Europe

There’s a reason that even many of Hitler’s followers never bothered to plow through the two volumes of his autobiographical screed: it makes for an excruciating reading experience, no matter what your political leanings. Which is just one reason why the successful bid by the Bavarian authorities this week to uphold the postwar ban on publishing the book in Germany defies logic. A far more sensible approach would be for the authorities to lift the ban long before Bavaria’s copyright expires in 2015.        

When Hitler was on the rise, the most perceptive American correspondents in Germany despaired that almost no outsiders had paid any attention to Mein Kampf. H.R. Knickerbocker, the Berlin correspondent of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post, told a fellow American reporter who had just arrived in the German capital to read the book right away. “No American I know of has taken the trouble to read it seriously, but it’s all there: his plan for the conquest for Europe,” he told him.        

So, too, of course, was Hitler’s vituperative language about the Jews and what he wanted to do to them. After reading Mein Kampf and interviewing Hitler in late 1931, when he was still an opposition leader on the rise, Dorothy Thompson, another famous American correspondent from that era, summed up his views: “The Jews are responsible for everything.” She added: “Take the Jews out of Hitler’s program, and the whole thing … collapses.”        

To be sure, committed anti-Semites were in complete agreement with Hitler’s descriptions of Jews as bloodsuckers and vermin—and anti-Semitism has hardly disappeared from today’s world, including in Germany. According to a recent study, one fifth of the population harbors “latent” feelings of hostility toward Jews. And about 26,000 Germans have been identified as right-wing extremists by the government, which is stepping up its efforts to combat this small but at times violent minority. One cell is suspected of killing 10 people since 2000, nine immigrants and a policewoman.               

But none of this strengthens the case for keeping the ban on the publication of Mein Kampf.  With its hundreds of pages of turgid, often incoherent prose, it’s hardly a major attraction now.

In fact, the only reason that the book may still exude a bit of magnetism for anyone but the already fanatical adherents of the far right is its banned status. And even that is a somewhat bogus claim, since any German who wants to read the book can turn to the Internet or buy a copy abroad. Owning Mein Kampf is not a crime; the current ban only prevents publication of the book in Germany.

It’s time to let Hitler’s outpouring of venom, dictated in 1924 while he was serving a short term in prison for his role in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, to be published. Today’s Germany is certainly a strong enough democracy to survive such a shift in policy, and it may even benefit from it. Inoculations always involve inserting a bit of poison into the body to strengthen it. Germany is fully ready for its shot.

Andrew Nagorski, vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute, is author of the forthcoming Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.
 

Clich here to read this article on the Daily Beast.

Two decades ago, Bill Clinton famously kept himself on message in his successful bid to unseat President George H.W. Bush by repeatedly invoking the phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was Clinton’s ability to convince voters that he could do a better job than Bush in addressing their economic hopes and fears that propelled him to victory. With voters more nervous than ever about their economic future, you’d think the same mantra applies now. Not exactly, though. The phrase simply doesn’t pack the same punch that it did in 1992.

The reason: whether you’re talking about the United States or Europe, the economic crisis is only part of a much larger angst. What’s on people’s minds is leadership—or, more accurately, the lack of leadership. Current political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic inspire less and less confidence and respect just when they need more of both to confront the daunting economic challenges posed by sluggish growth,  ballooning public debt, the tottering euro and the breathtaking pace of technological changes that can be both exhilarating and frightening.

Barack Obama’s approval ratings continue to be stuck below 50 per cent, while the divided results in Iowa demonstrate that no Republican challenger has captured the imagination of voters, even if New Hampshire nearly anoints Mitt Romney as the party’s nominee. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has come closest to seizing the mantle of leadership in Europe, warning in her New Year’s address that the continent was facing its “harshest test in decades.”  But she is the subject of dismissive comparisons to her towering predecessors like Helmut Kohl and Konrad Adenauer, with Europeans complaining that they have a historic crisis but no leaders of historic stature to meet it.

Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy—or, as some Europeans joke, “Merkozy”—are leading the effort to impose tough new EU budget discipline. This would apply not only to the most troubled economies like Greece, Spain and Italy but also to the other EU members, except for Britain which is increasingly going its own way. But while such steps are clearly merited, there’s a double danger: harsh austerity measures may not go far enough to get public debt under control, but may go too far in stifling growth. Already, there are predictions that Europe will be mired in another recession this year.

Some economists are concluding that the real culprit is the entire push for a common currency. “The euro should now be recognized as an experiment that failed,” Martin Feldstein, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Reagan, writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. While rejecting that verdict, even some of the staunchest advocates of European integration concede that failure is a possibility. Noting that China and the U.S. have a lock on the gold and silver medals when it comes to economic performance, former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski warns the EU has to prove it still deserves the bronze. Without major internal reforms, he told Newsweek’s Polish edition, “we’ll fall off the podium.”

The crisis in the United States doesn’t look quite as dramatic, which is both good and bad news. The bad news is that, short of the feeling of impending doom, America’s politicians on both sides of the aisle look all too happy to consider 2012 to be a typical election year, where scoring points against each other trumps any impulse to come up with genuine solutions that require bipartisan cooperation.

