Nick and Emmet at the Sundance Film Festival, 2011

In April Jo Stowell, an accomplished singer who had succeeded former Unitarian Minister Bill Houff as president of the local chapter of the United Nations Association, gave a marvelous performance of 1930s hits at a well-attended party at Bill and M’Lou Safranek’s home. In May I traveled east over Memorial Day to visit Trina and attend the fifty-fifth reunion of the Harvard class of 1956. Trina accompanied me to several events, including a banquet at the Harvard Club in Boston and a brunch reception in a tent in the Yard. On Thursday of that week I had dinner with my classmates Dick Shader and Jim Beck, both now retired from successful careers in psychotherapy, at Dick’s attractive Cambridge home. Little did I know that this would be my last week of “normal” health.

Walking back to Harvard Square Thursday evening I suddenly was out of breath. I thought, that’s strange, but attributed it only to advancing age and the strain of being away from home. On the weekend I rode with Trina and her children up to Vermont, along with Steffi, who was just returning from a visit to Nick and Kim in Salt Lake City. Emmet was already back in Spokane for his summer vacation. On my return flight to Spokane I had a terrible coughing fit in Denver. Other passengers looked at me, not knowing whether to laugh or to offer help. My pulmonary specialist in Spokane, the venerable Dr. Byrd, over eighty years in age, treated me for asthma with albuterol, but he never found its cause, which turned out to be blood clots in the lungs.

On Tuesday, July 5, 2011, a day after national Independence Day, I lost my personal independence. That day I took a late morning, pre-lunch walk, as I often had done in the past. Turning at 21st Avenue to go up Cedar Street (High Drive) I noticed something odd. Even though I tried to walk in a straight line I kept listing to the left. Every so often I would stop to rest, thinking my peculiar list might just be caused by fatigue. Eventually I made it home. I told Emmet what had happened, but thought all I needed was some lunch and my usual afternoon nap, at which I rarely slept, but always got some rest. Predictably, I did not sleep that day, either. After about an hour, I got up and went out on the patio to read. Sally had come home early that day and was here at shortly before 4 p.m. when quite suddenly my entire left side went lame. I could not even turn the pages of the book I was reading. Sally, realizing I had had a stroke, immediately called 911. The ambulance came, sirens blaring, and, since I could not walk, the medics carried me to the ambulance and rushed me to Sacred Heart. There I underwent a series of tests to determine whether the stroke I had suffered was hemorrhagic (caused by a blood vessel bursting in the brain) or ischemic (caused by a clot cutting off blood flow to the brain). Sally, who knew that an ischemic stroke caught in time could be reversed through a massive infusion of blood thinners and anti-coagulants, pleaded with the doctors to give that remedy a try. But too much time had passed since my first symptoms during my walk that morning, and the doctors still weren’t sure just what had caused the stroke. They were unwilling to risk the bleeding that might occur if it wasn’t an ischemic stroke. The cause of the stroke would not be definitively determined until Friday of that week, July 8th, when finally an MRI revealed the blood clots in my lungs (thus also belatedly revealing the cause of the asthma I had been suffering for weeks).

I subsequently spent seven weeks at St Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute undergoing physical and occupational therapy to prepare me to live with my disability. Somebody gave me the book, My Stroke of Insight, written by a Harvard brain scientist who had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in her thirties and had recovered most of her faculties. Her horrifying experience had actually contributed to her expertise on how the brain works. However, it had little relevance for me. At St. Luke’s they tried their best to lift my spirits. One of my nurses told me that, unlikely as it might seem now, I would end up writing about my stroke. The implication was that through my stroke I would yet gain in wisdom. I dismissed her assurance as just a well-meaning effort to cheer me up—but she turned out to have been right after all. Here I am writing about it, though I am not convinced that the experience has made me any wiser.

My hospitalization did have one advantage. Knowing I was being cared for enabled Sally to follow through on her long term plan to travel with her women’s group to Alaska for a week-long retreat in July. Emmet remained in Spokane and came to see me every day. He also represented us at the triennial Stackelberg Familientag in Germany in August, spending a few days in Berlin before the family get-together. Ingrid graciously put him up at her apartment.

Nick and Kim came to visit with Sebastian both in 2011 and 2012.

Sebi one year of age.

Sebi with his dad, 2011.

Sebi and Kim.

Sebi with Kim, 2011.

Sebi at age two.

Sebi summer 2012.

Meanwhile Trina’s kids were growing up, now at the cusp of their teenage years.

Brynnie and Siggi, June 2012.

Siggi, 2011.

Brynnie, 2011.

Trina and Garth's family, December 2011.

At the end of September Betsy came to Spokane to visit and to help out. Although her initial visit was scheduled for only two weeks, we kept extending her visit to a stay of six weeks. We did a lot of laughing as we exchanged reminiscences of days long gone by. In April of the following year she came back for another extended stay, this time for seven weeks.

Betsy in 2008

Progress in recovering my motor skills was much slower than I had been led to expect. Group Health discontinued paying for physical therapy when it became evident that I had “plateaued,” i.e, wasn’t making any improvement. Now my only option was to get used to living with my disability for the rest of my life. I did gain a new appreciation for the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), passed under the elder Bush in 1990, which had mandated wheelchair-accessible facilities in all public accommodations.

In 2011 I self-published the second volume of my memoirs, entitled, Memory and History: Recollections of a Historian of Nazism, 1967-1982. The following year the third volume came out, covering the years of my marriage to Sally and the birth of our son Emmet: A Life Renewed, 1983-1998.

Memory and History: Recollections of a Historian of Nazism, 1967-1982

A Life Renewed, 1983-1998.

In September 2012 I made my first longer trip since suffering my stroke. We flew to Boston to visit Emmet and Trina. We stayed at the Harvard Square Hotel, because the very comfortable third-floor accommodations at Trina’s were only accessible by a narrow, winding staircase that posed too great a hazard for me, especially because it had a railing on only one side. But it did provide an opportunity for Olaf to drive over from Albany, picking up Betsy in Northampton on the way. Thus we could celebrate a little family reunion. In my precarious state of health I never know when it might be my last one.

With Brynnie, Emmet, Trina, Sally, and Siggi in Cambridge, September 2012.

With Sally in the Yard, September 2012.

With Emmet in the Yard, September 2012.

At the end of May, Dan Hughes, a retired mathematician whom I met through Olaf, came to visit us from his home in Tuscany. An unusually enterprising octogenarian, Dan has relatives in Seattle, where he was born; his family used to vacation in Kettle Falls, north of Spokane, during his childhood more than 70 years ago. He had intended to visit Kettle Falls, but it turned out that his time here was too short for such an ambitious drive. Most of Dan’s professional career was spent teaching at British universities. He has become quite Europeanized, often viewing America with a somewhat jaundiced eye. After years of living in Europe he had become very critical of American foreign policy, an attitude I found very congenial. He was the most unlikely ex-marine I had ever met. Politically we were on pretty much the same wavelength, making his visit particularly enjoyable. Dan was suitably impressed by the dramatic waterfalls on the Spokane River, which he had never seen in their full splendor. He came at the right time of year, as the spring runoff was at its height. Our city’s original name (at least among non-native Americans) was not Spokane Falls for nothing! In a riverfront condominium overlooking the falls we joined a lively party of local conservationists to celebrate a recent victory: our regional utility Avista has been successfully persuaded no longer to divert as much water from the river to power its electricity-producing turbines as in the past. This means that for the first time in many years water would continue to flow over the falls all summer, no longer running dry in July or August as in previous years.

Spokane River in May.

In August 2009 we took Emmet, heading into his senior year, on a college tour to New York and Boston. Before we left he seemed to prefer Columbia, but after he toured the Harvard campus he realized that this was far from the snobbish, elitist university he had imagined. He would at least apply, he said, even though he was not yet ready to commit to Harvard, should he be accepted. In October he accompanied his mother to Washington DC, where she was attending the German Studies Association conference. Georgetown was another college he was considering at the time. He also took the opportunity to visit the Holocaust Museum. We spent a week in Vermont, in time to celebrate Brynnie’s seventh birthday, before returning to Spokane.

Emmet in 2009

Brynnie's birthday, August 13th, 2009.

With Nick and Olaf, 2009.

Nick at Edgecliff, 2009.

Old man in 2009.

Nick and Kim got married in a simple, but festive ceremony at a marvelous location at an elevation of over 7,000 feet near Heber City, Utah, in the foothills of the Wasatch mountain range on March 27th. 2010. When we first arrived at the isolated location, we thought we’d be snowed in for a week, but the weather cleared and created the perfect setting for a perfect wedding! We got to meet Kim’s parents as well, who had come from their home in Wisconsin.

Kim and Nick at their wedding, March 27th, 2010

Nick and Kim's wedding photo.

Nick and Kim's wedding in Heber City, March, 2010

In May 2010 we celebrated my seventy-fifth birthday with a festive dinner at Clinkerdagger’s on Saturday and a brunch at the Davenport the following morning.

Ehausted

Emmet’s graduation from high school, as one of about a dozen valedictorians with perfect 4.0 records, was another highlight of this eventful year. To my great delight he had accepted admission to Harvard, thus following in the footsteps of his grandfather Nicholas Biddle (class of 1900), his uncle Nicholas Biddle, Jr., (class of 1928), his father (class of 1956), and his sister Trina (class of 1988). Sally delivered him to Boston in late August, only reluctantly parting from her son when the university authorities convened an introductory assembly of freshmen to which parents were neither invited nor welcomed.

Emmet as a senior at Lewis & Clark High School.

Emmet, 2010

Emmet's graduation. June 2010.

Meanwhile, on June 9th, Nick and Kim’s son Sebastian Otto (Sebi)—my third grandchild—was born. We got to see him in August when we visited Vermont while Nick and Kim were visiting Nick’s mother Steffi.

Kim with Sebi, 2010.

Sebi with his happy dad.

Sebi with family (Trina, Steffi, Nick, Opa, Siggi, and Brynnie).

Sally, Emmet, and I had flown to Buffalo, visited Toronto, driven to Vermont and from there returned to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls for an “extra-ordinary” Familientag, the first one ever in North America. There were thirty-one Canadian Stackelbergs, twenty-six from the U.S., and fourteen who made the long trip from Germany.

Along the Niagara River, August 2010.

