The most recent book I brought home with me is one that had been sitting there for some time. Apparently nobody wanted it. It's titled, On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the legacy of a Nazi Childhood. No surprise there. With all the misery in the daily news, who needs to dredge up the Nazis? In fact, I suspect unless you're a history buff with a special interest in mid-20th Century history, you'll probably want to avoid this topic like the plague. If I were to make a "been there, done that," list of topics I've dealt with in my life, Germany from 1933 to 1945 would be at the top of my list. I grew up in a German-speaking home and had to ride the question how it was that the Germans I had around me as a kid were the people who taught me the meaning of love and security and the difference between right and wrong, while at the same time "the Germans" was a concept that often led a lot of people to freeze up and look like they wanted to spit.
By the time I started school in 1946 I had learned from my German grandmother that "there are good people and bad people everywhere you go," and that was all anybody thought I needed to know at that age. It then took many years to work through - to phrase the issue in the theatrical terms I've heard all my life: "how it was that the people who created Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms were also able to generate Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels?"
As a professional academic I devoted myself to the study of culture, defined as the "values, attitudes and beliefs of a people with a common identity and the practices and products derived from them." There, too, I moved from the initial oversimplifications - French make good lovers, Germans like to march, when Americans form groups the first thing they do is pick a president, vice-president and a secretary-treasurer - to an ever more nuanced understanding of diversity. We still operate with a lot of those simplifications. Like all generalizations, they make it easier to talk about the world without having to hedge all the time. "Of course, I don't mean all Japanese drink green tea, but most clearly do and not all Italians eat pasta, but most clearly do." Today one of the big questions that hang in the air is how it is that Putin is able to pull the wool over so many Russian eyes and get them to believe he is "liberating" the Ukrainians from Nazism. Often the answer you hear is "Well, Russians have no history of democracy; they are used to accepting the word of whoever is in charge. There is a powerful consistency between following the czars, following Stalin, and following Putin. It's in the Russian blood." The reason we fall for such generalizations is that there is a lot of obvious truth in them. You have to reduce a large complex of people to a single representative, but that comes naturally. Babies are cute, teenage girls giggle, Scandinavians are blonde. And Democrats are disorganized and Republicans have lost their soul.
On Hitler's Mountain is the story of a little girl - her name is Irmgard Paul - who grows up in Berchtesgaden in the shadow of Hitler's Eagle's Nest, his retreat in the far south of Germany. It's actually about half an hour south of Salzburg, Austria, by car - where Hitler met with fellow Nazis to work out some of the Third Reich's most important policies. As one of the kids from the neighboring village, she even gets to have her picture taken on Hitler's lap.
The memoir has four parts, tracing her childhood in the shadow of Adolf Hitler from her birth in 1934 until Germany's defeat in 1945 in the first three. Barely eleven at war's end, the tone changes with her life circumstances. She writes of challenges during the war, such as the moment where she has to choose between outing her anti-Hitler grandfather, whom she is not particularly fond of, to her Hitler-loving teacher, who is responsible for brainwashing the children in her charge and getting them to put the state and their Führer above all else. And of an awareness that while her family has to scrounge for food, she's luckier than the kids flooding in from the cities to her mountain village to avoid the British and American bombs now raining down on their homes. I read the book in bits and pieces, reflecting on such things as her having to live at times on potato peels while I regularly sat down to delicious curries and salmon and pasta with bottarga, the roe of the mullet - the fish, not the haircut - that Taku and I discovered in a restaurant some years ago in Florence, and which has remained one of my favorite things in the world. There but for the grace of God, go I, the saying goes. The absolute randomness of God's grace has always puzzled me. How do some of us get to feast on bottarga or salmon or T-bone steaks while others of us have to make do with potato peels?
My inbox fills with e-mails and my cell phone would ring every fifteen or twenty minutes, if I left the ringer on: Adam Schiff, Martin Sheen, Stacey Abrams, and a dozen others, all asking me for money and threatening the end of democracy if I don't come up with $55 immediately to split between them and the DCCC. It will be matched, doubled, tripled, I'm told, and as we get closer to election day I won't be surprised if that increases to quadrupled or quintupled. The only way we get to save democracy from the Trumpists, the tails wagging the Republican dogs, we are given to understand, is to spend billions of dollars on ads to scare the shit out of independents and habitual non-voters, scare them to the polls to keep the election deniers out of office. The majority of Republicans running for office deny that Biden won the 2018 election. In Arizona, all but one of the candidates are deniers. And nearly one third of Republican voters now tell us they're fine with using violence to keep themselves in power. Among election deniers, that figure is 39%.
I have sent money to John Fetterman and to a few others, feeling like my widow's mite contribution is money down the drain when Republicans have so many superrich in their donor base. But what is one to do? The game is money and that's how it is played. The cost is expected to soar to $9.3 billion before it's over.
This little memoir of a girl from Bavaria who once sat on Hitler's knee brings home the question of what happens when too many people share my concern that I'm just tossing money down the drain or believe the whole game is a losing business and tune out. I don't listen to Trump any more. I'm way past disgust at this lying narcissist, disgusted at the people who believe they can ride the tiger and come out on top financially, disgusted at how easy it is to blame the guy, blame his enablers, blame the media for keeping him front and center and his name fresh in the minds of so many who boast they are apolitical and will go with the crowd. I will vote, but even if I gave hundreds of my retirement savings dollars to the people I think can save democracy, that 9.3 billion dollar figure feels like a kick in the gut.
Irmgard Paul eventually met an American, married him and came to live in New York where she wrote her memoir under her married name, Irmgard A. Hunt. When asked one time whether she thought a Hitler could happen here in America, her response was:
(Y)es, an American Hitler is possible. But it would arrive largely unnoticed and insidiously, with the pretense of a free democracy intact. The first prerequisite is having the executive, legislative, and judicial functions in the hands of one very strong party with media either largely controlled by that party or under sympathetic ownership.
For the longest time now, ever since we began using the word fascism openly to describe the Trumpist phenomenon - the unabashed lying, the cult of the leader, the lowered resistance to the idea of public violence - we have been warned that any comparison to Hitler is a surefire way to weaken your argument. You become accused of being the boy who cried wolf, of overstating your case.
The caution is appropriate. We are not living in a fascist state. Our press is still largely uncontrolled; our problem is less about media control than it is about gullibility. I have blamed it on the American propensity for giving faith equal billing with reason. Once you open yourself up to the notion that what you believe to be true is as valid as what can be demonstrated to be true, you're an easy mark for anybody in the indoctrination or propaganda business - preachers of organized religion I'm talking about you - to grab you where you are vulnerable - your fears, your doubts, your prejudices against "others," particularly others you can be convinced are unseating you from a position of privilege. Our problem is multifaceted. It's part fear - of violence, of change - part ignorance of the big picture. And part simple inability to see ourselves as living in a national community and the ever-present inclination to revert to tribalist impulses.
Unfortunately, she contracts Alzheimer's, so the end of her life was not easy. It was, however, from all appearances, a life lived well. For anybody in search of happy endings, or looking for light in the darkness, if you come across the book at one of your local book exchanges, take it home and give yourself a good read. One that grows on you, as it sinks in that it is good history, and not simply a gripping memoir.
The box on the left is similar to the ones in my neighborhood. I understand, incidentally, that in Britain, rather than remove those wonderful red phone boxes, they are being converted into free book exchange libraries.
photo credit