Europeans traditionally admired the United States for its can-do spirit. Luigi Barzini, Italy’s elegant essayist, wrote in his 1983 book The Europeans that the continent’s inhabitants were always amazed by American attitudes. While Europeans expect to live with problems, he noted, Americans, by contrast, believe “that all problems not only must be solved, but also they can be solved, and that in fact the main purpose of man’s life is the solution of problems.”

Today Europeans bemoan the paralysis in Washington, wondering why that spirit has disappeared. They accurately point out that the U.S. faces many of the same challenges they do—and seems even less capable of deciding what to do about them. On a per capita basis, U.S. public debt ($33,555 in 2011) is higher than that of Germany ($27,750) and France ($33,083) and is only a bit below that of Italy ($37,313) and even Greece ($34,304).

Of course, debt—whether it’s per capita or as a percentage of GDP, where the U.S. still does better than most European countries—is only one measure of where things stand. And the Europeans are the first to admit that the U. S. still has the economic edge for all sorts of reasons—it’s more dynamic and entrepreneurial, less constrained by bureaucracy, and derives the benefits of continued demographic growth that stands in stark contrast to Europe’s unremitting demographic decline. But they have no confidence that they can look to the U.S. for genuine leadership by example when it comes to solving the big economic problems.

Still, there are grounds for guarded optimism. Because Europeans now recognize they are they are standing at the edge of a precipice, they may finally focus their energies on getting things right—finding a way to control runaway debt while promoting growth. Germany has done well within its borders on that score, but now needs to help others do so. Because Americans are more aware than ever that they now face many of the woes that they once ascribed only to Europe and other distant lands, they may demand more from their politicians in this election year—serious proposals about serious issues in a period when rapid technological changes are redefining everyone’s lives, livelihoods and capabilities. In a variety of new forums, like the Affordable World Security Conference that is scheduled for March in Washington, those discussions are already beginning.

As for the politicians, both the incumbents and those seeking to replace them, they’d do well to begin to engage in those discussions rather than merely scoring points against each other. And to take the lead in the search for new strategies and new solutions. Or, to put it bluntly, they should ponder a new mantra: “It’s leadership, stupid.”

Andrew Nagorski is vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming book Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.

Visiting playwright Vaclav Havel in his Prague apartment overlooking the Vltava River in the 1980s, foreign correspondents were often stopped by police or secret police watching his building, who demanded to see our identity papers. The authorities, of course, knew who we were and who we were seeing, but they wanted us to know that they knew. Havel, who died on December 18 at age 75, always knew that they knew what he and his fellow dissidents were doing because his defiance was deliberately public.

In an era when most people in the Soviet bloc kept their real thoughts strictly private, this left Havel and his colleagues exposed and vulnerable. Their manifestos, which were distributed illegally and broadcast by Western radios, prompted frequent prison terms. Even when they were ostensibly free, they were under constant surveillance. It’s easy to forget how small a group the active dissidents were right up until the cataclysm of 1989 that led to the collapse of communist regimes across the region, propelling their opponents, seemingly against all odds, into positions of power.

Looking back at my encounters with Havel both before and after 1989 when I covered those upheavals for Newsweek, I’m struck by three dominant character traits: his moral courage, his ability to recognize and live with the contradictions of human behavior, and his sense of the absurd. All three were essential ingredients of his improbable success. They also offer lessons for others seeking to overthrow dictatorships—and for those who are trying, as is the case today in much of the Arab world, to figure out what comes next.

Havel’s moral courage was long evident, but the thinking behind it was what was truly remarkable. In his seminal essay “The Power of the Powerless” and interviews, he would harp on the theme that individual actions matter, pro forma subservience to a totalitarian regime matters, and that non-violent defiance matters even more. So long as such regimes could maintain the pretense of unity, with citizens going along with such empty rituals as phony elections, the powerful weren’t threatened and any dissidents remained isolated. But Havel had an almost mystic belief in the “radioactivity” of words that exposed the lies of the system. “When free speech is suppressed, speech paradoxically has a special weight and power,” he told me in 1986.

A society might appear completely conformist, as Czechoslovakia did then or Tunisia did before a street vendor set himself alight last year, but the powerful example of even a small number of souls who were willing to speak the truth could abruptly change everything. If that implied that one day the truth might really set Czechoslovakia free, Havel wasn’t basing his actions on any calculation that he would live to see that day. In fact, the surest way of guaranteeing inaction, he reflected, was to try to calculate whether dissent could succeed. The only sure path was to follow one’s conscience, no matter what the price.

But Havel was anything but a humorless moralist. Just as he recognized the contradictions and ironies of a totalitarian society where public and private perceptions of reality were completely at odds, he immediately noted the irony of his ascension to the presidency of a free country. “God has punished me,” he joked when I met him in his office at the Prague Castle in July 1991. As a dissident, he had carefully chosen each word of his appeals for maximum impact; as president, he was forced to speak constantly, producing a flood of words with rapidly diminishing impact.

