Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had.
I do not speak of your little men, your baker and so on I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. Your friend the baker was right, said my colleague. Those, I said, are the words of my friend the baker. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all ones energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was expected to participate that had not been there or had not been important before. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes.
And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it. What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise to receiving decisions deliberated in secret to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing. You know, it doesnt make people close to their government to be told that this is a peoples government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. What no one seemed to notice, said a colleague of mine, a philologist, was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. It could easily apply to The Americans, 2001 201?. If you read nothing else this weekend read this excerpt in its entirety.
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