Trina's family at the Familientag in Niagara Falls, 2010.

Heinrich, Sigi, and Sandy in Niagara Falls.

The House of Hallinap, 2010.

In October the first volume of my self-published memoirs, Out of Hitler’s Shadow: Childhood and Youth in Germany and the United States, 1935-1967, came off the press. I decided to go the self-publishing route 1) to avoid the hassle of finding a commercial publisher, 2) to maintain total editorial control (maybe a big mistake!), and 3) to include as many images as I wanted (forty-eight in total). To the astonishment of my profit-oriented publisher, I did not do this for the money! I would have done well to hire a proof-reader. One of the picture captions employs the creative spelling of “summber of 1950.”

Out of Hitler's Shadow

Sally had a very busy and productive year as well, culminating in the completion of a chapter in a book to which she was invited to contribute. It is the Blackwell Companion to German Cinema. Sally’s article is on the well–known director Margarete von Trotta’s Holocaust film “Rosenstrasse.” The film deals with one of the very few documented incidents of what appears to have been a successful public demonstration in Nazi Germany—by the German wives of ethnically Jewish husbands. In the face of public protest the Nazis called off their plans to deport Jewish husbands in mixed marriages. Apparently they were wary of the ripple effect such an action might have had on the German population.

In early December we once again visited Nick and Kim in Salt Lake City. Johnnie Van Duyl once again joined us for Christmas, having better luck than in the previous year, when his flight was cancelled due to the heavy snow in Spokane.

Kim with Sebi, Christmas 2010.

Steffi, Stella, and Nick, August 2007

Johnnie Van Duyl was there, too. His mother Wini had died earlier that year, our last link to the war generation of our immediate family.

Sally and Johnnie, August 2007

With Tempy at Trina's, August 2007

Tempy and Betsy with the birthday child, August 2007

With Trina, August 2007

With Nick at Trina's, August 2007

At the gazebo house with Steffi, Gwen, and Sally, August 2007

My siblings, 2007

The ranks had thinned somewhat at my fifty-fifth high school reunion, to which Olaf accompanied me after we had completed a short auto tour of our old haunts in northwest Connecticut. This time the reunion was held in Amenia, NY, right across the state line.

Fifty-fifth high school reunion, 2007

Later that August 2007 we celebrated Brynnie’s fifth birthday.

Brynnie in August, 2007

Nick with Brynnie and Siggi, August 2007

Trina and Nick at Brynnie's birthday party, 2007

Emmet, Sally, and Brynnie with stuffed penguin, 2007

Sunset at Crystal Lake, August 2007

In the school year 2007-2008 Brynnie was assigned to do a project for her Kindergarten class. She was to have a hand-made puppet (”Flat Stanley”) photographed in as many locations as possible. She enlisted our aid, and some of the results are captured in the following pictures on the Spokane River:

Spring runoff with Brynnie's puppet, 2008

Clocktower with Brynnie's puppet, 2008

The spring run-off was spectacular in 2008.

Spring runoff on the Spokane River, 2008

In 2008 Routledge published the third book in my “Nazi Trilogy,” The Routledge Companion to Nazi
Germany.

The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany

Over the July fourth weekend 2008 we visited San Francisco at the invitation of Deborah Russell, the widow of my former Harvard roommate Paul Russell, who had died prematurely in 1996. Deborah wanted me to meet their sons John and Benjamin, and to tell them what I remembered of their father. We stayed in Arlie and Adam Hochshild’s wonderful home above the Castro district. Heeding Mark Twain’s warning about summer in San Francisco, the Hochshilds preferred to spend their summers in Maine. We took the opportunity to visit the recently inaugurated memorial to the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln International Brigade (ALBA), who had volunteered to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. I had been a member and supporter of ALBA for years.

ALBA Memorial, San Francisco, with John Russell, July 2008

There is also a statue of Robert Emmet in San Francisco, as seen in the following photo:

Robert Emmet's statue, San Francisco, July 2008

Later that summer we returned to Germany for another Familientag, this time back at Schloß Höhnscheid, after our usual stops in Heusenstamm and Berlin.

Sally at Höhnscheid, 2008

Susanne and Dieter at the Familientag, 2008

Trina hosted her by now annual family get-together on Crystal Lake. Siggi playfully dubbed Edgecliff “Fun and Suites.”

With Gwen, Steffi, and grandchildren, 2008

Emmet, Kim, Nick with Lorelei, Brynnie, and Siggi, 2008

Prosit Tempy, 2008

Olaf, Sally, and Kim, 2008

With Nick and Olaf, 2008

With Gwen and Steffi at Brynnie's birthday, 2008

Around the fire, 2008

The four siblings, 2008

With Emmet, 2008

Trina, 2008

My desire to start treatment immediately meant we had to forgo the long anticipated triennial Stackelberg Familientag, which that year took the form of a cruise on the Rhine River. I had bought our flight tickets long before and made arrangements for quite luxurious accommodations. Fortunately, Nick was willing to take my place on very short notice, so he and Emmet were able to attend. Sally, my loyal wife, stayed home with me.

The Rhine, 2005

Rheinfahrt with Olaf, Stella, and Timmi, 2005

Tempy on the Rhine, 2005

The prostate surgery was quite unpleasant, but did not justify my ill-mannered response to my surgeon. Without any good reason I accused Dr. Fairchild of withholding from me his knowledge that I was dying of the disease. Sally calmed me down and told me I owed Dr. Fairchild an apology. He took it very well, only commenting, “Prostate will do that to you.” Apparently, male bodies operate under the illusion that the prostate gland is a vital organ, which it is not, even though life is a lot more fun with it than without it.

By 2005 the Iraq fiasco was becoming apparent to everyone. Even the Spokesman-Review referred it as “the war to make the world safe for mendacity.” A reaction to the Bush administration policies was beginning to set in even among those former liberals (the so-called “neoconservatives”) who had not only supported the war but sought to take advantage of the end of the Cold War by pursuing a wide-ranging militaristic foreign policy (“The Project for a New American Century”) aimed at making American dominance and supremacy permanent. It was their policy recommendations that laid the groundwork for the “permanent war” mentality that has characterized the beginning of the twenty-first century up to the present. Although I was aware of the dangers of invoking the “Nazi analogy,” I was struck by certain parallels, which I turned into an anti-war talk entitled “What I have learned about Nazism in the past five years.”

What I have learned about Nazism in the last five years.

One of the favorite reasons given for studying history is that it can provide guidance for us in the present. Unfortunately, however, although history may repeat itself and certainly does in broad patterns, it never repeats itself in exactly the same way. We hope we can learn from the past, but the problem is that history teaches many lessons, and it is not so easy to determine which one is the right one to apply to any given situation. But one doesn’t only learn about the present from the past. It works the other way, too. Understanding the present can help one to make sense of the past. And that is the approach I want to take today.

Although I have studied Nazi Germany all my life, scholarly research can only get you so far in reconstructing the past. Speaking as a historian, the facts one uncovers can’t help but remain somewhat abstract and unreal unless one can relate them somehow to direct personal experience. In that respect American politics in the last five years have been very instructive for me and have clarified a lot of things that were unclear to me about Nazi Germany even though I have spent my adult life reflecting on the question how such a monstrous historical event as the Nazi takeover of power in Germany could have happened.

The fundamental question in every history of Nazi Germany is: How was it possible that a highly creative and innovative, scientifically and technologically highly advanced culture, with a long and proud historical tradition, could produce a movement and a government of such unprecedented savagery and destructiveness at the end of 100,000 years of human evolution? How could the Nazis have gained power in a country that was widely recognized as the world leader in several branches of science and the arts, particularly music and philosophy; a country with a worldwide reputation for the high quality of its universities and schools; a country that up to 1933 had won more Nobel prizes than any other country in the world; a country in which Christian religion, both Protestant and Catholic, played as great or greater a role than in any other European country; a country that for fifty years had served as the land of opportunity, a land of refuge for tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants escaping from the repression of the tsarist Russian empire? To provide a plausible explanation for how the country of “poets and thinkers” could have become the country of “iron and blood” is the almost insuperable challenge any historian of Nazi Germany faces.

Although I spent my professional life trying to explain this historical transition, it has been the experience of the last five or six years, in particular, that has opened my eyes to how the crimes and atrocities of the Nazi regime could have happened in a highly advanced culture that thought of itself as humane and civilized. I’m no longer surprised or mystified by questions that puzzled me all my life. I no longer wonder, for instance, how it was possible for a cultured, educated people to be so easily mobilized to follow their leadership into an open-ended war of conquest and spoliation in the name of fighting unmitigated evil (in the Nazi case, “Jewish communism,” in the present case, “Islamic terrorism”).

The past five years have shown me how a category of people, defined by both their ethnicity and political activities or opinions, can be so effectively dehumanized in the public mind as to justify their indefinite incarceration in concentration camps and the deprivation of all their civil and human rights. In the Nazi case it was allegedly seditious Jews who were dehumanized, in the present case, it is allegedly seditious Muslims and Arabs. I now understand the genealogy of the typically Nazi device of “protective custody” (today the operative phrase is “security detention”), the internment of “enemies” of the state for their own safety and for the protection of the public. The past five years have taught me how it was possible to get the Gestapo, which was made up largely of career policemen and civil servants — dedicated professionals, not Nazi Party ideologues — to inflict torture and humiliation on their prisoners. Detention without trial, suspension of habeas corpus, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation — if these can become standard practices in an America with liberal traditions and supposedly liberal institutions in the 21st century, then it is no longer so surprising that they became standard practices in a Germany with authoritarian monarchical traditions in the 20th.

How was it possible for smart, educated, well-meaning people not to see through (or wish to see through) the lies they were fed by their government and mass media? I now understand that the government doesn’t have to own the media in order to control it. The “big lie” works, as advocated by Hitler in Mein Kampf: Repeat a lie often enough and with enough impunity, and it will eventually come to be accepted by the public as truth. It is easy to manipulate language to cover up abuses and crimes as, for instance, in the euphemisms “collateral damage” or the “Patriot Act.” The Nazis called the Nürnberg racial law segregating Jews “the law for the protection of German blood and honor.” It no longer amazes me that there were so many willing collaborators in the government’s totalitarian project among intellectuals, the well-educated elite of journalists, academics, teachers, and writers. I have learned in the past five years how the dynamics of self-censorship work.

