Tea at Trianon: Resisting the Nazis

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Resisting the Nazis

From First Things:

Yes, there are too many Nazi comparisons. The Democrats are Hitler, the Republicans are Hitler, the EU is Hitler. Climate-change skepticism isn't just reckless, it's a Nazi-like mindset. Feminists aren't just mistaken, they're “feminazis.” All this displays a poverty of imagination. But it also shows that we need some shared ethical language. People may disagree about everything else, but at least everyone thinks the Nazis were bad. If we could not invoke the Nazis, it would be harder to ask two important questions: How does evil manifest itself, and how should we resist it?

Two books, Dietrich von Hildebrand’s My Battle Against Hitler and Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler, help answer those questions. Both men left Germany in the 1930s, and despite their temperamental differences, the two authors clearly describe the same reality.

Haffner’s memoir evokes the all-pervasive nature of Nazism. “It seeped through the walls like poison gas,” he writes. Work, leisure, family, and friendship offered no refuge. When Hitler becomes chancellor, life seems to carry on as normal: The shops are still open, the cinemas and dance halls are still full. And yet, Haffner writes, private conversations are soon infected by “a new intolerance and heated readiness to hate.” People are carried away, first by intimidation, then by the intoxication of being part of a movement, until normal, daily events seem charged with ideological meaning. There was an “unrelenting pressure to think about politics all the time.” A conversation between friends becomes an argument, then a tense row, then an open threat of being reported to the Gestapo.

Haffner hopes that the structure of the law (his own profession) would remain in place: Nothing, surely, could move the judges of Berlin’s legendary Kammergericht. But then an SS man is appointed to the bench. When he pronounces, the old jurists are a wretched sight: “They looked at their notes with an expression of indescribable dejection, while their fingers nervously twisted a paper-clip or a piece of blotting-paper.” Legal reasoning which the judges know to be utter nonsense is now backed with the threat of the concentration camp. Even the judges roll over.

Von Hildebrand’s account reveals what this poison gas demanded of individuals. His tale—usefully edited by John H. Crosby and John F. Crosby—includes dozens of vignettes of men (especially von Hildebrand’s fellow Catholics) choosing to jump one way or another. One describes a Franciscan theologian trying to reconcile Nazism with his religion: “Under the intoxicating influence of the Zeitgeist,” von Hildebrand recalls, “he was completely blinded.” Another portrays a Hitler-sympathizing journalist who converts to Catholicism and becomes a staunch anti-Nazi. (Read more.)