Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler

Defying Hitler is written about the rise of National Socialism within the German people during the interwar phase of Germany. Sebastian Haffner’s writes about how Nazism filled a certain empty space within the war-torn German people. Mass culture started to wash over the German people; this would start to create a society that would be built upon abstract numbers and hollow celebrations. To Haffner, the German people lived an outward existence that was deprived of any meaningful balance in a private life. The empty private lives are precisely what helped Hitler’s nationalist and Nazi propaganda to be effective in the persuasion of the German people. Defying Hitler opens during the time of the Great War. Haffner says that the true Nazi generation was born during the time of 1900 thru 1910. Once they would grow older, they would see the Great War as a type of game of national pride, but they were not be old enough to comprehend all of the destructive realities that the Great War would bring upon Europe. As a boy, Haffner was in this generation of young men. He would eagerly …show more content…
In a way I kind of figured that not every single German person was collaborating with the Nazi party, but I used to think that if a person lived in the country of Germany during this time, they supported the Nazi party. Hearing about Haffner’s story really opened my eyes. A lot of the German people went a long with what the Nazi party was doing, in fear that they might get killed or punished for not following in their footsteps. An example during the story is when Haffner is talking about his time in the camp. He says in the book that he would find himself just simply going along with most of the things that they did, such as shouting and saluting the flags. He did this mostly because of the fear of embarrassment or the fear of physical