I now understand how it was so easily possible to create a typically fascist permanent war mentality in the population even though a majority of Germans (or Italians) did not want war, neither in 1933 nor in 1939. The dynamic of how the Nazis manufactured a national consensus for militarism is clear. The doctrine of national security is a powerful integrative force. A militant foreign policy can effectively blunt demands for domestic reform. Aggressive foreign policies are useful as a means of promoting domestic unity, for when a nation is confronted with an external challenge or threat, the first imperative for the people is to rally around the flag. When the national interest or national security are at stake, agitation for a more equitable distribution of power, property, or wealth, for workers` rights or environmental conservation, can be made to seem deliberately divisive and thus tantamount to treason. Today this function is served by the war on terror—unending by definition—and by the official doctrine of preventive war.

The rhetoric of freedom can be successfully used to mobilize support for a repressive regime. It’s not well known that the Nazis spoke about freedom all the time. The slogan posted at the entrance of all concentration camps was, Arbeit macht frei, work will set you free. By freedom they meant national freedom, not individual freedom, but the similarities to today are greater than the differences. In both cases the function of this rhetoric is the same: to mobilize people to take up arms against putative enemies who seek our enslavement or, to put it in contemporary terms, who “hate our freedoms,” who “hate our prosperity and success.”

It sounds paradoxical that the strongest military power in the world (as Nazi Germany was for a time) should have been so easily able to exploit a feeling of victimization, the fear of being surrounded by enemies, the subjective feeling of defending the homeland and the native culture even when one’s troops are fighting thousands of miles from home deep within other nations’ territory. The generation of this defensive mentality was and is not just a matter of successful propaganda or verbal manipulation—it is that, too. People can genuinely feel that their way of life is endangered by peoples who pose no military threat to them.

That we are defenders, not aggressors, all appearances to the contrary; this self-understanding was the key to the public acceptance of the longest war the US ever fought, the one in Vietnam, which will probably be dwarfed in its length by the present murderous, unending, and unwinnable war [in Afghanistan]. Most Americans never felt like aggressors even when they were inflicting murder and mayhem on thousands of Vietnamese. They genuinely believed they were defending against a communist threat. This was the key to the Germans’ enormous endurance during the Second World War as well.

This typically Orwellian move of representing an act of aggression as a necessary defense was almost comically evident in Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag announcing the invasion of Poland (which, in the mendacity of the official rationale, its totally unprovoked nature, and its Blitzkrieg tactics is the war that the US attack on Iraq most closely resembles): “Since 4:45 this morning,” Hitler told the Reichstag, “we have been firing back.” The first draft of the secret German military plan for the attack on the Soviet Union (code-named “Operation Barbarossa”) contained the sentence: “The Russians won`t do us the favor of attacking us,” the implication of course being that a pretext for war would have to be devised.

Bush’s recently revealed plan to provoke an Iraqi attack by flying planes with United Nations markings over Iraq uncannily resembled the Nazis’ staging of a Polish attack on a German border post as a pretext for war. The SS took hardened criminals serving life sentences, dressed them up in Polish uniforms, promised them rewards for attacking a German military outpost, and even went so far as to leave one of the duped criminals dead at the scene as evidence of a Polish attack. If you are an optimist you can take comfort in the fact that the Pentagon has not quite achieved that level of cynicism and sophistication yet.

How even a civilized country of high culture can prefer solutions by force (i.e., final solutions) over diplomatic or negotiated solutions has become clear to me in the last five years. Americans have allowed their government to violate international laws, treaties, and conventions, and ignore world opinion with utter contempt for what our Declaration of Independence calls “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” German attitudes toward the League of Nations paralleled the attitude of our hardliners to the United Nations today. Our official representative to the UN John Bolton advocates ignoring the UN when it does not do our bidding. Nazis regarded international law and the League of Nations as impediments to their imperialist plans in the same way as our hardliners regard international law and the United Nations as impediments to their project for a New American Century—really a blueprint for global domination—today.

The past five years have been most instructive in showing how the Manichean moralistic mind-set of a cosmic struggle between good and evil has turned us into exemplars of the very evil we are supposedly fighting. One of the great misunderstandings of Nazism is that this was a movement driven by people without a sense of morality or religion or even patriotism. Nazis are often depicted as a gang of criminals driven only by a lust for power and self-aggrandizement. Paradoxical as it may sound, nothing could be further from the truth. Of course Nazism was an immoral movement judged in the light of the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust and the irrationality of the Nazis’ racial obsessions. It is not my intention to “normalize” or trivialize the horrors of Nazism. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that it transgressed against every humane and humanitarian norm and that it was the most destructive movement that ever existed on the face of the earth. The crucial question, however, is this: Was Nazism a movement inspired primarily by the rejection of traditional moral and religious values, or is it more properly understood as a movement that grew out of excessive moral zeal, a movement of moral rearmament and moral idealism, however perverted a form this idealism may have taken?

This is not a question that can be answered solely by applying normative criteria to Nazi atrocities, which of course can’t help but lead us to the conclusion that Nazism violated all normal and conventional moral principles. It is a question that can only be answered by empirical investigation and analysis of the sources of the Nazi mind-set and world view. In my first book, entitled Idealism Debased, published in 1981, and now long out of print, I investigated some precursors of Nazi thought like the racist proto-Nazi Houston Stewart Chamberlain. I came to the conclusion that Nazism represented “the triumph of squeamishness, of resentment, of purism and moral intolerance, of the need for rigid control and total order,” the triumph, in other words, of the morality police. The experiences of the past five years have reinforced my appreciation of how a highly moralistic and moralizing movement can become the progenitor of actions that later are easily and almost universally recognizable as highly immoral.

In actual fact it`s not that hard to recognize immorality even when it appears in moral guise. All morality presupposes a universalizing principle. As Immanuel Kant put it, “Act as if the maxim through which you act were to become through your will a universal law.” The absence of this universalizing principle, the refusal to respect the principle, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” should have rendered Nazi policies recognizable as immoral from the start, just as we should for the same reason recognize US policies as immoral today. This Kantian principle is expressed in Martin Luther King’s famous maxim, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Even though we are talking about a movement and a regime that committed unprecedented atrocities, the antecedents of Nazism lie in a reaction against amorality or immorality, against atheism, against what we might call moral “permissiveness.” We conventionally think of Nazism, because of its atrocities, as a movement that had no respect for social norms. In fact, however, it was the other way round—the Nazis were the enforcers of social norms—and here again the present has been very instructive. One of the main sources of Nazi appeal to the German middle classes, for instance, was its promise to defend the traditional family and Christian religion.

As the historian George Mosse has written, the Nazis “persecuted all those who stood outside the accepted norms of society.” We ignore the “normality” of Nazism at our peril, because by demonizing Nazism, by treating it as unmitigated evil, we automatically put ourselves on the side of virtue, thereby occluding recognition of the potential for fascism in our own society. We have become conditioned to thinking of our society as completely opposite to Nazi Germany. But the attitude that many people, particularly conservatives, have toward our government today, as the guarantors of morality, order, and security, permitting its citizens to enjoy the fruits of economic prosperity, was exactly the attitude many if not most Germans had toward their government at least until 1941.

This self-image of fascists as defenders of traditional moral norms, this vigilante mentality, is the source of the anti-democratic thrust of fascism. It is the core trait of what Theodor Adorno called the “authoritarian personality” and the authoritarian society. From the fascist point of view liberal or social democracy opens the floodgates not just to egalitarian political movements like communism but also to immorality, independent lifestyles, experimental in-your-face art, sexual license, moral chaos, what the Nazis called “cultural Bolshevism.” Much of the Nazis’ popularity derived from the widespread perception that finally the healthy tastes and instincts of the “moral majority” would be allowed to assert themselves against the degraded standards and “nihilistic” perspectives of a self-appointed intellectual and aesthetic elite.

The dynamic described by Thomas Frank in his book What Is the Matter with Kansas? was at work in Nazi Germany. Frank analyzes the reasons why Republicans were so successful in getting middle- and lower-middle class people to vote against their own economic interests in the “red” states. This “cultural egalitarianism,” this mobilization of anti-elitist resentments, is not socialist; it`s fascist. It is anti-socialist.

Nazism was a backlash movement against supposedly immoral, liberal and progressive values, not just in the political realm but in the cultural realm where the Nazis could count on popular mistrust and resentment of so-called “liberal and intellectual elites.” Fascism is a compensatory cult of unity, power, and moral purity (guaranteed by racial purity) to make up for the perceived decline in morality caused by degenerate and selfish intellectuals. This is also the key to Nazi antisemitism, a particularly lethal form of anti-intellectualism, anti-modernism, anti-liberalism, and anti-leftism. The basic impetus behind Nazi antisemitism was a determination to suppress all social and political criticism and dissent, particularly from the left, and all pluralism and diversity. As a result of the Holocaust, antisemitism is, thank God, totally discredited today. Social criticism, dissent, sedition, subversion, immorality are no longer equated with “Jewish blood” as they were in Nazi Germany. But the resentments behind antisemitism are certainly present in our society, almost openly so, for instance, in the attack on “liberal Hollywood” or the so-called “liberal media.”

While the left recognized the destructiveness of Nazism from the start, to most middle-class Germans this destructiveness did not become clear until the war brought it home to them with a vengeance. The important lesson for today is to be aware of the dangers of fascism or a new kind of destructiveness resembling fascism that might be concealed in our normality, in the normal structures of American society, hidden behind our sense of our own superior morality.

The closest relative to Nazism today is the religious right, the kind of moral and religious absolutism, fanaticism, and fundamentalism that seeks to impose its ideals on society and suppress deviance (or, for that matter, diversity), by force if necessary. In the name of this kind of idealism the most heinous crimes and atrocities against deviants (today, for example, against gays, against Muslims, against the homeless, against illegal immigrants, against doctors who perform abortions) can be committed in good conscience. Membership in a “moral majority” and the true believer’s conviction of possessing absolute moral truth give the religious and nationalist right that sense of unshakeable righteousness that if given free rein is eventually bound to culminate in tyranny.

