"Almost" Part 27: Book 2, Part 17

Chapter 68

Klaus was astounded at the amount of human energy that can be released by pushing all conflicts into the unconscious.

He was an educated man; he knew that the Nazis represented a radical break with European traditions – but then, Germany had never really been a part of Europe anyway. That Europe. The Europe he had studied in England. The Europe of reason and compromise and all the natural difficulties of different viewpoints. In Germany, there were no different viewpoints. There was one note; you could play it loud, or soft.

Klaus had been out of Germany for six years. When he had returned, he had mostly stayed at his father’s house. He had spent a little time in the larger cities – mostly Berlin and Hamburg, but they became depressing as the Depression worsened. His city friends had scattered with the onset of Nazism; a few had fled, most had joined. His local friends – the rural idiots, he called them – were largely indifferent to politics. They were happy that the Nazis were in power, because they got to keep their farms, which had been mortgaged to the hilt during the Depression, when it was impossible to make a living from honest crops. But such city matters as freedom of the press didn’t trouble them much.

In his new ‘Nazi experiment,’ Klaus had tried talking to them about Hitler, but it didn’t do any good. It was quite fascinating, and he found it hard to avoid the alienating contempt of the intellectual. They could only see politics in the most local, tangible and practical of terms. They cared nothing for freedom, the Reichstag or the death of the Republic. They wanted good rains and dependable insurance. They wanted their sons to work and their daughters to get married. They wanted to go to church and sit with a pipe. They wanted to know the words to every song that could be sung. They were the rhythm of the land, of the seasons, of the decades between birth, marriage and re-birth. When he was younger, Klaus thought that they might be wise, in their own slow, stolid way. But now, he knew that it was not so. Extend that principle, he thought, and trees become sages.

The Nazis were a curious bunch. Klaus could never quite decide if they believed their own propaganda or not. They would seem to – some at the salon evenings at Count Orsky’s were most passionate on this point – but in their very next breath, they could as easily say that all these lies were only designed for the masses, and that whoever swallowed such idiotic bait was utterly unsophisticated. Klaus could not follow their transitions.

Another curious item was the Nazi’s ability to combine a hatred of authority with an absolute allegiance to the Fuhrer. When Klaus, early on, began to point out some of the contradictions inherent in the Nazi theory of life and history, he was reviled. Any attempt to bring the authority of logic or experience on their beliefs was considered more insulting than a physical attack. They hated external authorities, but crawled before the image of Hitler without a thought. Most odd...