The following paragraph is from Joachim C. Fest’s Hitler (1974) (bibliographic information down below) and is from the very end of the text, “The Dead End.” While Fest is talking about 19th/early 20th century German, the conclusions he draws from the story of Hitler’s political life with the people are conclusions that expose some of the current trends in our own moment here in America. It’s these exposures, these moments when reading about another’s history and we see ourselves trodding down a similar path, that are important to take heed of, to listen to, to walk through the discomfort of… Just as people were just people in early 20th Century Germany, so are we just people–no more resistant than they to authoritarianism, nationalism, and (even) fascism. We are not a different breed of human, and especially not if we choose to ignore where and when history can and might repeat itself. So, I offer this paragraph as a moment for consideration of our own time, our own location in history, and our own relationship to this American political endeavor of democracy. In the end, we must be aware of our tendency to want to do away with “politics”, to be done with it, to hand it over to someone else so we don’t have to “worry” or “think” about it anymore. We must take seriously not only the rhetoric around but the ease of our tendencies toward private, autonomy, and the malformed conception of freedom as “freedom from the neighbor for myself.” We might be exhausted from party-politics and the constant manipulation of our fear and anger, but we must not confuse this exhaustion for an exhaustion with the entire idea of politics, which is larger and broader and deeper than simple party politics; it is the very ground under our feet as we move through our societies with each other. Enough from me, here’s Fest:

The National Socialist revolution did not merely shatter outmoded social structures. its psychological effects wen very deep, and possibly this was in fact its most significant aspect. For it totally transformed the entire relationship of Germans to politics. On many pages of this book we have mentioned the extent to which Germans were alienated from politics and oriented toward private concerns, virtues, and goals; Hitler’s success was partly due to that state of affairs. For on the whole the people, restricted to marching, raising hands, or applauding, felt that Hitler had not so much excluded them from politics as liberated them from politics. The whole catalogue of values, such as Third Reich, people’s community, leader principle, destiny, or greatness, enjoyed such widespread approval in part because it stood for a renunciation of politics, a farewell to the world of parties and parliaments, of subterfuges and compromises. Hitler’s tendency to think heroically rather than politically, tragically rather than socially, to put overwhelming mythical surrogates in place of the general welfare, was spontaneously accepted and understood by the Germans. Adorno said of Richard Wagner that he made music for the unmusical. We might add, and Hitler politics for the unpolitical.

Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, translated by, Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 792. Originally published as Hitler, Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1973.