Colin Horgan, excerpt from: This Is How It Happens: A study of men in Hitler’s Germany shows how people allow tyranny to spread
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise,” the philologist told Mayer. The Nazi dictatorship was “diverting,” he said, in that it kept people “so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated… by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”
Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, whose books were burned and who fled to London and then South America as the war began, felt similarly. “National Socialism, with its unscrupulous methods of deception, took care not to show how radical its aims were until the world was inured to them,” Zweig wrote in his 1942 reflections, The World of Yesterday, shortly before his suicide. “So it tried at its technique cautiously — one dose at a time, with a short pause after administering it. One pill at a time, then a moment of waiting to see if it had been too strong, if the conscience of the world could swallow that particular pill.”
As Zweig knew already then, the world did swallow that pill for a time. As did many people in Germany — including those who recognized the implications of that gradual progression. Because, as the philologist described to Mayer, that broader pattern of constant societal change that totalitarianism imposed had a profound effect on individual agency. It resulted in a kind of personal inertia, even when one had an inkling of what was being set in motion. Things kept getting worse, but, the philologist explained, one struggled to react properly, or convince others that they should be worried, too. “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,’” he explained. “And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it.”
That’s because — just as Zweig had described it — “each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse,” the philologist explained. “You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.” But that moment never came. “That’s the difficulty,” the philologist told Mayer. “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… 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 to not 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.”
The constant motion of totalitarianism Arendt would examine years later — the steady movement toward tyranny — is measured as drips, not as a flood.
“When men who understand what is happening — the motion, that is, of history, not the reports of single acts or developments — when such men do not object or protest, men who do not understand cannot be expected to,” the philologist told Mayer.
How many men, he then asked, understood this in America? “And when, as the motion of history accelerates and those who don’t understand are crazed by fear, as our people were, and made into a great ‘patriotic’ mob,” he continued, “will they understand then, when they did not before?”
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