Confronted by mass murder, educated Germans retreated into the “inner” moral certainties of Friedrich Hölderlin’s nineteenth-century lyric poems on “fate,” and the stirring literary depictions of battle found in Ernst Jünger’s post-World War I writings, including Struggle as Inner Experience. These writers, says Stargardt, helped Germans depict the war as akin to an “elemental force”—an act of nature. In both cases they allowed Germans to avoid “questions of causation and responsibility.” A few—like the anti-Nazi bank clerk Willy Peter Reese, who endured five tours on the Eastern Front—rebelled privately. He penned a light verse:

. . . Willy Peter Reese was a rarity and he kept his dissent to himself. Similarly, the Germans failed to react against their government even in 1945, when Stargardt estimates each day of hopeless fighting “cost the lives of 10,000 German soldiers.” Unlike the “turnip winter” of 1916-17, when hunger and suffering sent revolutionary, anti-war crowds into the streets, German solidarity held. The welfare state Hitler had created, in part with confiscated Jewish wealth, kept the masses reasonably well fed. And Joseph Goebbels kept the home front entertained. “Whatever you do,” Goebbels instructed, “do not broadcast tedium, do not present the desired attitude on a silver platter, do not think that one can best serve the national government by playing thunderous military marches every evening.”

Read the article “The Ideas that Inspired World War II Live on in Postmodernism” on city-journal.org.