In actual fact, however, and there is plenty of historical evidence for this, despite its moralistic antecedents and the moralizing vigilantism of Nazism, most people who joined the Nazi party were not fanatics, nor idealists, nor true believers, but rather human-all-too-human—ordinary venal opportunists looking out for “number one,” for a chance to advance their careers or accumulate wealth or milk the system for personal benefit. It is this mixture of officially approved fanaticism and cynical personal opportunism, cloaked in idealistic rhetoric, that made Nazism so destructive. Again the parallels to the present are inescapable. The culture of corruption that has prevailed in Washington DC for some time now, and that now finally seems to be meeting some resistance from our liberal institutions, has also helped me to understand how the Nazi system of rule functioned in practice.

The conventional view is that the Nazi dictatorship operated as a smoothly functioning, highly centralized, well-lubricated monolithic totalitarian dictatorship. Under the leadership principle, however, which obtained at every level of Nazi government, the system was much more decentralized, and local and regional leaders exercised much more autonomy in their fiefdoms than is generally assumed. The Nazis facilitated a Social Darwinist culture of competition and corruption in which party members, linked in various ways by networks of friendship and cronyism, competed and conspired with each other for turf control, for authority and jurisdiction, for power and special prerogatives.

This was a system in which many middle-level chieftains, lords and führers of their own domains, small-scale bureaucratic empire builders, might have merited the title of “hammer” for their readiness to use force and deception to line their own pockets. Whether they felt strongly about Nazi ideology or not—whether they were genuine Nazis or not—they understood how personal gains could be obtained by taking advantage of a system that was devised to favor members of the party and those who loyally espoused the party’s ideology. In that sense, for instance, Tom Delay or Jack Abramoff, out for what they can get while mouthing the politically expedient ideology, represent types that proliferated in the Nazi party.

Germans saw the Nazis as freeing them from internal chaos and restoring national power to meet an external threat. They saw the Nazis as defending national freedom against outside powers bent on destroying that freedom. Nazism was a popular movement precisely because it promised stability and the guarantee of a private sphere in which one could enjoy popular consumer products such as those provided by the entertainment industry. Ordinary middle-class Germans viewed the Nazis in much the same way as ordinary middle-class Americans view our right-wing Republicans today: a bit extreme, perhaps, often excessively partisan, but ultimately on the right side of history with the best interest of the nation at heart.

It is in this sense that we can’t say unequivocally that the fascists lost the Second World War and the democratic side won. Many fascist attitudes and values were absorbed by the victor powers and passed seamlessly into the militantly anti-communist and moralistic mentality of the Western postwar world. There is no question that the US was a liberal force against fascism in the days of the New Deal and the Second World War. But today we have become a force against liberalism and democracy. How this transition occurred would require a separate paper.

Let me conclude instead. We are not living in a fascist society; we are living in a society with the potential for fascism. The voices of dissent may be under surveillance by “big brother” and may be ignored by the mainstream media, but they are not illegal. The more useful historical analogy may be to pre-Nazi Germany, a Germany that harbored the potential for Nazism. The last five years have clarified for me how Germans viewed the new century, the dawning of the twentieth century, in the years before the First World War. This was to have been (and could very well have been) the German century. Yet this enormously dynamic nation, enjoying unprecedented prosperity and power, enjoying international respect and admiration and emulation, saw itself as beset by devious enemies and rivals bent on Germany’s destruction. The German imperial government feared the specter of egalitarian, democratic reform and revolution.The mentality of the German leadership on the eve of the First World War was one of preventive war.

The First World War was largely a consequence of the German government’s determination to seize the opportunity provided by Serbian terrorism (the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne) to eliminate its enemies and rivals in Europe and to shape the world to its economic and political advantage. Nazism was the radicalization of this domineering drive, an extreme backlash against Germany’s humiliating defeat in 1918 and the spread of the revolution of the subordinate classes from Russia to Germany. The First World War was Germany’s Vietnam; the so-called “November Revolution” in 1918-1919 was the German equivalent of the generational sixties anti-war revolt in this country.

Nazism was the right-wing backlash against liberalism, pacifism, anti-war activism, Marxism, and the chaotic experimentalism of the Weimar Republic in the same way as the “Reagan Revolution” was the right-wing American backlash against the liberation and reform movements and the permissive democratic culture of the 1960s. Nazism was dedicated to overcoming the German peace movement generated by the horrors of the First World War through the development of a new military culture and ethos in the same way that Reaganism was dedicated to overcoming the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the temporary reluctance to use military power in the pursuit of US interests abroad. The ready public acceptance of Reaganism and all its consequences, including its present extremist successor government, has helped to clarify for me why such a large proportion of Germans enthusiastically accepted Nazism. The specific circumstances were very different; the essential dynamic at work was quite similar. Both Nazi Germany and the right-wing extremists in control of the US government today pursued or are pursuing similar goals of internal purification and external expansion.

What is most striking in retrospect is the hubris of German aspirations in the twentieth century. How could this small country, notwithstanding all its assets, hope to accomplish what now seems an outlandish goal of dominating the world by military means? We can only account for it today as the lunatic fantasy of a deluded leadership elite, vastly overestimating its power and underestimating the forces of resistance their policies would provoke. But today with nuclear weapons at their disposal, our leaders are probably even more confident that they can achieve their goal of remaking the world in the American image.

What is most tragic in all this is that the lessons of German history in the twentieth century have not been learned. We Americans had an enormous, an unparalleled, opportunity at the end of the Cold War to lead the world in a new direction. Instead our governments, tilting ever more to the right, opted to repeat all the mistakes of the past. Today we stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century in much the same position as Imperial Germany at the beginning of the twentieth. The twentieth century became the century of unparalleled genocide and destruction, much of it directly attributable to the hegemonic hubris of the German nation. But I fear that the atrocities of the twenty-first century will dwarf those of the twentieth, if we cannot bring our nation to change course.

I recognized the danger that any reference to Nazism ran the risk of trivializing the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, but at least my version was not as intemperate as Kurt Vonnegut’s not just politically but also epistemologically incorrect comment, “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected.” Hitler was not elected, either, even if he did, like Bush, benefit from the politics of fear. Much more pertinent was Vonnegut’s other comment, made at much the same time, “If people insist on living as if there is no tomorrow, there won’t be.” In my journal I also noted a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “A nation of sheep breeds a government of wolves.”

Government-sponsored militarism was not the only parallel to Nazi Germany, as I noted in my journal:

Perhaps the greatest parallel is my recollection of childhood in Germany: The war was far away. Life was tranquil. One felt secure. There was an air of normalcy that one somehow knew didn’t exist anywhere else. We were a favored nation. We were the beneficiaries of all that bloodletting. We were the ones for whom it was being done. Even as a child I could sense that one didn’t have to feel guilty about our enjoyment of life, because that was precisely what gave all those military actions their purpose. The normalcy of the home front was the legitimation for the war. In carrying on as always we were playing our part in justifying the war. Nothing could happen to us because then the war would no longer make any sense. The unreality of it all—and the suffering it inflicted on so many people—did not come home until later.

Most or at least very many Americans believed that their government’s military adventures made them safer. Many Germans felt the same way during the Second World War.

Emmet completed sixth grade at Wilson Elementary School in June 2004 and moved on to seventh and eighth grade at Sacajawea Middle School in 2005 and 2006.

Sally and Emmet, 2006

Emmet as page for Senator Lisa Brown in Olympia, 2006

Emmet with Noema Ganzlin in Frankfurt, 2005 or 2006

With Tom Foley, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, at a Democratic fundraiser, 2006

For Sally and me our trip to Germany in the summer of 2006 made up for the trip we had missed the previous year. That year we also went to Augsburg and enjoyed the hospitality of Stella and Dieter for a few days. Dieter arranged a day-long excursion to Berchtesgaden where we visited the excavation of Hitler’s elaborate underground headquarters as well as the notorious “Eagle’s Nest,” perched high on an alpine ridge. Many people, including the Allies, had expected him to make a last stand in his alpine fortress. His decision to commit suicide in Berlin in April 1945, I reflected, may have saved the lives of those refugees, who, like us, had sought refuge in Bavaria during the war.

Sally at the Emmet celebration in New York, June 2004

In New York, June 2004

Nick and Kim in New York, June 2004

Tempy in New York, June 2004

Garth and Siggi in New York, June 2004

Nick in New York, June 2004

After the New York trip we spent a few days in Vermont, where Trina and Garth were renovating and reinforcing their wonderful lakeside cottage, Edgecliff.

Trina with her children at Crystal Lake, July 2004

Siggi, 2004

Grandparents and grandchildren at Edgecliff, July 2004

Our dogs Marley and Cloudy died in October 2002 and August 2003, respectively. We wanted to replace them with a similar breed. We chose a golden retriever thoroughbred, named Sunny, who joined us at age six weeks in August. I tried to register his name in accordance with the rules for documenting his lineage, but was told he needed a more formal title. His formal name was registered as “Sunshine of Spokane .” His short life (he died in June 2011 at the age of barely eight) made us regret not having acquired a mixed-breed dog.

Sunny, 2004

In view of the increasingly evident failure of Bush’s attack on Iraq, we had high hopes for John Kerry in the presidential elections of 2004. That is, some of us did. But more and more radicals of the left were giving up on the two-party system altogether. I got some hint of this development years before from Mort Alexander’s response to my warning that failure to vote for the Democratic candidate was bound to result in a Bush victory: Mort’s response was, “I don’t care.” Mort was one of the founders of the local Green Party, which eventually folded; but a hotly debated question in Spokane’s tiny progressive community was whether Ralph Nader, who received more than 60,000 votes in Florida, had cost Gore the 2000 election. I for one argued that a vote for Nader was effectively tantamount to a vote for Bush. This aroused the ire of our old friend David Brookbank, who also resented our move from our humble Spokane Valley home to a fashionable residential area of the South Hill. To him our purchase of a more expensive home represented a process of bourgeoisification that would inevitably desensitize us to the problems of poverty and inequality. From his perspective we had joined the other side. There was still a certain novelty to public email discussions in those days, and insults and maledictions were much too freely exchanged on our local Progressives’ email list. In July 2004 I recorded my reaction to this resort to personal attacks:

On the scholarly lists I participate in, such vulgar and vicious personal attacks would not be permitted, but I guess the managers of this list are more interested in its entertainment value than in its intellectual content. There is a perverse thrill in this kind of voyeurism, seeing others skewered and enjoying the fact that one is not oneself in the line of fire.

