Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...East-West struggle-a bewildering and indecent haste hardly calculated to reinforce any moral lessons. Moreover, West Germany has become a youthful nation: over half its population of 58 million were born or grew up after the Nazi era. These new Germans, who had nothing to do with Hitler, will agree with ex-President Theodore Heuss in accepting a "collective shame" for their nation's past, but they refuse, and understandably, to shoulder forever a "collective guilt" for the sins of their fathers...
Only conscious or unconscious racists claim that Germans carry a hereditary taint. But all examinations and self-examinations of Germany must sooner or later lead to the legitimate questions: How did Hitler happen? How could Nazism seize a civilized country? Despite all the words expended on the subject, the phenomenon essentially remains a mystery. But part of the answer had to do with national identity. Though Hitler behaved like a nationalist possessed. Germany's sense of nationhood was always a fragile and insecure state of mind. In 1871, Bismarck belatedly forged German unity under Prussian hegemony from the anachronism...
...sufficient to explain Nazism. It could not have happened but for two additional qualities that in the past at least have always seemed to be part of the German character. One is romanticism, the antirational worship of Wagnerian life and death of which Nazism represented a cancerous acceleration. The Hitler regime was romantic, even idealistic, in a perverted way; as Heinrich Heine said, "We Germans are idealists even when we hate." The other, and contradictory, quality is an alarming literal-mindedness, which made it possible even for many educated Germans to absorb and act on Nazism's pseudo science...
Loaded with Evidence. They paid four midnight visits to the neo-Nazis' secret headquarters in downtown Stockholm. Working by flashlight, they photo graphed documents, photos, anti-Semitic tracts, Nazi flags, busts of Hitler, small arms. On one visit they were startled by what sounded like a footstep. They bolted for the piano in the office, started banging out the Nazi Horst Wessel song and singing lustily. But the noise turned out to be the minute hand of a big clock, which had stuck momentarily, then was released with a thump...
...turning from existentialist liberalism to Communism, it can also be argued (as Sartre does in "Reply to Albert Camus," reprinted in Situations), that existentialists who do not make this choice fail worse. Sartre made this argument when he pointed out to Camus that Camus had not hesitated to oppose Hitler...