Rating: 
Summary: Honest account by an angry young man
Review: Especially relevant with today's political world climate, this interesting autobiographical account of a young man's exposure to the rise of the Nazi party. A small book with a heavy message, altho' I feel it could have benefiited from some editing by or because of the translation into English.
Rating:
Summary: Honest account by an angry young man
Review: Especially relevant with today's political world climate, this interesting autobiographical account of a young man's exposure to the rise of the Nazi party. A small book with a heavy message, altho' I feel it could have benefiited from some editing by or because of the translation into English.
Rating:
Summary: Very interesting book
Review: Everytime I thought of Nazi Germany, up until I read this book, I only envisioned Hitler, the war and the persecution of the Jews. This book got me thinking of what might have gone through the minds of ordinary German citizens, espacially those who (secretly) opposed the Nazi regime.
Rating: 
Summary: a deep,personal insight,and a lesson in style...
Review: Haffner spares nobody,least himself.The story encompasses the years 1907-1933,and in all fairness,I have to state,that I read the complete story,in a German edition,so I know what happened afterwards.
the author explains,taking himself and the people about him as living examples,how Hitler and his gang could seize power,and,subsequently,sink the German ship as deeply,as it sunk,morally,ethically,politically.
Most explanatory is the phase of 1933,when haffner describes how he,his decent friends,his father,tried to retire to small niches,to live some sort of biedermeier,and were uprooted by the nazi machinery,washed out of their holes of seeming innocence,
deprived of all means and space for inner emigration.
I don't want to spoil the exquisite joy,that reading Haffner's account provides,so in conclusion,let me say that Haffner is a journalist of a kind not found anymore,short,concise,to the point,in the original at least,of a unique style,that does not require a thousand words to draw a pandemonium of unheard of proportions.
Be sure to read the book,all books,by Haffner,if they do not enlighten you to their subjects,they will do your style a world of good.
Rating:
Summary: Different modes of psychic dying
Review: Haffner's book depicts very precisely how the radical political changes in 1933 in Germany affected the personal lives (friendships, loves, family ties) of every German, when Hitler and his Nazi Party took power and turned the country into a totalitarian racist State. All those who didn't support the new rulers were nearly daily harassed. For Haffner, this harassment became a daily duel between the individual (himself) and the State.
Under the guise of fighting for the liberty of the German State, letter and phone secrecy were abolished as well as freedom of speech. People were submitted to unrestricted search warrants, property seizure and arbitrary detention.
This book gives also a succinct but excellent summary of the German political situation after World War I until 1933 with the cowardly betrayal of their voters by the leaders of the opposition parties as a culmination point.
This book is an in depth personal account of the catastrophic change in Germany in 1933, which forced the majority of the German population (the Nazis didn't obtain the majority in the election) to live in a fascist State.
Not to be missed.
Rating:
Summary: The Growth of Nazism, Told First Hand
Review: How did it happen that Germany elevated the Nazis to power, and allowed them to create the worst nightmare of the last century? It is a question that has been argued about ever since, and as with all such big questions there are lots of answers and the sum of them always prove unsatisfactory; a mystery still remains. Nonetheless, a new part of the answer was published in Germany in 2000, and caused a sensation. The book, _Defying Hitler: A Memoir_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), was actually written in 1939 and had remained secret. It was written by Sebastian Haffner, the pen name of Raimund Pretzel, while he was in English exile from Germany. The manuscript was interrupted by the outbreak of war, at which time Haffner put it away in order to write a more urgent book on how the English might best win the war. Haffner went on to become a highly respected British journalist and man of letters. He forbade his son from looking through his old papers until after his death. He died in 1999, and his son, Oliver Pretzel, found the manuscript in a drawer. Having published it in the original German, Pretzel has now translated it into English. A valuable work, it not only throws fresh light on the rise of Nazi power, but gives vivid pictures of how life was lived as the dictatorship progressed.Haffner traces some of the roots of the rise of Nazism come from The Great War. He was seven years old when the war erupted, and he recalls how invigorating the time was for him. The schoolboys' experience of war at home, Haffner says, gave them an indifference to lack of food, but more importantly it gave them a taste for excitement, for marching, for militarism. When Hitler came, his unspoken promise to repeat the great war game, and win it, easily found a receptive audience. Haffner had lost his jingoism by the decade after the war, though his contemporaries had not. Haffner began to study law, and became a law clerk in Prussia's courts, with the promise of rising in the legal ranks. Haffner loved the legal system for many reasons, not the least of which is that the law functioned from day to day, undisturbed by the moral morass caused by the Nazi revolution. He thought this a triumph over the Nazis. But one day, while he was going through legal documents within the quiet and solemn library of the court, he heard a growing disturbance in the corridor and doors being banged. A Jewish clerk packed his papers and left. There were shouts of "Out with the Jews!" and a few of the clerks giggled that they were already gone. A Jewish attorney, a wounded veteran of the previous war, "caused a fuss" and was beaten up. Soon a brownshirt was inspecting the nose of Haffner himself and asking if he was an Aryan. "Before I had a chance to think, I said 'Yes.'... What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace!... I had failed my very first test." It is this sort of detail and introspection that make this book so valuable. Regrettably, this is an unfinished narrative. How we would like, after such a memoir, to hear about how he became a novelist and journalist, and insisted on writing things he would not be ashamed of when the Nazis were defeated. He met a Jewish woman and married her, becoming guilty of violation of the race laws but somehow evading prosecution. He eventually arranged a visa to go work on articles about England, where he arranged to stay, even though he was interned in the camps for Germans. His son and translator has provided a small amount of this story to add to the truncated memoir, but Haffner's words speak in clear horror of the threat going on around him, and within him. It is an unforgettable addition to the histories of the time.
