Erik Larson Quote

The thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another. Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term fanatical became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, described as a happy mix of courage and fervent devotion. Nazi-controlled newspapers reported an endless succession of fanatical vows and fanatical declarations and fanatical beliefs, all good things. Göring was described as a fanatical animal lover. Fanatischer Tierfreund. Certain very old words were coming into darkly robust modern use, Klemperer found. Übermensch: superman. Untermensch: sub-human, meaning Jew. Wholly new words were emerging as well, among them Strafexpedition—punitive expedition—the term Storm Troopers applied to their forays into Jewish and communist neighborhoods. Klemperer detected a certain hysteria of language in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation—This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!—and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, copied from American cinema and thrillers, that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In late July 1933 Klemperer saw a newsreel in which Hitler, with fists clenched and face contorted, shrieked, On 30 January they—and here Klemperer presumed he meant the Jews—laughed at me—that smile will be wiped off their faces! Klemperer was struck by the fact that although Hitler was trying to convey omnipotence, he appeared to be in a wild, uncontrolled rage, which paradoxically had the effect of undermining his boasts that the new Reich would last a thousand years and that all his enemies would be annihilated. Klemperer wondered, Do you talk with such blind rage if you are so sure of this endurance and this annihilation?