In his writings, he was quick to admit that newly liberated societies were full of disappointments, including “an enormous and dazzling explosion of every imaginable human vice.” With the disappearance of the police state followed by a period of uncertain transition, free speech and the arts flourished, but so did aggressive criminal behavior. Thus, he was less startled by such negative developments than many of his compatriots, while remaining optimistic that new societies based on individual responsibility would gradually evolve and begin to reverse such trends. I suspect that today he would be far more troubled by some of the political forces unleashed by the Arab Spring, but he would still counsel patience, avoiding a rush to judgment.

Havel considered the early suggestions that he might seek the presidency an “absurd joke.” In his world, though, jokes always had meaning. Shortly after the first free elections in neighboring Poland in June 1989, a group of Solidarity activists who were now suddenly elected to parliament paid a visit to Havel at his country house. Over a hearty meal served by Havel’s wife Olga, everyone consumed copious quantities of beer. Then, Havel led his guests outside to relieve themselves—offering a full frontal view for the secret police surveillance cameras deployed around his house.

Czechoslovakia’s final reckoning with its Communist system was still several months away, but a police state that prompted such open mockery was doomed. It was a scene that fits perfectly into the play that should be written about Havel’s life.

Andrew Nagorski is vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming book Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power.

The EastWest Institute's 8th annual Worldwide Security Conference (WSC8) took place on October 3-4, 2011. The conference, sponsored by the French G8 Presidency, brought together leading policymakers for two days of networking, debate and exclusive private consultations on a range of new security challenges, from the new political landscape in the Arab world to a growing number of attacks in cyberspace. Here is an overview of WSC8 media coverage.

> PC World
> New Europe
> The News (Pakistan)
> Kuwait News Agency
> ARN
> Kashmir Watch
> TechWorld
> CIO
> CFO World
> PC World
> CSO Online
> Infosec Island
> IT World
> ComputerWorld (Japan)
> IGT (Russia)
> RT.KORR (Russia)
> inoSMI (Russia)

Otto and Elise Hampel were improbable German resisters. By all accounts, the working-class, middle-aged couple accepted Hitler’s New Order up until 1940. Then, during the invasion of France, Elise’s brother was killed—and something snapped in them. The pair began writing postcards denouncing the Nazi regime and calling on Germans to engage in civil disobedience and sabotage.

“Hitler’s war is the worker’s death!” one of them proclaimed. They managed to drop the postcards in public places all over the German capital for two years. Although almost all of these subversive missives were immediately turned into the authorities by the terrified Berliners who picked them up, the Gestapo and the police frantically searched for the perpetrators, assuming they were dealing with a much larger conspiracy. In October 1942 the Hampels were finally arrested and, after their forced confessions, tried, convicted, and sent to the guillotine.

There’s nothing to indicate that this seemingly ordinary couple’s crusade won anyone over to their cause, and their actions never attracted the kind of postwar attention that other tales of resistance did. Much better known are the stories of the White Rose, the Munich students who wrote incomparably more elegant leaflets against the regime before they were arrested and executed in 1943; the defiance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other church figures; the Red Orchestra, as the Soviet-linked, often highly placed espionage rings were called; and of course, the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The White Rose and the Hitler plot, in particular, have inspired countless books and films.

But the Hampels’ story wasn’t completely forgotten. It would serve as inspiration for Hans Fallada (1893-1947), the immensely popular German novelist of the 1930s who refused to join the Nazi party but also refused to flee his homeland. As Fallada saw it, that left him no choice but to make numerous compromises with Hitler’s regime so that he could keep writing: “I do not like grand gestures, being slaughtered before the tyrant’s throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one,” he declared later.

When the war ended, Johannes Becher, a German Communist writer who had returned from exile in Moscow and Tashkent, used his position as a rising cultural apparatchik in the Soviet occupation zone to reach out to Fallada. He arranged housing and writing assignments for the ailing writer, who had struggled with alcoholism and morphine addiction while trying to survive the war and Hitler. Most significantly, Becher supplied him with documents from the Gestapo file about the Hampels’ case, suggesting that this might serve as the subject of his next novel.

Fallada took the message to heart. His final novel, Every Man Dies Alone, written in an astounding 24-day spurt, is based loosely on the Hampels’ story. And shortly before its publication in 1947, Fallada succumbed to his assorted addictions and ailments at age 53. His last work was praised, but didn’t achieve the huge sales or psychological impact of his prewar hits. That was hardly surprising: Germany was just beginning to recover from the devastation of 12 years of National Socialism and six years of war; it was too early for an exhausted, shattered nation to focus on a novel that confronts the issues of resistance and fear.

