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The Necessity of Lies
The Nazis would have been unthinkable without the First World War, and here, right at the beginning of the story, we see something else: the trauma of defeat left millions of Germans believing a particular narrative about the war not because it was demonstrably true, but because it was emotionally necessary. The nation had been gloriously unified in the sunshine of August 1914, or so most Germans thought. Yet, in the cold rain of November 1918, betrayal and cowardice at home–the “stab in the back”–had brought defeat on the battlefield. Neither part of this narrative was accurate, but the contrast between August and November allowed the Nazis to promise that they would bring back the unity of August once they had defeated the treason of November. What a nation believes about its past is at least as important as what that past actually was.
The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett
In Benjamin Hett’s book on the fall of the Weimar Republic, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Fall of the Weimar Republic, there are eerily familiar echoes between 1930s Germany and the contemporary rise of autocratic power throughout the world, the United States in particular. Hett explicitly acknowledges these similarities, pointing out that in contrast to the “glow” that came with “the end of the Cold War,” he claims that “our time [meaning the time when this book was published, or 2017] more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s.” Although it is almost a cliche to draw parallels between 1930s Germany and the aspirations of Trump and many of extremists on the far right that Trump encourages, there was a a comment that stood out for me in Hett’s analysis. This is the necessity of lies, or as the pull quote above argued for, the role that lies played in the processes that made it possible for the Nazis to come to power and undermine democracy in the process. At the very basis of Nazi power was a big lie, or at the very least a narrative that strays far from the truth but was nonetheless “emotionally necessary.”
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