With cutting irony, Rönne defends himself against the suspicion of being a fellow-traveler: “Now you can probably guess that I had no reason to love the Nazis—although” (a coquettish sidelong glance at Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel, mother a Timermann with two m’s) “there were some pretty gorgeous boys in those chic uniforms, especially in the SS . . .” (General chuckles of understanding, tactfully suppressed: when the lock of hair makes the man, you have to speak the truth in dulcet tones.) But with a sudden return to intellectual seriousness, Rönne continues in an almost passionate voice, “What people today suppress” (“Vat beeble today subbress”—as Rönne gets more involved, you forget his knotty Baltic accent) “is Nazism’s irresistible seductiveness in its early stages. Its timeliness.” Now Rönne is speaking with the razor-sharp clarity of a master sleuth analyzing a case. His audience is enthralled by how his incisors drop shut and get readjusted. “Besides their idiotic party platform consisting of nothing but half a dozen barely comprehensible slogans like ‘smashing the feudal system’ and similar nonsense, the Nazis were ready to catch every current of the times. Meanwhile and quite independent of them, the promise of a new world order was in the air in any case. The Bolsheviks were promising one too. In this general proliferation of ideologies and utopias, the Nazis had all sails hoisted for every wind, especially the wish for a reform of every aspect of life, from health sandals to Teutonism, from tarot card reading to phrenology, from Coué’s autosuggestion to Sylvio Gesell’s ‘shrinking money.’ Everything and everybody needed to be—and wanted to be—reformed, rethought, renewed—it’s not as though that was dictated to the people from above.” (Witte: “Exactly. Nobody forced us into anything!!!”) “It took root and thrived in everyone’s mind.” The epoch’s expectations of life and hope for the future were virulent in every individual. And despite the obvious trend toward mysticism and arcana in this evocation of the future, the belief in the rational progress of technology remained unshaken. It was technology above all that would liberate humanity from the drudgery of their former blind enslavement to work.” Rönne waxes lyrical. “It’s almost impossible today to imagine the strength of that trust in the coming of a new world era. Today, we no longer harbor any hope. Quite the contrary: we look bleakly into the future. Especially threatening is the promise technology holds. Even optimists live from one day to the next as if traveling through a tunnel: it’s possible we’ll emerge, but no telling when. In the years after 1918, it was utterly different, and you’ve got to grant that fact to the poor stiffs who followed the pied piper Adolf Hitler. The so-called weltanschauung of the Nazis, their philosophy and ideology, was larded with promises that played to the needs of those poor saps. Because they suffered privation during the inflation—déclassé, plundered, unemployed, starving—and intellectually starving because the traditional ideas meant nothing to them anymore—they wanted to take part in the creation of a new reality from which everlasting injustice and everlasting suffering were excluded.”