The essential commodity was Beziehungen: clout. Those well connected in the National Socialist hierarchy possessed the most. The promise of influence reshaped fundamental aspects of personal identity. Buruma cites the case of Erich Alenfeld, a Jewish convert to Christianity, who wrote a letter to Hermann Göring in 1939 volunteering his service in the German Army; his son later joined the Hitler Youth. Such transformations were not always cynical accommodations. They were also driven by the nationalistic spirit of the day. People like the Alenfelds, Buruma writes, “were as much influenced by German romanticism as anyone of their generation.”
When escapism and patriotism failed, there was always exile — a choice popular among German literati of a range of political persuasions. Bertolt Brecht, the leftist playwright, and Thomas Mann, the once-conservative novelist, had both left the country in 1933 as the fascists came to power. Mann could be scathing about contemporaries who chose to remain behind. Anything published in Germany between the years of 1933 and 1945, Mann insisted, bore the scent “of blood and shame.”
The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler told himself that he was an artist first and foremost — unpolitisch, in the idiom of the hour. He stayed in Germany and, despite his opposition to the Reich, conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1942 on Hitler’s 53rd birthday. The stench of blood and shame followed him for the rest of his life. After the war, when he was offered a prominent job as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, his Italian contemporary Arturo Toscanini and others campaigned against him. The symphony rescinded its offer.
Many Germans, of course, had no choice but to stay. Oppressive exit taxes for Jewish residents made emigration expensive. Instead, they were forced to flee to the seedy Berlin underworld. The capital in the 1940s was only a decade or two removed from the Babylon Berlin of the Weimar era. Families took rooms in brothels and hid out in louche pool halls. Their circumstances made them vulnerable to sexual extortion. These domestic refugees referred to themselves as “U-boats,” plunging below the surface of society.
Buruma’s own father, Leo, spent part of the war in Berlin, dodging Allied air raids and attempting to find his own balance between resistance and survival. Leo had been forced to move from the Netherlands to Germany, working in a factory that made brakes for locomotives but also light machine guns. He recalled seeing the Allied bombers glimmering in the sky like a school of silverfish. The falling bombs from one raid burst a gas line, injuring his girlfriend. For the rest of his life, Buruma recounts, his father could not bear the sound of fireworks.