The recent decision by Melville House to translate Every Man Dies Alone into English for the first time, while reissuing two of Fallada’s earlier novels in paperback, should go a long way towards elevating this book to the place it deserves in world, and not just German, literature. If Fallada’s early popularity sometimes raised suspicions that he was a bit of a lightweight, his final book demonstrates the opposite. It’s unquestionably his most powerful work: Primo Levi described it as “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.” That’s an accurate judgment and not just a routine blurb, but it fails to reflect the full scope of Fallada’s accomplishment. By chronicling the actions of a couple who did exactly what he and most Germans refused to do, Fallada raises the larger question of the meaning of “grand gestures” in the face of any tyranny.

Hans Fallada’s real name was Rudolf Ditzen, and his complicated personal story allowed him to understand the lives of his varied cast of fictional characters. Aside from a prolific novelist, he was many things: a mental patient, a prisoner, a farm worker, a journalist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, and, at the end of World War II when the Red Army occupied his small town, briefly a district mayor. Although he incurred the Nazis’ wrath on several occasions, he never was a member of any resistance group. He tried to keep his distance from a regime he clearly loathed, but he bent to its will when he felt he had to, while battling his inner demons.

In 1911, when he was 18, Ditzen and a fellow student staged a duel, which was supposed to serve as a respectable cover for a suicide pact. Ditzen fatally wounded his friend, whose shot missed him. Ditzen then shot himself with his friend’s gun, but survived. Charged with murder, he was declared unfit to stand trial and was committed to his first stint in a mental institution, followed by drugs, treatment centers, and subsequent work on farms and a series of other jobs. He was twice caught embezzling to feed his drug addiction, leading to his first jail sentences.

Ditzen’s father was a retired justice of the Supreme Court, and his son must have been a continuing source of embarrassment. When he began to make good on his ambition of becoming a writer—the publisher Ernst Rowohlt printed his first novel, Young Goedeschal, in 1920—his father was unnerved by its autobiographical story and suggested he use a pseudonym. Rudolf chose Hans Fallada, both names associated with the Grimm brothers. In their story “Hans in Luck,” the title character is a simple fellow who convinces himself he’s lucky even when he’s swindled again and again. In “The Goose Girl,” a horse named Falada (one “l”) bears witness to the treachery of a maid who usurped the identity of the princess she served. Frightened that the horse may reveal all, the maid orders it beheaded—but the truth ultimately comes out when the horse’s head is nailed on a city gate and starts to talk.

In his more mature novels, Fallada infuses his characters and plots with many of the same themes: naïveté and the search for identity and truth, despite the brutality of the world that his characters inhabit. Little Man, What Now?—his 1932 novel that has been reissued in paperback—was a huge bestseller in Germany, and an international hit translated into more than 20 languages. It was made into separate films in Germany and the United States. It tells the story of a young couple whose struggle to survive and start a family plays out against the backdrop of the Depression. Johannes Pinneberg loses one job and then another after marrying his pregnant girlfriend Lämmchen (the diminutive for “lamb” in German). Pinneberg believes that he will be able to provide for his small family even when everything looks relentlessly grim. But it’s Lämmchen who is the anchor of the book: She is determined, tender, and willing to put up with all hardships.

Fallada’s literary style is often held up as an example of Neue Sachlichkeit, the movement for more literal, realistic representation in the arts. The Manchester Guardian ascribed the success of Little Man, What Now? to its “unsentimental realism,” and much of its appeal is, indeed, its unsparing description of the life of two individuals caught up in an economic crisis they can hardly understand. At one point a policeman singles out the shabbily dressed Pinneberg in a crowd of window shoppers, ordering him to move on. The unemployed ex-salesman suddenly understands “that he was on the outside now, that he didn’t belong here any more, and that it was perfectly correct to chase him away. .  .  . Poverty is not just misery, poverty is an offence, poverty is a stain, poverty is suspect.”

But realism isn’t enough to explain why the novel captured the popular imagination of readers around the world. Nor is the sympathetic portrayal of Lämmchen. The narrator saves the couple by departing from harsh realism when it suits his purpose: Thus, Fallada makes sure that whenever it looks like the couple will sink too far, a near-miraculous intervention keeps them afloat. For all the talk of realism, the narrator is susceptible to sentimentalism, which adds to the book’s appeal. There is always hope, the narrator is saying: The Guardian didn’t have it completely right.

The narrator also sets the political context. Lämmchen comes from a working-class family and her “heart was with the Communists.” But the couple isn’t much concerned with politics; they simply want a roof over their heads and enough to eat. Fallada dismissively mentions a coworker of Johannes who is a Nazi, and injects the occasional rumination about social injustice.

How could one really laugh in a world where captains of industry are allowed to line their own pockets and make hundreds of mistakes, whereas the little people who had always done their best were humiliated and squashed?

Major literary figures such as Hermann Hesse, Carl Zuckmayer, and Lion Feuchtwanger, all of whom would become anti-Nazi voices outside of Germany, were enthusiastic about Fallada’s bestseller. The Nazis were put off by its negative portrayal of the party activist and by Fallada’s empathy for Jews, but they also applauded its harsh spotlight on life in Weimar Germany.

