Spending Easter without Hitler

Market Square in Weimar, 1932. Img: From Fritz Sauckel’s Kampf und Sieg in Thüringen

I was standing on the market square in the middle of Weimar. The town was eerily quiet. From the elegant, yellow facade of the town hall, black-red-and-white banners flapped in the wind. Every now and then the cloth straightened and swastikas flashed into view.

A waiter in a tailcoat appeared from nowhere. ‘Would you like a drink, Madam?’ he asked, his white-gloved hand holding a small tray with just one glass of champagne on it. I took it and saw it had a small elephant engraved near the rim.

I looked over my shoulder and saw that I was in front of the Hotel Elephant, out of which now streamed dozens of men in brown uniforms. They came to a halt in a long line to my left and right and stood to attention, their right arms raised in rigid salute.

I turned my head back again, and suddenly the market square was full of people. Men, women, children. They all had looks of crazed euphoria on their faces. The crowds were pressing forward as one, held back from the hotel entrance only by a row of men in shiny black boots.

There was something utterly horrifying about the scene, as if it was building up to something terrible, and I had no way of stopping it.

I ran up to the front row of people, wanting to shout at them to go home, to go away before it was too late. But I had no voice, just silent screams of warning. The crowds completely ignored me, and began chanting something unintelligible. I was like a ghost among them, sensing that something very bad was going to happen, but unable to do anything about it.

All around me, the sound of drums was building up to a rhythmic crescendo that accellerated the chanting. Then suddenly, it stopped and a hushed silence descended. I turned around again and looked at the hotel entrance.

From the shadows, the contours of a figure were slowly emerging, moving towards a microphone that somebody had placed outside. The man stepped outside into the sunshine, and I knew the face I was about to see.

Then I woke up.

Startled and beset by an intense, lingering feeling of unease, I stared into the darkness of the night. Hitler dreams are probably a good sign that you’re working too much.

If you’ve ever fallen asleep after hours of reading, binge-watching or playing a particularly engrossing game, you’ll know the feeling. It’s possible to become so immersed in a world that isn’t your own that it’s difficult to shake it off. Go to bed in that state and your mind flings you right back in it.

I think this is what happened to me. Battling against the clock to get my new book on Weimar 1919-1939 finished, I’ve been trying to roll back or freeze other projects and concentrate just on the manuscript for a bit. This means, I spend hours every day combing through newspapers from the 1930s as well as reading letters and diaries. Then I weave these impressions into one narrative strand.

Do this for two years, and you begin to feel like you know the people whose correspondence you peruse or whose private lives you pry into. They suprise you when they do something unusual. You get excited when their story suddenly connects to the bigger, national picture.

It doesn’t help that Weimar has changed very little despite being bombed at the end of the war. So, if one of my protagonists notes in his diary that he saw Hitler on the market square, I can envision the scene just a little too vividly. Mentally, I’m spending rather a lot of time in Nazi-era Weimar.

Despite of what that sounds like, immersion – even in the lowest episodes of human history – is usually a good thing for historians. Personally, I even consider it a necessity. A degree of empathy helps understand and convey why people made certain decisions. But with book-writing, it can be difficult to draw the line. Winston Churchill put it well when he talked about his own experiences as an author:

‘Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.’

I’m in that last phase now, but my monster is still very much alive. As much as I love my job, waking up from a Hitler dream isn’t my idea of a good start to the Easter weekend. Especially not when it coincides with the dictator’s birthday which is still celebrated by neonazi groups to this day.

So forgive me if I’ll leave you with this stream-of-consciousness piece this Sunday. I’m going to lock my book tyrant in my study, shut the door behind me and take some time out to do some very un-German, easterly things. I’m sure there's a hot cross bun with my name on it somewhere.

Frohe Ostern, dear ZEITGEISTERS!