Understanding—after being insulted on the Progressive List-serve by David Brookbank—the trepidation Mama felt at being interviewed on tape: “It’s like running naked through Grand Central Station.” Gaining strength also from Papa’s confession, “I have survived because all my life I have been able to identify the look of the killer in someone’s eyes and have avoided that person.” Even Jesus’ advice, “Turn the other cheek,” gives comfort. It gives me a new appreciation for the generation and attraction—and effectiveness—of cunning, subterfuge, and underhandedness as survival mechanisms. As a genuine humiliation perhaps it also teaches me humility. And it makes me understand by my own reaction how former radicals can turn into bitter reactionaries, the dynamic that so afflicted the communist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. It is also a reminder of the importance of manners, so often misrepresented as just a signifier of social status. Perhaps also a sense of appreciation how community is gained at the expense of outsiders.

David made particular fun of Sally’s bumper sticker “Mall Wart,” which he cited as an example of a silly and meaningless protest, while the issues of war and peace went unaddressed. So it was with particular delight that I heard Lisa Brown, at a monthly Magnuson Democratic Club luncheon,

explaining the subtle interrelationship of Walmart’s anti-union policies with the public welfare. The fact that Walmart pays such low wages and offers no health benefits to its employees puts an increased burden on the state’s health care coverage, which clicks in for people below a certain income level. So the public ends up paying for Walmart’s low-wage policies. Equity requires that Walmart should at least be compelled to make a larger contribution into the state’s insurance fund, and the Democrats in Olympia are working on legislation to that effect. The blockage is the Republican control of the Senate. A good example of corporate welfare, or welfare for the rich.

In my journal I tried to fashion an argument in defense of my partisanship for the Democrats and hence inevitably also in defense of the two-party system and the importance of choosing the Democrats over the Republicans.

Can we agree that we (i.e., the dominant system in which—as Tom Jeannot [my Gonzaga colleague in philosophy] pointed out—we are all more or less implicated insofar as we draw a pay check) do form an ideological camp (with two parties alternating in exercising power)? We do, virtually all of us, have some commitment to what could be termed the “American ideology,” broadly characterized as liberalism, the commitment to civil liberties, representative and constitutional government, and free economic activity. On all of these clusters of commitments we have our differences, particularly on the last one, but even our most ardent champions of socialism (Tom?) wouldn’t want to restrict the right of craft workers to produce and sell their wares, the right of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, or physicians and, yes, professors to sell their services, the right of individuals to choose their occupation or enter a profession or open a business, the right of farmers to market their crops. Part of the reason why national or multinational corporations need to be regulated and restrained (Walmart?) is to protect the right and ability of independent individuals and small businesses to make a living.

The main division on our list seems to be between those who see the American two-party system (the institutionalization—and maybe domestication—of political opposition) as only the “duopoly” of a single corporate ruling class, as opposed to those who see it as an imperfect but nonetheless meaningful mechanism to reconcile conflicting popular (often derisively termed “special”) interests in a pluralist society. The argument of one side is, there’s no difference between the parties; the other side says, let’s work with what we’ve got.

Bottom line: American values and the American system, fought for in revolution, are worth defending. Wholesale transformation of the system risks losing what has been gained at the cost of many lives. Progress, understood here as progress toward a better, i.e., more just and equitable, society is not achieved overnight, and a final end to progress is never achieved, except in total reaction. Progress is achieved step by step and often requires holding actions to retain what has been gained and prevent backsliding and the loss of hard-earned achievements of the past. What is at stake in this election is the loss of America’s distinguished liberal tradition. Those of us who are trying to unite the left in defense of this tradition are constantly subject to insult and ridicule by the crackpots on this list whose only argument is personal attack, because they despise reasonable discourse as a sign of weakness, what Schwarzenegger might call “girlie talk.”

David Brookbank was eventually banned from the Progressives’ list, but that proved to be a self-defeating move, as the list lost much of the popularity it had gained through controversy and gradually fell into disuse. In retrospect it is hard to understand what all the excitement was about. Those who had threatened to move to Canada if Bush were reelected stayed put. The Iraq War did bring the Shiite majority to power, but with it a staunch ally of neighboring Iran, now promoted to the U. S.’s enemy number one in what Bush preposterously called ”the axis of evil.”

In July 2005, Trina and Garth celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary with an elaborate party at Edgecliff. Apparently they wanted to make up for the fact that they had been married in a private ceremony that excluded even their own parents. Since then, besides raising two children, now five and three years old, respectively, they had done very well financially. Garth was working as an analyst in an investment firm, and the economy was riding a housing bubble that would not burst until 2008. They spent a lot of their money on improving Edgecliff, which proved an ideal setting for a big family party. They had been married on Bastille Day, July 14th, another reason for a celebration.

Garth and Trina after ten years of marriage

Brynnie and Siggi, July 2005

Trina with her parents, July 2005

The belated wedding feast, July 2005

Kim and Nick, July 2005

The night before, on July 13th, Steffi had hosted a cookout at her house in Irasburg.

At Steffi's, July 13, 2005

July 13, 2005

With Olaf in Vermont, July 2005

In the evening Trina lit a huge bonfire.

Bonfire on Crystal Lake, July 2005

The celebration even included a brunch the following morning.

With Betsy and Liz Biddle, July 15, 2005

Garth’s brother Kurtie had built a treehouse for Siggi.

Siggi's treehouse, 2006

Steffi and I combined to present the anniversary couple with a carved stone bench to commemorate the occasion.

With Garth's mother Gwen Rodrigue and Steffi on the memorial bench, July 2005

Siggi and Brynnie, 2005

Crystal Lake at sunset, 2005

Dan Brauner and MK, brunch 2003

Leonard Butters and Jessica Kenney, 2003

Lisa and Mort, January 2003

Tom Karier and Goli Janssen, 2003

In May 2003 I commented in my journal on an interesting discussion I had with Bob Bartlett, a co-founder of Gonzaga University’s new Institute of Action Against Hate and the invited speaker at one of our United Nations Association (UNA) meetings:

I challenged Bob on the use of the term “hate”. My point of entry was his justification of the term: “We wanted to be very specific about what we opposed, and we didn’t just want to oppose hate acts but to find out what makes people hate in the first place.” If they wanted to be specific, I asked, why did they choose such a general term—a characteristic that almost everyone shares? Wasn’t that just letting the culprits off the hook by subsuming their lethal prejudices under a universal trait? Why not explicitly specify the racism, homophobia, and gender prejudice that we mean? Why not point squarely at the radical right? Bob was clearly discomfited by the question, but not because he was caught by surprise. Rather it was, as he wearily explained, because he had heard it so often before. As he reviewed the debates and arguments that had led to the adoption of the name, I began to grasp its purpose and utility. The purpose, it seems, was not to draw up rigid partisan lines, assailing the other side from a higher vantage point of virtue. The purpose was to get people thinking about why they hate certain groups. It is more a dialectical strategy than a scientific project. The importance is not to be right, but to make a difference. People are invited to reflect on the nature of hate, on the sources of their own hate. Its universality makes it a useful starting point to engage the discussion. “Hate” is not chosen because it is innocuous, but because it is brutal. It was adopted as the term after much wrangling. “If anyone can suggest a better term,” George Critchlow had said, “we’ll use it.” As Bob Bartlett pointed out, reasonable people agree on what constitutes hate and what differentiates the universal emotion from its unacceptable expression. I felt distinctly uncomfortable as he implied that to challenge the use of the term was to adopt the right-wing line and to serve their interests. Its potential dangers, however, are evident in the efforts of the right to use “hate speech” codes to suppress criticism of the government and to end affirmative action. And it is probably true: in a decade or two “hate” or at least “hate studies” will stand for a particular kind of hate that people will understand as such. That is how language changes. If “hate” as a descriptor is to be colonized, then at least let it be by the Left. Logic be damned.

The annual summer picnic of the UNA, on whose board I had served since the early 1980s, was held at our house as well.

Lindell Haggin and Jane Cunningham, UNA picnic, 2003

Julian Powers, summer 2003

On our annual trip to Vermont in the summer of 2003 (after Sally had returned from Lübeck) we saw family and friends.

Olaf in Vermont, 2003

My ex-wife Steffi and our grandson Siggi, summer 2003

With Maureen Dyer, 2003

Marian Brow and Maureen, 2003

Alexandra and Lorelei, 2003

With Sally, 2003

Our trip was enlivened by a visit to the famous Bread and Puppets Circus in Glover. The combination of acerbic political commentary and acrobatic stunts in the troupe’s imaginative skits was enthralling.

Bread and Puppet Theater, Glover, VT, 2003

With Trina's family in Glover, summer 2003

The anti-war and anti-imperialist thrust of the Bread-and-Puppet troupe was timely indeed. The Iraq War, which President Bush had declared over in a ridiculous and embarrassing victory ceremony on an aircraft carrier in the spring of 2003, had bred a fierce insurgency that showed no sign of ending a year later and brought out the worst in America’s military and political culture. On April 12th, 2004, I wrote in my journal:

News stories now celebrating the new-found comradeship of the Marines fighting in Fallujah: “I want to kill these guys more than when I first got here,” a nineteen-year-old Marine is quoted as saying in the Spokesman-Review. “We took them out,” another one is quoted. “It’s a motivating thing. Even the guys who took hits were joking about it. We were pumped up …” “We killed numerous enemy,” he continues, “we slaughtered a lot of them.”

To me the parallel to the notorious “body counts” of the Vietnam War, in which so many Vietnamese civilians were killed, seemed obvious. It offered a true, if rare, example of Santayana’s celebrated dictum about history repeating itself, even if not in exactly the same way. The Iraq War was based on the same values, biases, and assumptions as the Vietnam War except that the enemy was now “terrorism,” not communism. In November 2003 I had written:

American justification for military repression in Iraq (as expressed by an American colonel in charge of a house-to-house search in several towns: “We are the chemotherapy to expunge the cancer in Iraqi society. The therapy may be painful, but after we’re finished there’ll be no more cancer.” The updated version of the Vietnam-era rationalization: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

To understand the potential danger of fascism in America we need to look not only at the easy transition from democracy to fascism at the end of the Weimar era, but also at the easy transition from fascism to democracy at the end of the Second World War. How many of those fascist values survived in transmutation? How many came to be shared by the victor powers after the Second World War?