Like Pinneberg, Hans Fallada wanted to live his life and largely ignore the political battles swirling around him. The enormous success of Little Man, What Now? provided him with enough money to leave Berlin and purchase a small farm in the village of Carwitz, 50 miles north of the capital. He lived there with his wife Anna, who—like Lämmchen, the character modeled after her—came from a working-class background and exuded a commonsense approach to life that offered him more stability than he ever had. Martha Dodd, the daughter of William Dodd, the American ambassador in Berlin during 1933-37, was curious to meet Fallada and paid him a visit.

"He was a stockily built man with blondish hair and charming, genial features; his wife plump, blonde, serene, with a peasant face. They had two children, a young, bright-faced boy of four and an infant in arms. Their life seemed to be built around their family and their farm. He was isolated from life and happy in his isolation."

Dodd was in the process of becoming a fervent anti-fascist, a path that would lead to close contacts with Soviet diplomats and charges that she spied for the Kremlin. (In 1953 she fled the United States and spent most of the rest of her life in Prague.) She was naturally scornful of a prominent writer like Fallada for his decision to disengage as much as possible from the political scene: “I got the impression that he was not and could not be a Nazi—what artist is?” she noted. “This withdrawal from life was Hans Fallada’s tragic solution to the problems that might have been troubling his peace. It was a temptation to which he had completely succumbed. And the impression of defeatism he gave us was saddening.”

Yet Fallada wasn’t so much withdrawing from life as frantically trying to keep writing, always conscious that the Nazis could silence him at any time. While his social criticism and sympathetic characters were tolerated because they were situated in an earlier era, the Völkischer Beobachter complained that “he was never one of us.” At times, Fallada went to some lengths to ingratiate himself with Germany’s rulers: In the foreword to his novel Once a Jailbird (1934), he appeared to endorse the changes in the justice system under the Nazis, and he wrote a final section of Iron Gustav (1938) at Joseph Goebbels’s insistence, transforming the main character into a Nazi sympathizer.

While defending such actions, he was clearly not proud of them, and considered emigrating on more than one occasion. He almost took up an offer from his British publisher to emigrate in late 1938, but reconsidered. He couldn’t imagine living in exile, but was also finding it increasingly difficult to continue his life in Germany, even in the relative isolation of Carwitz. His drinking was out of control. He and Anna divorced in July 1944, and on August 28, he pulled a gun on her. In the ensuing scuffle Anna took his gun and hit him over the head. According to a court document, he had drunk a dozen bottles of wine in the two days leading up to this incident, and as a result was confined to a psychiatric hospital for three-and-a-half months.

It was there that Fallada wrote The Drinker.He had always written with near-manic speed, as if he couldn’t get the words out fast enough, and the notations in his manuscript indicate that he wrote this novel in two weeks. Writing in the first person and making no attempt to disguise the parallels to his life, he launches right into his descent into alcoholism. Starting with the opening line—“Of course I have not always been a drunkard”—he quickly adds, “But then the time came when things began to go wrong with me.” The opening paragraph also includes this revealing sentence: “Worst of all, the feeling gradually grew on me that even my wife was turning away from me.” This is typical Fallada, plunging right into his stories, sweeping the reader into their tumultuous flow from the very beginning.

Erwin Sommer is the main character, a merchant whose drinking leads to the loss of everything: his job, money, wife. Like the author, Sommer threatens to kill his wife after consuming vast amounts of alcohol, an incident that hardly registers with him till he is incarcerated. But unlike Fallada, Sommer is too far gone to convince anyone he can be freed. Here Fallada tells a story of self-destruction, viewed through the booze-soaked mind of Sommer. He can see what’s happening, and is powerless to do anything about it. As Sommer is led from prison to the mental institution where he will spend the rest of his days, he passes a sign for his old store: “Erwin Sommer: Market Produce, Wholesale and Retail.”

And led along by a little chain, a suitcase in his free hand, this same Erwin Sommer went by, living yet dead for all that; traces of his life still remained—for how much longer?

It’s as searing a portrayal of an alcoholic as exists in modern literature. Of course, the book could have been set anywhere, since Sommer is in a private hell that doesn’t offer or need any references to war or Nazis. But there’s a natural tendency to interpret his portrayal of the brutal world of the asylum as a commentary on his larger surroundings, where so many were led away, feeling similarly powerless.

The Drinker had no chance of publication under the Nazis, and would only be published in West Germany in 1950, three years after Fallada’s death. Emerging from the asylum, Fallada took up with Ursula Losch, a 24-year-old widow who shared his weaknesses for alcohol and morphine. They married in Berlin in February 1945 and a bombing raid broke up their party afterwards. The couple quickly fled the capital, returning to her country cottage. When the war ended, Soviet authorities briefly appointed Fallada mayor of the district around Carwitz, but he wasn’t capable of dealing with the chaos of the early occupation. He once again sought refuge in morphine, and Ursula tried to kill herself. After they were both hospitalized they returned to Berlin, where Fallada would meet Johannes Becher and become acquainted with the Gestapo file of Otto and Elise Hampel.

