Tag Archives: Nazism

From Bach to Hitler

 

I just finished reading In The Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson. It’s the story of an American family in Germany during the 1930’s as Hitler came to power.

Any reader of this story or student of this time in history asks why a civilized nation like Germany allowed such a depraved group of leaders to take over their country. How did the country that produced  Bach and Beethoven produce Hitler and the Holocaust?

One senses that citizens, weary of war and economic hardship (as a result of World War I), allowed this charismatic speaker to hypnotize them into believing that he could lead them out of their difficulties. And if he told them that a particular group (the Jews) was responsible for those difficulties, how easy to believe this simple lie. As the losers in World War I, the Germans chafed at their humiliation. When Hitler appealed to their pride by suggesting they were, in fact, a superior people, they wanted to believe him.

A reasonable people surrendered their reason to anger and pride.

Simple Solutions Can Be Deadly

 ” . . .when a man is driven to despair he is ready to smash everything in the vague hope that a better world may arise out of the ruins.” So wrote a former German official, Erich Koch-Weser, in 1931, as the spellbinding Hitler hovered on the periphery of power. A beaten down people saw in Hitler a chance to rise again. Their misery was real, but their choices in dealing with it caused tragedy for themselves and most of the world.

While the misery in this country has not reached the level suffered by the German people during that time, we can still note the tendency to grasp at simple solutions. They range from “down with government” to “down with Wall Street” to “down with religion.” Atheism would answer the problem of religious intolerance, for example, by simply ridding the world of religion. That solution gets rid of religious intolerance but offers no help for our intolerance of differing political views or ethnicity. Could it be that the underlying issue is not religion (or government, or Wall Street), but our sinful tendencies?

Solutions, most likely, will require difficult choices and the overcoming of our inclination to fight only for our tribe or group instead of the common good, not a magical waving of some political wand.