American imperialism has given a new urgency to studying Nazi Germany—whether one supports American imperialism or not. Nazi Germany was after all the most recent historical example of an effort to create an empire by military force. It would seem to be a matter of urgency to explore what was similar and what was different about that effort.

The prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, which had been going on for years, but did not become public knowledge until 2005, confirmed that it did not take a direct order from above for perpetrators to carry out the wishes of the leadership. The terrorist ideology had won out in the American prosecution of the war. Traditional American values of democracy and human rights took a big hit.

In May 2004, shortly after my sixty-ninth birthday, I retired after twenty-six years of teaching at Gonzaga University. I had two professional projects yet to finish, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany, eventually published in 2008, and a second, considerably expanded second edition of Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies, published in 2009. My department awarded me emeritus status with a plaque that included a very generous tribute, written by Betsy Downey:

Through your courses, particularly your popular courses on Hitler’s Germany and the Holocaust, you have helped students understand the complexities of the past and of the present world, the many forces that lead to destruction and disintegration, and the forces of cooperation and progress. You have brought your own qualities of intellectual rigor and breadth to the classroom, stimulating your students to grow and mature intellectually.

At the annual honors convocation in late April, at which retiring professors were also recognized, I was allowed to say a few words. I was stunned and elated by the exuberant response from my colleagues—a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. My faculty nemesis from the biology department, the ultra-conservative and hawkish Hugh Lefcort, with whom I frequently sparred in political disputes on the faculty email list, got up and walked out in order not to have to witness the accolade. His abrupt and unceremonious departure in no way detracted from my joy.

Throughout the year 2002 it became increasingly apparent that the Bush government was planning to launch a war against Iraq to oust its leader Saddam Hussein, whom Bush falsely accused of involvement in the 9/11 attack and of developing “weapons of mass destruction.” It was terribly frustrating to see so clearly what was coming and yet to be so unable to do anything about it. Of course, we attended numerous anti-war rallies and I gave several talks, but all without effect. Already in 2001 I had noted in my journal how ambivalently my students reacted to a film denouncing Nazi tactics in the run-up to the Second World War:

The very conspicuous silence of each of the classes to whom I showed the first film of the Why We Fight series, explaining the events that led up to the American participation in the war. In their effort to show the Nazis as villains, the film sarcastically explained how the Wehrmacht won such spectacular triumphs: “Pick an army that is still fighting with cavalry and foot soldiers and send your tanks against them. Next, bomb their inferior aircraft while they are still on the ground. Then send wave after wave of bombers to destroy their defenseless cities and kill their unwary residents. Then send the Luftwaffe over at leisure and photograph the results of your handiwork. Then gloat.” And, in reference to the original footage of German newsreels: “Never does it show a German soldier being killed, or wounded, or even spraining an ankle.” Were the students so silent because they were embarrassed by the obvious parallels to the U. S. in the present?

Throughout the year 2002 it became more and more apparent that Bush was determined to go to war. In June I wrote:

Understanding how Hitler was able to get the support of the people by watching Bush in action today, preparing the country for preemptive wars against terrorism today. It is very hard to deny or ignore a threat that our own policies have created. The secret to public support is that our actions are a necessary defense to a very real threat. And thus a dynamic is unleashed that will force the world—somehow, sometime—to eliminate the American leadership. The only plausible means is from within. Let us hope it can be done by democratic means. But with democracy rapidly diminishing, there’s not much hope of that.

Why not take bin Laden at his word? “There will be no peace in America unless American-sponsored violence ends in the Mid-East.”

Fascism and “the war against terror:” the dynamic of continuous war; the battle of good vs, evil; the syndrome of “we’re number one;” the reciprocal relationship between war and the destruction of democracy at home.

My entry on September 21st, 2002, was even more prescient:

There will be a revulsion against Bush’s policy of war. The revulsion will be slower if the war is successful, of course. But it will set in in any case. Americans will be revolted by the costs, by the damage, by the many people we will kill. Thus the war policy will weaken, not strengthen America, by mobilizing the only force that can ultimately harness the Behemoth—ourselves. The revulsion will also be fueled by the progressive loss of the values we are supposedly fighting for, civil liberties and constitutional representative government, which will have to be restricted in proportion to the loss of popular support for Bush’s policies. But as always in history, the revulsion will come too late.

Bush and Hitler—not the same of course (though probably similar in intelligence quotient and lack of self-reflection), but two faces of the radical right.

What is fascist about America is that it is now virtually impossible to bring it back to a sensible path through democratic means, through winning elections. Even if Democrats are elected, as they will occasionally continue to be, they will have entirely internalized the conservative-aggressive-triumphalist-self-congratulatory national consciousness, successfully raised to dominance by the Republicans. As the country veers ever more to the right, more and more people accept its ideology as entirely normal and natural. No awareness of the extremism that it is.

In the run-up to the Iraq War I spoke out wherever I could, as did many others. The biggest anti-war rally I ever attended in Spokane took place in early March 2003. But none of it made any difference to an administration determined to “shock and awe” the world. On March 17th, 2003, the unprovoked attack on Iraq began and took its predictable course. In October of that year I wrote in my journal:

The one good thing about the Iraq War: it demonstrates very clearly the causes of terrorism. There has been a huge escalation of terrorism as a result of the U.S. invasion. The experiment has succeeded: we now know what produces suicide bombers.

The following September I added:

How extraordinary that we were right about the ‘’’Gulf War” in 1990-1991 after all! It just took fourteen years for our prophecies to come true.

In 2002 we took a number of memorable trips. Before attending the triennial Stackelberg Familientag at the Kloster Michaelstein, a picturesque monastery in the Harz mountains in the eastern part of Germany, we visited my cousin Innet in Busum., a town just outside Amsterdam. Emmet was impatient to explore the city, which is why he is sulking in the following photograph.

At Innet's in Busun, summer 2002

With Nick in Amsterdam, summer 2002

Innet, on the other hand, would have preferred not to go into the city at all. The presence of so many immigrants, especially from Asia or Africa, made her feel surprisingly uncomfortable. We had not realized the depth of her hostility to and suspicion of foreigners. When we bought a falafel from a street vendor, she asked incredulously, “Can one even eat such stuff?”

Nick and Kim joined us a day later, and together we traveled on to Germany. Michaelstein had been chosen as a location for the family gathering because it was located near the Stecklenburg, a Medieval castle ruin, which was thought to have been the point of origin of the Stackelbergs before they migrated to what would later become Estonia and Latvia. This part of the family history turned out to be a myth when Cousin Wolfhart traced one of our ancestors to the area around Cologne in the Rhineland. But we visited the ruins of the Stecklenburg anyway since we were so close.

The Stecklenburg with Nick and Kim, summer 2002.

Alecki Riesenkampff, an old friend from the 1960s, behind Innet.

Trina came to the Familientag as well, despite being in the eighth month of her pregnancy.

Kloster Michaelstein with Trina and Garth.

Familientag 2002.

Susanne, Stella, and the two Dieters, 2002.

Saying goodbye to Ursula and Wolfhart the following morning, 2002.

We spent some time together with Trina in Berlin as well.

Cruise on the Spree River, 2002.

Siggi in Berlin, 2002.

Sally with Trina, Holiday Inn at Humboldtheim, 2002.

The new Potsdamer Platz, 2002.

Bryndis (Brynnie) was born on August 13, just a day after we left Boston and returned to Spokane.

Brynnie's birth, August 13, 2002.

Trina's expanded family, August 2002.

Before that we had attended my fiftieth high school reunion in Lakeville.

Fiftieth high school reunion with David Winn, Topper Smith, Cynthia Barnett, and Judy Olson, 2002.

Fiftieth high school reunion with Peter Kenny and his wife Virginia.

We also visited Wini at “Noble Horizons,” an assisted living home in Salisbury, where Wini now lived after suffering a fall at her home above the flower store.

Wini at Noble Horizons, 2002.

Wini, 2002.

On our way back from Connecticut we stopped for lunch with Betsy and Naomi in Northhampton.

With Betsy in Northhampton, 2002.

Naomi and Lila, 2002.

Back home we had a visit from Grandma Winkle (Sally’s father had died the previous year) and Kelly.

Amy Winkle and Kelly, summer 2002.

With Grandma Winkle and Kelly on the Spokane River, 2002.

With Lucas back home, 2002.

Lisa, Tom, Goli, and the three boys, 2002

Nick and his girlfriend and later wife, Kim Korinek, came for Thanksgiving.

Nick with Emmet and Kim, Thanksgiving, 2002.

In December 2002 we attended a very enjoyable concert presentation by Utah Phillips, who did his best to cheer us up:

Utah Phillips’ marvelously optimistic assurance that the present right-wing predominance won’t last. “The deportations and the Palmer Raids after the First World War, the army firing on unemployed veterans during the Depression, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and the Vietnam War were much worse than this. What followed was FDR’s New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement. We’ll get out of the present bad times, too.” But he neglected to mention that the counter-force of communism was gone, too. For better or worse?

My reaction was not so optimistic: “Will democracy emerge stronger after this disaster? Many people will have to die before we know.”

Hitler's Germany (1999; 2nd edition, 2009)

The Nazi Germany Sourcebook

Hitler and Mussolini, 1938

The book was ready for production in the spring of 2001. Our editor at Routledge, Virginia Peters, was impressed by the book, but she pointed out that it exceeded the length specified in our contract. She gave us a choice: either cut it down to the contracted length or take a cut in royalties to make up for the extra cost of publishing so large a book. To avoid marital discord we chose the latter option. The question of what selections to include in the book had already led to some disagreements, as Sally wanted to include more social history, including women’s history, while I held out for more political history. As a result of our decision to leave the book at its present length, it would be several years before receipts from the sale of the book would be enough to cover our advances and enable us to draw royalty payments.

The contents of the book was not the only source of potential family discord. In the spring of 2001 we decided it might finally be time to leave the suburban “Valley,” where I had lived since 1978, and move into the city to the South Hill, where most of our friends had their homes. There was a particularly beautiful two-story 1937 brick building on a double corner lot at 24th Avenue and Howard Street that struck our fancy.

Our home on Maringo Drive, 2000.