Politics is front and center in Every Man Dies Alone. Written right after the war, it is set in Berlin and populated by a lengthy and varied cast of characters who demonstrate the full range of human behavior during the terror of Nazi wartime rule: everything from sadistic brutality and desperate opportunism to glimmers of compassion and defiant courage. While Fallada breathes life into all of his characters, he is especially fascinated with those who opt for resistance, knowing the likely outcome.

At the center are Otto and Anna Quangel, who receive news of the death of their son in the invasion of France. Otto is a dour foreman in a furniture factory, a stickler for enforcing the rules, and usually so silent that most people barely notice him. Anna has learned to live with his apparent lack of emotion, and keeps her feelings in check as well. But when the letter arrives explaining that their son has died “a hero’s death for Führer and Fatherland,” she lashes out at Otto: “Lies, all a pack of lies! But that’s what you get from your wretched war, you and that Führer of yours!”

Otto is stunned by this first outburst in their long marriage. He protests that he voted for Hitler only once, as she did, and can’t fathom what has happened. Taking on the painful task of informing his son’s girlfriend Trudel, he’s confronted by another surprise: When he admits his feeling of helplessness, the young woman confides that she’s joined a secret resistance cell in her factory. Even if they are vastly outnumbered by the Nazis and their followers, she explains, “the main thing is that we remain different from them, that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do.” And she quotes one of the organizers of the cell:

He said we are like good seeds in a field of weeds. If it wasn’t for the good seeds, the whole field would be nothing but weeds. And the good seeds can spread their influence.

Otto ponders that message and begins writing antiregime postcards. “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son,” reads the first one. Dropping more and more postcards around the city, he triggers a devastating chain of events. As in the case of the Hampels, the frightened people who pick them up rush to hand them to the authorities. During the search for the author, and after the Quangels are finally caught, the collateral victims keep multiplying. Among those victims are not only Trudel and her new husband, both of whom had flirted with resistance and sought to escape to a quiet life outside the city, but also others, such as a petty thief who couldn’t be further from a political dissident. Fallada conveys the all-pervasive atmosphere of terror where anyone can suddenly be found guilty, no matter how docile they’ve been, and no one can escape the possibility of torture, confession, and death. Not even the torturers and murderers themselves.

Those who have been raised in a free society, and ask why people didn’t rise up against such a system, are likely to pose a different question after reading Every Man Dies Alone: How did anyone have the strength to resist and maintain any shred of human decency? And yet Fallada’s universe contains many who act decently, at least on occasion, even if they move among the murderers, criminals, and schemers, all trying to survive at any cost. There is a retired judge who tries to save a Jewish neighbor and then seeks to ease Otto and Anna’s suffering when they are caught by slipping them cyanide—which neither takes in the end. There’s the mail carrier who resigns from the Nazi party and seeks refuge in the countryside when she learns that her son has smashed the skull of a Polish Jewish child. There’s a prison chaplain who does everything possible to lessen the suffering all around him by acting as a friend to the condemned. There’s even an SS guard who takes pity on Anna and Trudel by allowing them to remove the corpse of a cellmate, who had been left to rot in their cell, to a morgue.

Fallada cannot get away from the central question: Is it worth resisting if the price is so much suffering and death—not just for resisters, but for anyone remotely associated with them? When the Gestapo inspector Escherich finally tracks down Otto after two years of a frantic search, he wants his prisoner to acknowledge the futility of his actions. Escherich informs him that the authorities had collected all but 18 of the 285 postcards and letters he had written. By then, Otto has also learned about the others who were going to their deaths because of his and Anna’s singular protest campaign.

Otto surprises his captor by his response to the news about the fate of his postcards and letters: “Eighteen items: that’s the sum total of my work of two years, my hope. My life for those eighteen pieces of paper. Well, at least they were as many as that!” Escherich refuses to concede that much, claiming that the 18 postcards were destroyed by people too afraid to turn them in: “You must have known you had no chance!” he persists. “It’s a gnat against an elephant. I don’t understand it, a sensible man like you!”

Otto maintains that he had to fight, and “given the chance I would do it again.” But he, too, wavers as the guillotine approaches. Speaking to a musician who is also facing death for opposition to the regime, Otto asks what good their resistance has done. This produces Fallada’s real answer to the question, as spelled out by
the musician:

As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean we are alone, Quangel, or that our deaths will be in vain. Nothing in this world is done in vain, and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.

Fallada also injects one major surprise: Escherich, the Gestapo inspector, is won over by Otto’s argument that it’s better to die fighting an evil system than to live serving it. Imprisoned briefly and beaten when he appeared to have bungled the case, Escherich has a sudden glimpse of what it was like to be on the receiving end of his organization’s methods. He can’t admit this to Otto, but is disgusted by his handling of “the only decent man here.” Calling himself too cowardly to follow Otto’s example, but “the only man Otto Quangel converted,” Escherich shoots himself.

