“HITLER WAS RIGHT!” screamed the graffito (in English) in a bar bathroom in Germany. Then in smaller letters, a reverse punchline to this shocking sentiment: “He knew only the Germans would be stupid enough to follow him.”
Youch! I winced, thinking of the poor stupids, then laughed and peed. Was relieved at how the graffito had turned out to be a joke (to us anti-German foreigners anyway), since it was written in English. As a visiting “Ami” (American) student, I didn’t want English-speaking neo-Nazis going around worsening the perception of us. We were hated enough already. Or at least I was.
Said bathroom was at the university in Freiburg, where as it happened I was taking a course called “Probleme einer Biographie Hitlers” (Problems of [Writing] a Biography of Hitler). “Cool class,” I thought when I saw it in the course guide. I understand history better when viewed through the prism of people’s stories, not bloodless, impersonal ideas. (Did you know the eerie fact that young Adolf Hitler’s art-school drawings of cities never featured any people in them? I learnt that in the course!)
THE COURSE TOOK PLACE IN THIS BUILDING. THE INSCRIPTION TRANSLATES AS: “THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE”
The syllabus consisted of three doorstop-sized biographies of Adolf Hitler and discussions of the many discrepancies among them.
The course also planned to address the universal problems with trying to paint a definitive literary portrait of anyone, not just Hitler. But we ended up not having time for that.
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Like every huge character, living or fictional, Hitler stays interesting to biographers due to his central mystery, an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a swastika flag. In the simplest terms, it’s: “Crazy or evil or both?”
Another giant bafflement is his former constituents, the German people. As recently as 20 years ago, a poll showed that a large majority (I think it was 80%) of Germans, when asked, agreed with this statement: “Hitler did a lot of terrible things, but you can’t deny the good things he did.”
I remember the year I studied there (1991) a guy in his 30s told me that his mother had a secret copy of Mein Kampf stuck in the back of the bookshelf. (It’s against the law for Germans to own that or any Nazi things.) I said, how disturbing, and… why does she still have it? He said, “With anyone over 50 years old in Germany, there’s always still a little bit of brown stuck in there.” Brown for brownshirt.
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Some “unconventional students” arrived on the first day of “Problems of [Writing] a Biography of Hitler” — to audit the class.
It was three white-haired men in their 60s or 70s, meaning it was possible they had that much more “brown stuck in there.” They were old enough to have been in the mandatory “Hitler Youth” education program for sure, and possibly had even fought for Hitler in the war.
Now, Freiburg’s university is comparable in its political hue and overall vibe to the University of California at Berkeley. In other words, it’s filled with a diverse mix of orthodox liberals, casual leftists, radical leftists, socialists, and straight-up Marxists.
But! The philosopher Martin Heidegger also taught here, and was the Rektor of the university during the Nazi reign of violence. His Faustian deal with the Nazis is a different course, a different story for a different day. The point is, Freiburg was not always Berkeley’s German cousin. Far from it.
The white-haired auditors announced they were just curious, and since they lived in the community, they wanted to sit in on the course and see what developed. The young professor, who would fit in nicely in Berkeley, if you get my drift, was in no position to disallow their attendance. It’s a free country (well… technically). But he did not exactly extend a warm welcome to the old men. He and the traditionally college-aged students seemed nervous about the presence of these men.
I rubbed my hands together and thought, “Go get some popcorn.”
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Being Germans, the old men were never late for class, of course. They were always sitting there across the table from the young students by the time I got there (late, of course, being an American).
On the first day the professor threw out a few questions to get the discussion going, like, “Did being Austrian make Hitler not a German, or even more of a German?” and “Do you agree with this author that Hitler may have been sexually abused as a child?”
I thought he probably had been, but I never once said anything in class. I think any opinion you vocalize about Hitler is bound to seem lame and miss the point. Remember: Hitler was designed to trick you.
It was a typical back-and-forth for a little while, made remarkable only by the white-haired auditors grunting their disapproval here and there, or talking among themselves.
“Please stop talking among yourselves,” the professor admonished. During the first few class sessions, the auditors acted contrite when this happened and cleaned up their act enough to not get ejected from the class. Wir bitten um Entschuldigung, Herr Professor, they would say with questionable sincerity.
Gradually little skirmishes started to happen. One of the long-haired traditional students was saying something unflattering about Herr Hitler when two of the auditors interrupted him loudly to “correct” him. He yelled back at them that it was his opinion, and he had a right to it. “Yeah,” said the white-hair. Then sneered, “We live in a de-mo-cra-cy.” He mimed a ptui spitting gesture with his lower face.
Yes, the problems with a biography of Hitler were manifesting themselves at high volume right before me.
You could tell there was more than just political and generational discord going on here. There was a seething hatred. The professor tried to be the neutral arbitrator, but he was clearly defeated by the truism being demonstrated in his classroom: The Nazi thing pits grandchildren against grandparents in Germany.
Session by session, this class was starting to have the same air about it as the Nuremburg Trials. Except because the Allies weren’t running this show, there was no air conditioning, the open windows with no screens were letting bugs in and it was hard to see because the eco-freaky Germans didn’t want to turn the lights on if the sun was out.
The subject of propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will came up one day. The predictable critiques came forth from the professor and students. But it was all too much for the auditors. First these little punks pick on their guy, now they’re tearing apart their favorite movies?
“You have no idea what it was like!” yelled one old man. Overlapping that another old man said, “We were there, you weren’t!” The intra-German shootout resumed again. The professor stopped it and then “turned over the floor” reluctantly to one of the old men and silenced everyone else with a plea for politeness and patience with those who are different than us.
The spotlight finally officially his, the white-haired auditor collected his thoughts and began his statement. “You kids watch these films and you laugh at them. But you don’t understand something about Hitler. He was personally very alluring!”
The young students rolled their eyes and made a lot of annoyed “ach” sounds.
“He was!” insisted the old man as his old-man compatriots nodded and harumphed their approval. Jabbing his finger in the air dramatically and in a way reminiscent of the subject of the class, the old man rumbled emphatically, “He held a great erotic appeal — especially for women!”
— besonders unter den Frauen! This unleashed the final pandemonium. All the young students laughed and hooted loudly at the white-hair’s inadvertently admitted man-crush. The old men’s faces reddened and they blustered some parting complaints about liberal bias to the professor, then got up and huffled out.
I thought after that Valkyrian explosion they were gone for good. But I was wrong, they were back the next week, though they were much more subdued, perhaps readying a final battle plan. Waiting to roll out a new tactic in what they saw as a world-historical struggle to exculpate the collective memory of their generation. They were staying in this course, and they were in it to win it.
Tags: Adolf Hitler, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany, Graffiti, Martin Heidegger, Mein Kampf, National Socialism
