The right lessons from a Nazi past

There is an increasing number of articles about the Nazi and Fascist period in the international media. This reflects in my view not that there is a risk of the same type of regimes coming back, but the fact that some of the mental processes that made them possible, in a different period, may be at work today in our democracies. After all, the human mind is the same now as it was in the 1930s, but the social and technological context has changed substantively. One of these articles was published two days ago in the New York Times, with the title "I loved my grandmother, but she was Nazi." I don't totally like the easy attitude of the author: "I disapprove of what my dear grandma did." A more productive  attitude is for each of us to think about our hypothetical choices if we had been exactly under the same circumstances that pushed other more or less ordinary people to Nazi or Fascist membership. And to reflect about whether our Fascist or Nazi ancestors would be very different from us had they lived under our present circumstances. Nevertheless, this particular article has a useful reminder of the frame of mind under which many people embraced disastrous ideas, and it is a frame of mind that sounds quite familar to many of us living in societies where national dreams are still too alive: "She and my grandfather grew up in a working-class suburb of industrial Dortmund, where unemployment was rife; it had been occupied by the French after World War I. They joined the Nazi Party to be youth leaders in an agricultural education program called the Landjahr, or “year on the land,” in which teenagers got agricultural training. My grandmother always maintained that she had joined the Nazis as an “idealist” drawn to the vision of rebuilding Germany, returning to a simpler time and, perversely, promoting equality. In the Landjahr, sons and daughters of factory workers would live and work side by side with sons and daughters of aristocrats and wealthy industrialists. She liked the idea of returning to “traditional” German life, away from the confusing push and pull of a global economy. Through research, I understand the Landjahr program was part of Hitler’s larger “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”) vision of making Germany a racially pure, agrarian society. The “racially pure” part was not something my grandmother ever mentioned."