Resistance

Detroit has me thinking about the Weimar Republic.  A recommendation from David Foster:   Defying Hitler.

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions. . . .  Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed.  They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting.  So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.  They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.

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To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion.  There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live.  They began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities.  It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

A couple of Mr. Foster's commenters prefer Diary of a Man in Despair.  Both on order now.  I'm looking to learn from these books how people try, and fail, to prevent the decay of a society into tyranny.