Our new home at 24th and Howard, 2001.

We wanted to make a contingency bid tying the purchase of the new house to the successful sale of our old one. However, our agent, our friend Bob Gilles, persuaded me that if we were serious about purchasing the new home, we needed to detach our offer from the sale of our old home and make a substantial down payment to demonstrate the seriousness of our intentions. Fearing that we might not be able to sell our Valley home for a reasonable price, Sally was unwilling to take the risk of making an unconditional bid. This led to what possibly was the fiercest spat of our entire married life, reducing our poor nine-year-old son Emmet (who at this point didn’t want to move from his school at Pasadena Park at all) to tears. In my journal I described the incident as follows:

Calling Bob Gilles just to make sure that he did not want to submit the contingency bid for us, which I felt fairly confident he would not want to do, as Deb had told Sally that he was wary of representing friends (understandably preferring to keep personal and business relations apart). Hence the call would not only be a courtesy—to show him that we were prepared to retain him—but would also be useful , as I could also get “disinterested” advice from a friend. My surprise therefore to discover that he was quite eager to do it and in fact offered to come over that night to write the bid up. Not just offered, but insisted. Once here, he persuaded me that a contingency offer was a waste of time that would not enhance our chances of getting the house one iota. If we really wanted the house, we should make a bona fide offer, trusting in our ability to sell our Maringo Drive house. This we were not prepared to do. He must have realized he had been overly aggressive, because a couple of days later, when I called to tell him that we had decided to put in a contingency bid, he unhesitatingly and without objection said he would get right on it.

Later that summer, while we were in Vermont, Sally changed her mind. She agreed that if the house on 24th came on the market again, we should make an unconditional offer despite the risk involved. This was indeed what we did, and the deal was closed in July, 2001. I had recalled that years ago Wayne Andresen, the manager of the Inland Empire paper factory across the river, had spoken of buying up the river property on our side of the river to preempt any move by residents to regulate the factory’s pollution. I called him and was not disappointed. He offered to buy our property for $160,000, the full appraised value, four times the price I had paid in 1978. Bob Gilles helped us through a successful strategy of offers and counteroffers to bargain the 24th Avenue property, originally listed at over$300,000, down to $274,000, a price we were able to pay with only an $80,000 mortgage. In late August 2001 we moved into our new home, where we have lived very happily ever since.

Betsy was our first visitor at our new home in late August, 2001.

Betsy, Spokane River cruise, August, 2001.

The year 2000 was quite eventful for other reasons, too. On May 1st, only a few minutes after midnight, my first grandchild was born. Trina had wanted him to be born on Mayday, the worldwide socialist holiday, knowing that this would give me particular pleasure. He was named Sigugeir (Siggi) in honor of his father Garth Jonson’s Icelandic heritage.

Trina with Siggi, born on Mayday, 2000.

Going back east that summer, we met Wini in Salisbury and Olaf in Boston.

Lunch with Wini at the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, summer 2000.

Olaf and Sally in Boston, summer 2000.

Lisa Brown won another legislative term in 2000. Here she is with Senator Maria Cantwell:

Lisa with Maria Cantwell, campaign 2000.

One of our close neighbors in our new home was Tom Karier.

Tom Karier, summer 2000.

A number of other guests helped us celebrate our last summer at Maringo Drive.

Morton and David, 2000.

Paige Kenney with Nancy and Rusty Nelson, 2000.

Emmet was still very much into beanie babies that year.

Beanie baby newscast.

Beanie baby concert.

Marco, Lucas, and Emmet, 2000.

We spent Christmas 2000 with Sally’s parents in Phoenix. It was to be the last time I would see Sally’s father who died in October the following year.

Christmas in Phoenix with Carl Winkle, 2000.

Christmas in Phoenix with Amy Winkle, 2000.

Judy, Christmas 2000.

Sue, Christmas 2000.

Sally's niece Kelly, Christmas 2000.

Among other visitors to our new home in town were Larry and Jill, and our good friends Paul and Heidi.

Larry and Jill, 2001.

Paul, Heidi, and Katie, 2001.

Nick and Kim visited us as well.

Nick and Kim in our new house, 2001.

And here is our last picture of domestic bliss at Maringo Drive:

Last picture of our home at Maringo Drive.

Halloween 1998

Making banana bread, 1998

Patsy Clark's, Thanksgiving 1998

Christmas 1998

We gathered in Albany, VT, for Mama’s funeral service in January 1999. As Mama had foreseen, it was the first (and last?) time that all of her children were together in the same place since Papa’s death in 1994. Olaf’s son Paul was the only family member who was with Mama the night she died. By the time the local undertaker came in the morning, rigor mortis had set in. They carried her emaciated body out as if it were a wooden plank. Shortly before her death, Mama had asked Betsy’s opinion why she had no appetite. Betsy’s response was, “It could be anorexia.” No wonder she and Mama could never get along!

Betsy’s fantasy life, fueled by her conflict with Mama, was still active: insisting to me after Mama’s funeral that she had a different father from us boys—and possibly I did, too.

With Betsy, January 2nd, 1999

To me Mama’s death seemed like the late effect of my failure to heed my Harvard classmate Dick Shader’s admonition, delivered in 1956: “No one ever gets well only for themselves.”

Olaf in Mama's seat

Trina in front of Mama's books.

Betsy with Naomi's picture in the background.

In the spring of 1999 the U. S., in the name of NATO, launched a devastating aerial attack on the remnant of Yugoslavia that remained intact after the civil war between Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims of the 1990s. It seemed that the twentieth century was coming full circle. The tide of nationalism that had precipitated the First World War (and the second one as well) was reemerging after the fall of the communist regimes that had—give the devils their due!—more or less successfully repressed national hatreds in the realm under their control in the post-war era. The Yugoslav War, supposedly fought to prevent alleged Serb human rights abuses in the province of Kosovo, would become the first war in which the aggressor—NATO—did not suffer a single casualty while raining death and destruction on military and civilian targets alike. It was the first of a succession of “humanitarian” wars, ostensibly fought in the defense of human rights. In my journal I lamented

[my friend Mike Gurian’s father] Jack Gurian’s defense of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in a talk to the United Nations Association [whose president I was at the time]. Proof positive how very easy it is to rationalize aggressive war. How very much he still fills the role of his former employment as an officer of the American Information Agency. A grab bag of rhetorical techniques and arguments, as if he had come straight from Washington: demonizing of Milosevic, platitudes about “human rights” (but only as defined in conservative liberal countries like the U. S.), invocation of the Munich analogy, etc., etc. Gurian sees the Yugoslav war as a sign that there is progress in the world—the evolution of democratic norms.

I saw it instead as just another sign that belligerent imperialist powers will always come up with a nice-sounding pretext for war (much like Russia in Chechnya).

I was planning to attend a Holocaust Museum-sponsored faculty seminar to be given by Raul Hilberg in Washington DC in the summer of 1999, but fate intervened, much to the disappointment of our seven-year-old son Emmet, who had looked forward to the long-anticipated train ride from Washington to New York and Boston. I had already received my tickets for the flight to Washington from the seminar sponsors when I was forced to cancel my participation due to a herniated disc in my back, probably brought on by stress and too much tennis. I not only played with friends twice a week, but also competitively in the spring and summer leagues of the Spokane Tennis Association. But my crucial mistake, after developing back pains, was to seek treatment at a chiropractor’s. He asked me to sign a statement releasing him from any liability resulting from his treatment. The statement included the cautionary note that although treatments are 95 per cent effective, in five per cent of all cases the treatment makes the condition worse. That is precisely what happened to me. After the treatment I could no longer walk. What made it even more aggravating was that throughout his treatment the chiropractor kept up a running monologue on the splendid features of his new Porsche. Surgery was now the only option. The case was severe enough for my doctor, Robert Riggs, and my insurance, Group Health, to authorize emergency surgery on Memorial Day weekend, 1999. The surgeon was in such a hurry to leave on his planned holiday after the operation that he failed to inform Sally of the results. She was left on her own in the waiting room for four or five hours, worrying and wondering what was taking so long. In my journal I wrote:

My herniated disc as life’s forcible reminder that I am entering old age and cannot go on the way I have. But it has also given me a new strength, a new equanimity in the face of the deterioration of the body. Although none of the symptoms that made me feel weak and at the end of my tether in the period before the herniated disc have disappeared, my attitude has changed. I no longer try to fight it.

I took comfort from one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “Illness itself can be a stimulus: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulus.”

My surgery forced me to miss two events I had looked forward to with great anticipation: Cousin Ginny’s elaborate seventieth birthday party and the memorial service for Mama, which Olaf had scheduled for the summer to facilitate wider participation than in the winter months. Indeed, from all reports, both events were very festive occasions. Johnnie Van Duyl called me from Vermont and later sent some photos of the memorial ceremony.

Garth, Trina, Paul, Nick, Mariann, John, Cora, and Olaf at Ginny's seventieth birthday party.

Liz and Robie Rosenthal, June 1999

Olaf's family, June 1999

My recovery was marvelously rapid, and by July I was virtually back to normal.

Sally's parents visit in July 1999

In August we went to Europe as originally planned. As usual, we landed in Frankfurt and spent a day with my cousin Eva Ganzlin. She was reading my just-published Hitler’s Germany, leading six-year-old Emmet to excitedly report, “Eva is reading English in German!” On this trip, unusually for us, our destination was not Berlin, but rather Munich and Bavaria. We had hoped to meet up with Stella, now living in Augsburg with her new husband Dieter, but she had to leave for Karlsruhe to tend to her ailing mother just on the day we arrived. Uschi Nussbaumer did come to join us from Zurich for a few days in Munich.

With Uschi in Munich in 1999

In Munich, 1999

We travelled to Ried, retracing with Emmet the path we walked to school (barefoot, except in winter) in Benediktbeuern as children. Climbing the Benediktenwand with a seven-year-old seemed like too much of a chore.

The monastary in Benediktbeuern, with the Benediktenwand.

Lautenbachers, where we had eaten lunch during the war, was now a fancy motel, called the Rabenkopf, where we stayed for a night or two back in 1989.

Lautenbacher's in Ried, 1999

We also visited Rohrdorf and the Elmhof, which had not changed since our last visit in 1989. We spent a few days in Passau, where the Inn flows into the Danube. Eastern Washington University had a student exchange agreement with the local university, giving us a formal reason for our visit.

