The Third Reich Of Dreams Quotes

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

The supporters of the idea of healing through forgetting obviously are not aware of the price society pays for this "health." It is a known fact that the men and women who helped Hitler commit mass murder did not need psychiatric help. They adapted excellently to conditions under the Third Reich and later effortlessly made the transition to postwar life. They could easily forget. They held down jobs, started families, mistreated their own children—all without the slightest twinge of guilt. These people didn't dream. And they never for a moment thought that they had done something terrible by carrying out their "duty." Hitler and those like him were, indeed, proud of their ability to forget their traumas. But surely we don't want to pay the price for forgetfulness.

In normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them… In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.

The American girls, undaunted, maintained their natural warmth, and in their unrivalled sympathy there appeared genuine maternal feelings that did not alter for national differences, but that was feeble consolation in this profound sadness over the fact that "being a human being among other human beings" only ever happens in dreams of a perfect world.

There never was a war of the free world against fascism, there was only war between two versions of fascism - because the so-called free world has tortured and massacred more lives than the third reich could only dream of. There never was a world war between good and evil, there was only war between two evils. There never was a world war against tyranny, there was only war between an established tyrant regime and a rising one. The real first world war has just begun - the war between good and evil - the war between emancipation and occupation - between inclusion and exclusion - between expansion and contraction - between reason and rigidity - between humanity and inhumanity. I call it, World War Human. And unlike previous times, we won't win this war by old-fashioned bullets and bombs, or by deceit and diplomacy. The World War Human can only be won by education, and education alone - by an ardent, absolute, unambiguous, unbending, undoctrinated, unphobic, unwhitewashed, decolonized, nonpartisan, gender neutral, valiant, self-correcting and conscientious execution of education.

War child and psychoanalyst Hartmut Radebold confirmed this in an interview with Der Spiegel on 28 March 2013: Many children have unconsciously adopted the symptoms of their parents. One patient dreams of the tank attacks that his father experienced. The adults have conveyed much more through gestures and insinuations than they realize. This has been absorbed by the children and incorporated into their identities. Parents unconsciously pass on tasks to their children: Carry on with the family, do a better job and protect us, so we don’t decompensate.

The larger magnates and their wives had decided ideas. For them the Hitler invention meant no more strikes or labor-union agitation, no more Reds fighting in the streets; it meant wages fixed and permanent, resulting in such prosperity as heavy industry had never before known. In short, the Third Reich was the magnate’s dream, and Lanny was struck by the curious resemblance of their conversation to that of his father.

This is the former laboratory of Dr. Fritz Hauschild, head of pharmacology at Temmler from 1937 until 1941, who was in search of a new type of medicine, a “performance-enhancing drug.” This is the former drug lab of the Third Reich. Here, in porcelain crucibles attached to pipes and glass coolers, the chemists boiled up their flawless matter. Lids rattled on potbellied flasks, orange steam released with a sharp hiss while emulsions crackled and white-gloved fingers made adjustments. Here the methamphetamine produced was of a quality that even Walter White, the drug cook in the TV series Breaking Bad, which depicts meth as a symbol of our times, could only have dreamed of.

M. lived a very private life; whatever discontent he felt, he kept to himself. This was surely infuriating to the Stasi. But it is hugely telling about the kind of place the GDR had become, so effective at driving people inward, away from the public sphere and into that private sanctum in which they cannot be found. That M.__'s intentions went unnoticed was thus not simply a failure of the system, but also, paradoxically, evidence of its success. This kind of social atomization is a mainstay of authoritarian systems, a point Hannah Arendt makes in Origins. Her study focused on Hitler's Third Reich and Stalin's USSR, but its resonance with the GDR is immediately obvious. These are systems defined by extralegal violence and indoctrination, where state slogans are repeated by rote and citizens follow orders not out of any deep, abiding belief, but for fear of persecution. "The aim of [totalitarianism] has never been to instill convictions," Arendt writes, "but to destroy the capacity to form any." In such conditions, the entire fabric of society unravels. Since people are isolated from one another — each existing in their own fearful pod they stop sharing their experiences. This produces what Arendt calls loneliness, a special kind of solitude where you feel alone, even when surrounded by others. For the Stasi, this was very much the point — to infiltrate social units and destroy the trust people had in each other, thereby ensuring no communal bond was strong enough to overwhelm the state. But it's clear that, by 1989, they had become victims of their own effectiveness. With time, people begin to unknow, unlearn, unobserve as an emotional response to state power. In such a system, people's thoughts become so guarded that even when they do report on one another, the information garnered is unreliable. And when people disappear totally inward, there is nothing to report at all.