The chances that a real Gestapo inspector would have come to such a conclusion are probably about zero. Yet Fallada develops Escherich’s story in a way that doesn’t feel implausible—no more so, that is, than the change of heart of the Stasi agent monitoring the conversations of the main character, an East German playwright suspected of dissident leanings in 1984, in The Lives of Others (2006). But strange things can happen in the closed worlds of dictatorships, and even if both conversions—in Fallada’s novel and in director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winner for best foreign film—are no more than dramatic devices, they are remarkably effective dramatic devices.

The historian Golo Mann was unequivocal in his praise for the German resistance. “In the darkness it was a shining light,” he wrote. But there were various kinds of German resisters, and they went to their deaths in different ways. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the military plot against Hitler whose bomb failed to kill the Führer on July 20, 1944, met his end crying out: “Long live holy Germany.” Stauffenberg was an aristocrat who could still cling to that vision. Fallada’s vision is of a Germany that is too corrupt, compromised, and terrorized to lend itself to romanticism. Yet the author of Every Man Dies Alone doesn’t give up on his fellow man. His last chapter focuses on two characters who survive the wreckage of Hitler’s Germany: The mail carrier who had resigned from the Nazi party, and a young boy she adopts who had fled his family of party opportunists. Fallada writes the first sentence in a different, more personal voice, leaving no doubt about his intentions: 

But we don’t want to end this book with death, dedicated as it is to life, invincible life, life always triumphing over humiliation and tears, over misery and death.

When the boy proclaims “I’m starting afresh,” Fallada is declaring his hope for the birth of a new Germany. Only a writer whose trajectory included drugs and alcohol, petty crime and multiple incarcerations, and who made more compromises than he cared to admit with the Nazis he despised, could have written such words with full conviction, and make them feel convincing. And this ringing affirmation of life would be his last words before his death.

Andrew Nagorski, vice president and director of public policy at the EastWest Institute, is author of the forthcoming Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (Simon & Schuster)

The article was publsihed by The Weekly Standard.

In an interview on For Your Ears Only Franz-Stefan Gady discusses the possible causes of violent extremism in Europe, in light of the most recent terrorist attack in Oslo.

The full episode of the program is available here.

Writing for the Journal of Foreign Relations, Franz-Stefan Gady analyzes the historical overlap of literature and politics.

Click here to read Gady's piece in the Journal of Foreign Relations

Gady also analysed the latest tensions around the South China Sea disputes in an interview with Der Standard.

You can read the full interview here.

Click here to read the piece in CivSource.

Perspectives coming out of the EastWest Institute’s global cyber security summit in London

EWI is a global think tank that has organized a series of meetings to help address the pressing issue of international cybersecurity cooperation. The London Summit was attended by government representatives from 47 countries, as well as a significant number of business and technology leaders.

For me, the important insights that emerged from the London Summit were the potential cyber threats that could impact state and local governments. Many vital citizen services are provided online and international cyber intrusions can compromise the security of these networks. Still there are significant challenges that need to be addressed in order to develop the multilateral agreements and the policies that need to be in place to ameliorate the cyber risks. This issue is not new. Two years ago in Beijing I attended meetings organized by the East/West Institute that addressed the issue of cyber threats. A preliminary agreement was reached at that time, to support multilateral cybersecurity negotiations around several agreed upon topics. The U.S., China, India, Russia and NATO were also ultimately parties to that agreement.

The discussions around protecting critical government services in cyberspace that emerged from the Beijing discussions became the platform for a preliminary interchange on the issue at the first EWI Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit held in Dallas in 2010. It was developed further this year at the 2011 EWI Summit in London.

In addition to the Summits, EWI working groups continue their work throughout the year, to try to hammer out recommendations that set the stage for international cyber cooperation to move forward. Earlier this year U.S./Russia bilateral negotiations on political infrastructure protection took place under the sponsorship of the EWI. The following five major recommendations emerged from that working group:

• Russia and the U.S., along with other willing parties, should conduct an evaluation of the present state of the intermingling of protected, humanitarian critical infrastructure with non-protected infrastructures in order to determine whether existing Convention and Protocol articulation is sufficient and whether significant detangling of essential humanitarian critical infrastructures is feasible.
• Russia and the U.S., along with other willing parties, should conduct a joint assessment of the benefit and feasibility of special markers for zones in cyberspace that can be used to designate humanitarian interests protected by the Conventions and Protocols of War.
• Russia, the U.S. and other interested parties, should assess how best to accommodate Convention principles with the new reality that cyber warriors may be non-state actors.
• Russia, the U.S. and other interested parties, should conduct a joint analysis of the attributes of cyber weapons in order to determine if there are attributes analogous to weapons previously banned by the Geneva Protocol.
• Russia and the U.S., along with other willing parties, should explore the value of recognizing a third, ‘other-than-war’ mode in order to clarify the application of existing Conventions and Protocols.

With these US/Russia recommendations as the foundation, one of the objectives of the London Summit was to define approaches to protect critical government services for our citizens. The protections are critical because of the proliferation of services available on the internet, including emergency response, health care, and human services. Several significant insights came out of the discussions at the Summit.

