During annual leaves, I entertain myself reading “pleasure” books, typically about Fascism. For once, I opted for the cognate Nazi partner, reading the essay “The Nazi Seizure of Power. Experience of a Single German Town 1930-1935” by William Sheridan Allen. The ethnographic (hi)story is really fascinating. The way the Nazi party took over democratically a middle size city in Hannover tells a lot about how fragile democracy can be. Much of the Nazi preoccupation was to propose “a social revolution”, replacing the progressive SPD stance with illusions. Needless to say, lower-middle social class was the paramount target of Nazism, whose fear was to become miserable like unemployed blue collars become at the wake of WWI. However, my interest has been diverted by the extent to which lower-middle class supported Nazism, included the owner of the only bookshop of this town – Walther Timmerlah (identities are anonymized by Allen). He supported Nazism from the very beginning and he belonged to the Nazi hopeful side for change, later definitely deceived by events. If you want to know by and how such people fell in this huge bias, please read the book.
Nowadays, we need to understand how democracies may degenerate into similar tragedies following a formally legal procedure. Moreover, I dare to maintain that we need to understand how the core people of the main Nazi secretary of this city ultimately hated culture and educated people, first of all Walther Timmerlah, more than any other SPD party activist. SS people epitomized their own active members “Scheiss Akademiker” for the only reason of having a minimal threshold of culture (the lion share of real academic people probably were safe and self-protected – this is feed for further reading list) and being superior to them intellectually, rather than economically or from a social class point of view. SS sort of people, whose entertainment activities include burning books, cannot be blocked at their appear if they get support by bookshop owners.
Picture used for the Italian 2014 edition by Einaudi
giuliomarini 