Insomniac Reading of Late.

We had the great war behind us and the shock of defeat, the disillusionment of the revolution that had followed, and now the daily spectacle of the failure of all the rules of life and the bankruptcy of age and experience. We had lived through a series of contradictory creeds: pacifism, nationalism, and then Marxism. (This last has much in common with sexual infatuation: both are unofficial, slightly illicit, both use shock tactics, both mistake an important though officially taboo part or the whole, sex in the one case and economics in the other.) -- Defying Hitler, Sebastion Haffner, p. 61.

A reader from NYC sent me a copy of Sebastian Haffner's excellent memoir entitled Defying Hitler: A Memoir. It is a remarkable book and filled with marvelous observations such as the one above. I must confess that as comparatively well-read as I am on the Nazi period of German history I had never heard of Haffner.

The principal thing that makes Haffner's recollection so unique is that is was written when it was fresh after his escape from Nazi Germany to England in 1938, but then abandoned and put in a drawer unfinished when the war broke out. This is not the sanitized recollections of an old man looking back, but the refreshingly honest cry of a man who has lost his country to thugs while the wounds were still fresh. Haffner's account also does not spare himself, as he details the gradual compromises he made with the Nazi regime until he could take no more and escaped. I understand much more about the forces acting upon ordinary Germans during this period from reading Haffner and I very much recommend it to you, my own readers. My sincere thanks to the reader in NYC for such an instructive book.