• There is a need to more clearly and specifically define those critical government services on the internet that directly affect the lives of private citizens.
• Work also needs to be done around policies to protect other critical infrastructure, such as the electric grid, which if attacked, could affect the ability of governments to provide critical citizen services.
• Once defined, policy should apply in peacetime as well as in wartime.
• Although consideration of the U.S.-Russia recommendation of markers in cyberspace was considered, there was concern about the recommendations as they did not address the risks posed by non-state actors.
• It was discussed that cost benefit analysis is required around potentially segregating certain vulnerable entities on the internet.
• Finally, it was also recognized that some multilateral backup capabilities may need to be established subject to assessing cost effectiveness.

The commitment was made by the Summit attendees to continue to refine the observations and recommendations, recognizing that there may ultimately be a requirement for international statutory changes and treaty agreements. The commitment was made to report back on progress at the third Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit planned for 2012 in India.

As always I welcome your feedback and questions for a lively discussion in the comment section below.

Mr. Robert N. Campbell III is Vice Chairman, Principal, Deloitte LLP and is the U.S. State Government Leader, based in Austin, TX

Click here to read the article in Today's Zaman.

Some newspapers have been manufacturing anti-AK Party stories, not based on factual evidence but because of the prejudice they hold against the AK Party. Supporters of the government here at home and in the West should make a point to emphasize the untruthfulness in these deliberately misleading stories. Mediators have always had a crucial role in history as people who are able to employ rhetoric understandable to both sides. One such mediator is Zuhal Kurt.

She is on the board of directors of the EastWest Institute, a global think tank and highly effective in the US. She is also the chief executive officer of privately held Kurt Enterprises, whose investments include 6News, a satellite news video broadcast covering Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. Kurt Enterprises even owns a race horse training company, Kurt Systems, which uses advanced technology to help improve speed and stamina in race horses.

As an experienced and ardent student of Turkey, she brings valuable insight to understanding Turkish politics and the AK Party’s popularity. She thinks that the AK Party has played a crucial role in solving Turkey’s identity crisis, which she maintains has been in place since the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. She says the country is still experiencing a paradigm shift and undergoing a process of reconstructing its identity. The most effective steps in defining Turkey’s identity have been taken by the AK Party, according to Kurt. Since the time it was founded as a new republic in 1923, Turkey has faced an identity crisis, Kurt believes. She asserts that this crisis has cost the country much in terms of constitutional, political, social and economic development.

Over the past 10 years the AK Party government has constructed a new Turkey where so many constituents are different. That alteration has resulted in new classes and rules. And for Kurt, the new order naturally has its opponents. There is group of people who have a hard time adapting to the new and transformed Turkey. “Change is not an easy thing to accept. But when we look at the overall situation, Turkey is a totally more powerful and dynamic country compared to what it was 10 years ago. In that time Turkey has tripled its national income and attained an economic growth rate that was unimaginable before. Now citizens of European countries are seeking to immigrate to Turkey. Turkey is not only a strong power in its region but one of the pivotal powers in the world. These are very positive indicators,” says Kurt.

Although there are very positive signs in Turkey about the AK Party government, and it has gained half of the voters’ trust, some of the foreign media’s interpretations of the AK Party are in no way positive. Suspicions about Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s strong personality and tendencies toward totalitarianism are hardly comprehensible for supporters of the AK Party. But Kurt thinks Erdoğan should use a calmer rhetoric and embrace the West as well as the East. The harsh attitude he took in his election campaign and on certain occasions may be understood as domineering. Kurt thinks he does not need such an attitude because he is on the right track. She also notes: “He got 50 percent of the vote in his third term. This is unprecedented in Turkey’s political history. If people think that Erdoğan has been in power for too long, they should know that this is normal for Turkey. For instance, the country’s ninth president, Süleyman Demirel, was in power for many years. Turkey’s politics do not produce as many politicians as other countries do. People do not give up political power easily.”

Kurt recalled that in his victory speech Erdoğan sent messages to different parts of the world. “While he embraced the Balkans, North Africa and neighboring regions, he mentioned Europe only once and did not mention the United States at all.” However, Kurt said she believes Erdoğan should embrace the entire world. Kurt said Erdoğan needs to be more realistic and less emotional and populist in his approach to Israel. She claims: “Turkey should see Israel as a pluralistic society not a one-dimensional state. There are so many peaceable people in Israel. When the Mavi Marmara incident happened, many Jewish citizens of Turkey became anxious. But Fethullah Gülen’s statements in The Washington Post [that the flotilla had disrespected Israel’s authority as a state], brought them relief.”

Kurt says that she gets many questions in the US on whether Turkey is becoming a fundamentalist country; she responds: “I totally disagree with this idea. Although Turkey is a conservative country, it will never be fundamentalist. In Turkey the culture of religion has never led to fundamentalism.”

She adds: “What I love most about this government is its policies to break prejudices. Ten years ago we were not able to talk about minorities and their rights. Even though there are no concrete solutions yet, we are talking about them freely. There is discomfort about Erdoğan in the Western media, but I think the prime minister can solve this problem by taking some easy steps.”