Summary
Mayer initially planned to go to Germany in 1935 to interview Hitler himself. He failed to secure an interview but discovered, to his horror, that the Nazi movement had more mass appeal than he had previously expected. He decided to switch tactics and focus on the experience of the man on the ground. How does a person, who in most other respects would be considered normal or even good, get swept up in a genocidal ideology? After the war he moved to a small town that had strong support for the NSDAP before, during, and after WW2. He made genuine relationships with 10 of the residents and engaged them in extended interviews. The first half of this book is essentially these interviews, organized into a clear timeline. The second half is Mayer attempting to psychoanalyze Germany as a whole based on what he had learned from these interviews.
Thoughts
To get the bad stuff out of the way first, I think it is a mistake to attempt to psychoanalyze an entire country, especially based off of 10 interviews. The second half of this book is largely a showcase of Mayer’s erudition, which is impressive, but not in an original or startling way. When people try to explain the decisions of a nation in psychological terms there is seldom anything of value added. These conversations will likely be explicitly racist, or in an attempt to not be, they will become vague enough to match what you’d see from astrological readings.
This being said, the first half of the book was unique, and worth reading. I think one buys a book like this in an attempt to see “how we went wrong” hopefully to avoid it happening again in the future. Additionally, they might expect to learn how to communicate with people “on the other side”. This book suggests that these ideas may be too optimistic. Mayer, of German Jewish descent himself, drew on his strongest asset: his humanity and ability to create real connections with people who had and continued to have ideologies specifically hateful towards people like him. But this proved not enough; in almost every case there was no appreciable change in the position of his 10 interviewees. The only conclusion one can draw from this is pessimistic.
The other conclusion this book underlines is that, even though it feels cliche to say at this point, almost anyone could become a Nazi. The reason this conclusion is usually rejected mentally is that we make Nazi and monster equivalent terms. This is not how they are experienced locally. Locally it appears as a mixed bag, some good, some bad. The bad is ignored, and the good emphasized. One small hope that can be taken from this book is that the least “Nazi” of the 10 was a schoolteacher. This is not to say that education saves you from bad ideology, but I do firmly believe that exposure to the world in all its complexity should impress upon one, the smallness of their own mental life. This still requires a receptive personality, and in a nation of millions one can expect there to be several hundred thousand who are not receptive. Unfortunately, with the right leadership, that is all it takes to create suffering on a historical scale.