Discovering the Third Reich Through Mephisto

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Discovering the Third Reich Through Mephisto

"Mike," a confused coworker asked me, "why do you want to take a course on the Nazis?" Finding myself unprepared to account for a lure that, to me, was intrinsic to the subject matter, I struggled with a hasty explanation about studying mass dementia for the sake of understanding how it works and preventing it from happening again. "A whole bunch of Jews went willingly to their deaths," I elaborated. "A nation of people stood by and watched it happen. You have to wonder, why didn't somebody stop that?" "Yeah," replied my friend, "the Germans said 'Come here and we'll kill you,' and the Jews went anyway. I guess they were all stupid."

I discovered that I had no immediate answer to this facetious dismissal of one of history's most profound tragedies. It was a sweeping and indiscriminate assertion, to be sure, but not one entirely without merit. If general stupidity were not to blame, then why had six million Jews endured such torture? Were none of them in a position to unite in any sort of cohesive resistance? What of the Catholics who were murdered in the concentration camps as well? The blacks? Political dissidents? Members of the press? In fact it seems that the Nazis, over the course of their reign, discriminated against so many professions, creeds, philosophies, and classes that for a person not to belong to at least one must have been a remarkable feat of chance. I could not begin to understand how the National Socialist Party had, with such a miserable and offensive political platform, managed to gain power in Germany, nor how, with such cruel and oppressive practices, they managed to keep it.

Klaus Mann's Mephisto answered a number of these questions for me. Though it did not trace the Nazis' rise to power outside of mentioning a few highlights, it did portray in a frighteningly matter-of-fact manner the social and cultural climate of that crucial time period: the dying years of the Weimar Republic, and the early years of the Third Reich. Specifically, it reassured me that the whole of Germany had not welcomed the Nazi takeover with open arms, nor enjoyed the years spent living under the Reich.

"Was it possible?" Mann's character Hendrik wondered upon receiving the news of Hitler's appointment as chancellor. (Mephisto, 156) "The blustering lout whom his brilliant and progressive friends had so often ridiculed had now suddenly become the most powerful man in the country! This is horrible, thought the actor Hendrik Höfgen.

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