germany before the war and were unable to leave when war broke out.