Who Goes Nazi?

Who Goes Nazi?

Someone at Bookwoom Room linked to an old 1941 Harper's essay that's been posted on the web, part of that magazine's effort to bring its 148-year history into its electronic archives. Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961), a journalist, was kicked out of Nazi Germany in 1934 and over the next seven years watched Hitler's power spread to France. Writing in Harper's in 1941, before it was clear whether the U.S. would join the war, she proposed the parlor game of imagining which party guests would go Nazi when the time came. "Nazism," she says, "has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind."

Thompson felt that the post-WWI "lost generation" had been "treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected." As if setting up a country-house mystery, she examines thirteen people:

• a contented blue-blood with a classical education,
• a pragmatist who "fits easily into whatever pattern is successful,"
• a social climber who is "bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity,"
• a "spoiled only son of a doting mother,"
• a masochist looking for someone other than her bored husband "before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement,"
• a warm ex-actress "full of sound health and sound common sense,"
• a cheerful young man studying engineering in night school at City College,
• a contrarian intellectual whose "brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus,"
• a "good-natured and genial man" ready at any time to "grab a gun and fight,"
• a young German emigre who left the Nazi Youth to escape to Switzerland on foot,
• an assimilated and wealthy pro-business Jew who is skeptical of the criticisms of Hitler,
• a sad, quiet Southern Jew who loves his country "in a quiet, deep, unostentatious way," and
• a powerful, predatory labor leader.

Thompson considers which of the guests will make the right choice and concludes: "Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t -- whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi."

It's oddly reassuring to read this essay, written by a thoughtful journalist with enough experience in 1930s Europe to know just what the world was up against. In 2010, we're facing discouraging trends in education, social dissolution, and moral unraveling, but no more than Thompson saw.