"You see," my colleague went on, "one
doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act,
each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for
the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking
that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting
somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go
out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of
doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains
you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as
time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community,
‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know,
in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on
walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not
even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak
privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what
do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re
an alarmist.’
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this,
and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know
for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise,
the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party,
intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or
even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally,
people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or
submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at
meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off
in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in
small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to
yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens
your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what?
It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must
make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you
wait, and you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands
will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst
act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest,
thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say,
the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’
stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t
the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of
them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.
Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at
Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of
them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy,
and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby,
saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything,
everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you
live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.
The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the
shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the
holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the
lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live
in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even
know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now
you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The
system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to
sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing
process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to
a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this
new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new
morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted
five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could
not have imagined.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you
have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that
was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early
meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others
would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of
hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You
remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised
beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your
principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or
learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest
there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became
this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to
know."
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