In August we once again attended the triennial Stackelberg Familientag at Schloss Höhnscheid near Kassel.

Familientag, August 1999

Emmet in his spiffy suit.

Sandy Stackelberg and his boys.

Nick bought his first house in 1999, an only moderately run-down Craftsman-style frame house in a nice location on Spruce Street in Seattle.

Seattle skyline from Nick's porch, 1999.

In September 1999 Eva and Günther visited us before making a week-long tour of the West Coast and New York.

Eva and Günther on their Amerikareise, September 1999.

Emmet at the computer, 1999.

Emmet's eighth birthday, September, 1999.

Emmet, Marco, and Lucas, Halloween, 1999.

Emmet's school picture, 1999.

Christmas 1999.

Although Mama had been looking forward to the long-planned Emmet family get-together in Ireland in June in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the failed uprising against the British in 1798, when the time came she was too weak to go. Olaf delivered the verdict, “For her the trip comes too late.”

I saw her for the last time in July 1998 on our return from Ireland and a brief follow-on trip to Germany. Sally, remained in Germany to teach a summer course at the Fachhochschule [University of Applied Science] in Lübeck, still one of Spokane’s sister cities at the time. Parting from his mother was quite traumatic for six-year-old Emmet who dissolved in tears as he waved good-bye to his mother on the station platform as our train pulled away. He was soon distracted, however, by the thrill of riding in the Inter-City Express. Later, back in Spokane, he bravely told Sally over the phone, “I’m getting over my fear of missing you.” I recorded some impressions from our visit to Mama in my journal in July 1998:

Insights from my visit to Vermont. Two paradigmatic clashes between Betsy and Mama in which, despite my overall condemnation of how Mama has treated Betsy over the years, I found myself far more in agreement with Mama: one was Betsy’s typically clumsy (and condescending) attempt to be “nice” to Mama by telling Emmet that the presents she had bought for him also came from Mama. “I can give my own gifts, thank you,” was Mama’s sharp and predictable response. The second clash came after Emmet described how Louise had yelled at her daughter Sherry and told her to “get out of here.” Mama rebuked Emmet for revealing this embarrassing family dispute. This provoked Betsy into rising to Emmet’s defense. “I think it’s perfectly all right for him to talk about it. Do you want him to lie?” It was only after I twice defended Mama’s censure as perfectly appropriate that Betsy gradually gave in.

I managed to deflect most direct clashes of my own with Mama, two of which stick out in my mind. One was over the remark I made when Emmet was chasing after Mama’s half-wild kittens who always fled at his approach. In a facetious tone I said, “He likes to feel the power,” and was unpleasantly surprised when Mama took my remark seriously. “Oh no,” she said, “that’s so wrong. That view is imposed on children by grown-ups. Children want to get close to animals.” Her contorted face showed how strongly she felt about this, as if she had struck at the very source of our civilizational malaise. I did not feel that it was worth it to try to explain that I had meant my remark facetiously. Advice to visitors to Mama: know when not to make small talk.

The other run-in came on the subject of Berlin. I knew that she had not liked Berlin when she lived there (her marriage was dissolving), so I did not want to give her occasion to contradict me by expressing a positive judgment. Deliberately non-committal, I said, “Berlin has really changed.” Predictably, however, that did not stop her at all. “I detest Berlin. It’s an awful, narrow-minded, self-important city.”

I did not think this was the last time I would see Mama, although she tried to persuade me to stay longer by saying that maybe next year at this time she might no longer be alive. I told her we had to get back to tend to our dogs, an argument she found difficult to counter, since all her life she had used the same excuse to justify not budging from her place.

Mama on the deck Olaf had built for her, July, 1998

Mama, July 1998

Mama indoors, July 1998

One of the last pictures of Mama before her death 1998

With Trina and Mama, July 1998

Marley and Cloudy, 1998

After returning from Vermont, I reflected on what turned out to be (although I did not yet know it) our final parting.

The peculiar implications of Mama’s mumbled “you’re a good boy” at our parting in Vermont. It was quite unexpected—and unpleasant—to me. For one thing, expressing a “judgment” like that suggested that she was not at all emotionally involved (at the brink of tears, for instance) by our going away. For another thing, it was said in a way that seemed to refute a previously held conviction (such as that I was not a good boy). Even the way it was said, hardly audible, seemed to suggest that she was talking to herself, revising an earlier opinion. Or if it was said to me, as it must have been given the pronoun “you,” it singularly lacked conviction. Aside from the fact that the whole phrase was rather patronizing to begin with, suggesting that its main aim was simply to once again establish the mother-son relationship (like straightening my tie years ago, or asking me to run a trivial errand, to which Aunt Temple had objected almost thirty years ago.)

Mama was not defeated by old age. She told Maureen Dyer, “I can’t see anything, I can’t hear anything, and I can’t remember anything, and I’ve never been so happy in my life.” Maureen told Mama about her mother’s Alzheimer’s. “She’s in a nursing home, but for all she knows about it, she could just as well be in Hoboken.” Mama: “How awful! I’d much rather be in Hoboken and think I was in a nursing home.” Mama gave us instructions for her funeral. “I want all four of you to get drunk. I want my body cremated and the ashes thrown out on the dump behind the house.” At the time of her death, three of her children were over sixty years of age and the fourth one turned sixty the following day.

12/22/1998 Mama’s death. Notified by Trina by phone at 5 a.m.(Ruth Lawrence had phoned her mother) shortly after I had woken from a remarkable dream of Mama, thin, even skeletal, but active and moving, on her farm, which was, however, more abundant and comfortable than in reality. What made the dream extraordinary was that residing as a rather unwanted guest on the outskirts of her property were Hitler and a number of his aides, all rather ridiculous as they had no power, which also made them seem uncharacteristically moderate, since their words were empty threats (a reflection, perhaps, of my dismissal in class of the Aryan Nation as too insignificant to be the quintessential form of American fascism—it was the Ku Klux Klan that I had hoped to elicit from my students). Hitler’s minions dutifully went to pick up their grub at the main house, so many tamed monsters.

The pain of Mama’s death lies in the sudden realization of all those missed years when I barely saw her or talked to her, as if they would never end. I truly took her for granted. The pain of knowing at the end of her life how lonely she was. Although I never saw her more than once a year for the past twenty years, her death pulls the ground from under me. Her death also takes much of the pleasure from writing my book [Hitler’s Germany]. I now realize how much I was writing it for her.

As Mama had predicted, her funeral provided the first occasion in years for her four children, now all over sixty years in age, to gather together in one place. It seemed to me that Olaf, who inherited the role of “top dog” in the family, unconsciously adopted many of Mama’s mannerisms. But he was critical of her ready acceptance of violence and predation in the natural world. Mama understood that her love of nature was a corollary of her dislike of human society. “I’m anti-social,” she once told me; “I love living at the end of the world.” As the second-oldest living Emmet (among the more than four-hundred living direct descendants of Thomas Addis Emmet—the founding father of the American branch of the Emmet family), Mama would have loved to have been able to attend the week-long family reunion in Ireland in June 1998. It was indeed a most enjoyable celebration, well-organized by our cousins, Susanna Doyle, Grenville (“Jeremy”) Emmet, and Katie Emmet.

Three brothers in Ireland, 1998

Stackelbergs, Abbey Tavern, 1998

Abbey Tavern, Howth, June 26th, 1998

In Ireland, June 1998

Robert Emmet's statue at St. Stephen's Green, Dublin

In front of the Royal College of Surgeons. 1998

At the Temple Bar Hotel, Dublin

Alexandra, Paul, and Katie Emmet, 1998

Emmet in Ireland

Olaf in Ireland

Trina in Ireland

Ginny in Ireland

Trina and Garth in Ireland

Trina, Nick, Xuiwei, and Olaf in Ireland

At Eva and Günther's, 1998

At the airport, 1998

Emmet finished Kindergarten and entered first grade shortly before his seventh birthday in September 1998.

Emmet's seventh birthday, 1998

His Kindergarten teacher Linda Lentz gave him a glowing report:

Emmet expresses himself well and can easily talk to both children and adults. He enjoys interacting with literature and is eager to answer questions and join in group discussions. Emmet is well-liked by all his classmates. He uses words to handle conflicts that arise. Even though he chooses to spend much of his time with Lucas [Brown], he is able to easily work and play with any of the other children.

Emmet enjoys success in using scissors, pencils, paint, glue, etc. He is printing his name nicely using lower-case letters. He works hard to do quality work. One of Emmet’s favorite free time activities is to build a stage using blocks and sing and “play” his block guitar. He also enjoys the computers. Emmet is a good listener during circle. We enjoy him immensely.

On a much higher level, Trina was also adding to her academic achievements.

Trina getting her MS degree at the Harvard School of Public Health, 1998

1998 was the year of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment (and eventual acquittal) for having lied when he denied having had sexual relations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, based on Clinton’s dubious claim that oral sex did not constitute sexual relations. My view was that while Clinton’s actions may have been morally reprehensible and politically misguided, they did not constitute sufficient grounds for impeachment. The exploitation of the case by Republicans for political advantage seemed to me to outweigh Clinton’s misdeeds. I noted a resemblance between the prosecution of Clinton and the prosecution of informers in the former East Germany.

[Joachim] Gauck, the man in charge of investigation of the [former] East German STASI (the state security service), reminds me of Kenneth Starr, special prosecutors. Both men have grown into their jobs to such an extent that they can’t seem to face any other employment. Both have developed elaborate, passionate rationales for the importance, indeed the necessity, of their jobs. In both men one gets the impression that their jobs have affected all their attitudes, indeed their personalities. Their self-serving motives are so obvious as to make it very difficult to take seriously their vilification of the objects of their investigations. If they weren’t right-wingers before, they would have to become right-wingers now. Thus does the material base determine tne superstructure of values and ideas with unusual directness. Rarely do we have such unmediated examples of economic determinism.

The other big event of 1998 was Ursula and Gordon’s wedding.

Ursula and Gordon getting married at Patsy Clark's, 1998

At Ursula and Gordon's wedding, 1998

The Women's Group at Ursula's wedding

The men of the Women's Group, 1998

Sally and Marion at Ursula's wedding