Rating:
Summary: Moving Personal Story
Review: I found this to be an absorbing and moving account of one fairly ordinary person's experience in Germany of the 1920's and 30's. From a historical vantage point, it provides one valuable perspective of the rise of Hitler and why it was allowed to happen --- I'm reminding of the quote from Edmund Burke about evil triumphing because good people do nothing. Several times, Haffner apologizes for providing so much of his personal opinions and stories, but for me, the story of him and his friends was the most rewarding part of the book. This memoir ends fairly abruptly, in late 1933, so we are left hanging, though the author's son, who translated the book into English, includes an afterward with details of the Haffner's life after 1933. Unfortunately, the abrupt ending leaves us in the dark about the fate of my favorite of Haffner's friends, his Carnival girlfriend Charlie, who was Jewish. I was very moved by the brief glimpses of their short romance and her devotion to her family.
Rating:
Summary: Answers a lot of questions...
Review: If you are like me and you've always wondered just how an insane madman like Adolf Hitler came to power in a modern country like Germany than read Defying Hitler. The author, who describes his personal experiences of the time, pulls no punches and makes no excuses for the shift to radical nationalism in Germany in the 1930s.
The book is presented much like a diary recounting the author's life at specific times in Germany between WWI when he was a small child and 1933 when the Nazi regime began to reveal it's true face to the German people.
Sebastian Haffner presents his own theory about where this radical nationalism first developed and supports his theory with what he experienced.
It's an excellent book and a great read.
Rating:
Summary: Haffner's Rosetta Stone
Review: Sebastian Haffner's "Defying Hitler" is a rare gem that explains what is was about those in Germany between 1918 and 1933 that found a hearth in Hitler's promise of a glorious Fascist future. 1933 is the story's kernel when, as Haffner says, the dual begins. Hitler comes to power. It's the state versus the individual; the struggle for one's soul. It's the ordinary person (Haffner) up against Big Brother, Nazi style, with fangs exposed, talons sharpened, ready to strike. Haffner probes the riddle of motivation and explains how for some Hitler was the hero for the hour to restore German's stature among the leading rank of nations. For others, it was join the cause or to yield to the alternative temptation of rejection or resistance. For Haffner himself the Nazis are a deadly pestilence that overturns the individual's capacity to live, to love, and enjoy life as one wants. For Haffner, this foot soldier for nondescript humanity, what does he do? This is the real tease. Haffner later becomes a celebrated German writer and commentator. Written in 1939, he never actually completes this early work which his son Oliver only discovers after his father's death in 1999. Thankfully Oliver fills in the blanks and we are not going to spoil the story by revealing the outcome here. Despite the abrupt end, it's not hard to see why this book became a best seller in Germany. Haffner writes with a beautiful cynical wit and has a grasp for history and the human condition. Champollion's Rosetta Stone provided a key to unlocking the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs. In its own way Haffner's "Defying Hitler" is the Rosetta Stone for Nazi Germany. It's a carriage for meaning and insight into not just a dark chapter of German history, but perhaps our own.
Rating:
Summary: How Germans were turned into wolves who hunted other humans
Review: The title of my review is a paraphrase of Haffner's description of Hitler's sinister accomplishment. He certainly doesn't pull any punches, and is unsparing on the moral failings of his fellow Germans in the early 1930s. This book was written in 1939, shortly after the author's escape to England. Although Haffner became a distinguished journalist and historian, he never published this book during his lifetime; it was discovered by his son and published after the author's death at the age of 91. Perhaps, like many war veterans, the experiences tangled up with the manuscript were so painful and so personal that the author couldn't bear to revisit them (a chapter was published on the 50th anniversary of an event that it describes). What Haffner--and his son, who is the assured and elegant translator--have given us is one of the most compelling and insightful descriptions of the period that has been written. It can only be compared to the diary of Otto Klemperer as a revelatory description of how a nation of people, not so different from other nations at the time or indeed of any nation today, could descend into barbarism and criminality on the vast scale of the Third Reich. From the opening sentence the 1920s and 30s in Germany is evoked: "This is the story of a duel." Specialists will be aware of the importance of actual duelling in middle and upper class German society as late at WWI, and its endurance as a symbol thereafter, and with this characterisation of his personal struggle against the Nazi State, Haffner seductively invites his reader into the authentic atmosphere of the period. Scholars who have thought deeply about the Nazi period recognise it as the final culminating phase of a second Thirty Year's War that began in 1914; indeed, Haffner's explanation for the Nazi catastrophe is based upon his view that the generation who grew up during WWI, NOT the soldiers but the children who experienced the excitement but not the misery and death, were the key constituency for the Nazis. Haffner's use of generational analysis is a powerful conceptual tool that is much more understood and accepted these days--Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation", however correct or incorrect it may be, has been a huge best seller--and Haffner in 1939 stumbled upon this type of analysis as he sought to describe how Hitler had come to power. "Defying Hitler" is also the intense, personal description of the crisis that Haffner and his family and friends underwent during the rise of Hitler, conveyed with the power of a novelist. Haffner succeeds in humanising the Germans he knew and lived among without ever downplaying the horror of the decisions that they made, as he shows that it was all too clear what the consequences of those decisions were likely to be. This is a unique book and it is highly recommended for both readers who have read almost nothing about the period, as well as readers who are thoroughly familiar with the subject, and yet are still trying to come to terms with how such a terrible catastrophe could occur in a civilised nation.
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