“And the decisive thing,” Rönne continues in Baltic indifference, “the thing that distinguished the forerunners of the National Socialist ideologues from the crude revivalists of early Christian ideas in the era of mass culture, was their aestheticism. Even the promise of order—from the highest intellectual level of the last of the knightly orders right down to the trivial obsession with the political and moral housecleaning of corruption and perversion and every variety of dissident and minority—all that had more of an aesthetic than a moral character. Aestheticism was a basic characteristic of the epoch’s sense of the world. ‘Strength through Joy,’ ‘Joy through Beauty,’ etc., slogans everyone endorsed; just think of the choreographed masses in Moscow as well as Nuremberg: pretty, club-swinging lads and maidens—the new humanity was blond, strong, and beautiful. The unbeautiful was denied the right to exist. Hence the silent agreement of just about everyone on the extermination of the Jews.” (Witte again, robustly: “Jawohl! That’s how it was!”) Rönne smiles and continues. “But these are subtleties that the flat-footed, polemical ignorance of present-day historians doesn’t get into. Both sides work to falsify what happened, both the prosecutorial standpoint of former pacifists and the guilt-denying standpoint of the Germans themselves. Both pillory the evil of National Socialism as an ideological project and not, as would be more appropriate, its execution by the filthiest of the minds it swept up. Hitler, Göring, Goebbels at the tip of a pyramid of criminals and ghouls, based on the worst petit bourgeois resentments—that’s not the only thing that’s meant by National Socialism. And that’s why I wish someone would correct the conception widespread here and everywhere: it wasn’t the Nazis who were responsible, but the greatest enemy of all humanity: stupidity. The Germans weren’t led astray by a group of conspiratorial villains like children by the Pied Piper of Hamelin; instead, the German philistine with his well-known musicality composed the most sublime, poisonous, and seductive flutings of the zeitgeist into a march, and marched off to his own perdition in stalwart lockstep. A perdition, by the way” (with an eloquent gesture that comprehends the sumptuously set table), “that ironically enough seems to be turning into salvation.”

Awkward silence around the table, broken after a while by Witte’s sister Wilma with the brittle sentence, “I don’t think you can call Hermann Göring a filthy mind.” (His peccadillo: art theft. Speaks for his good taste, doesn’t it?)

• • •

Report from Nuremberg: