Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself. The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945

Melita’s parents expected the same deference from their children as from these ‘common’ people—their maid, for example, or their chauffeur. Their conservative upper-middle-class authoritarianism drove a wedge between them and their daughter. When the seamstress sat at her sewing machine extolling national community, it stirred Melita’s youthful sense of justice, prompting feelings of which her parents would never approve.

His aim was to show the effects of the various phases of Nazi rule on his colleagues at the factory, to give some insight into the minds of these people he had been living among for twenty years. Although Juvet had been born in Frankfurt am Main and raised in Munich, he thought of himself as Swiss, not German, and wrote as an outsider, looking on.

The bleeding wound that was Germany shaped the childhood and youth of an entire generation.

‘I can’t carry on,’ the man had sighed. ‘Everything I believed in is turning out to be madness and crime.’ When Kronika bumped into him on Wilhelmplatz, in the government district, he was still wearing his swastika badge, still attending the press conferences at the Propaganda Ministry, like a good Nazi, still taking the mandatory tone in his writing, urging the people to carry on. And yet he could see that it was over.

Skibbe had entered the war late. If the Volkssturm—the old men and Hitler Youth boys called up to serve as a national militia—were the country’s last reserves, Skibbe was among the second-to-last. A few months earlier, he’d been hoping to survive the war at home with his family, but since general mobilisation in January 1943, the civilian population had been sifted with an ever finer sieve until he, too, was caught in its mesh. Skibbe was conscripted in December 1944.

The dead of Demmin, Berlin, Leipzig and Siefersheim have no place in the German tableau of history, with its focus on culprits, victims and the occasional hero or heroine. They don’t fit the accepted narratives, so their suicides have remained private tragedies. But every one of their deaths is proof of the depth of the abyss that had opened up before the Germans during the Nazis’ rule.

During her journey through postwar Germany, Hannah Arendt had the opportunity to study this phenomenon. In her conversations with Germans, she often found they had a blind spot when it came to the causes and origins of the totalitarian experiment, and their own participation and involvement in it. Her questions on these subjects were met with angry bewilderment.

For most Germans, the drama began in 1944 or ’45, when the country was destroyed, the cities bombed, military bases established. They’ll talk freely about the great ‘trek’—the exodus of people from the east, fleeing the advance of the Red Army. In fact, they’ll talk about anything that makes victims of them.