Discovering the Third Reich Through Mephisto :: Essays Papers

Discovering the Third Reich through and through MephistoMike, a confused coworker asked me, why do you want to take a course on the Nazis? Finding myself unprepared to account for a lure that, to me, was intrinsic to the subject matter, I struggled with a hasty expla realm more or less studying mass dementia for the sake of understanding how it works and preventing it from occurrent again. A whole bunch of Jews went willingly to their deaths, I elaborated. A nation of people stood by and watched it happen. You have to wonder, why didnt somebody stop that? Yeah, replied my friend, the Germans state Come here and well kill you, and the Jews went anyway. I guess they were all stupid.I nonice that I had no immediate answer to this facetious dismissal of star of historys most profound tragedies. It was a sweeping and indiscriminate assertion, to be sure, nevertheless not virtuoso entirely without merit. If general stupidity were not to blame, and then why had six million Jews endu red such torture? Were none of them in a position to unite in any sort of viscid resistance? What of the Catholics who were murdered in the concentration camps as well? The blacks? political dissidents? Members of the press? In fact it seems that the Nazis, over the course of their reign, discriminated against so galore(postnominal) professions, creeds, philosophies, and classes that for a person not to belong to at least one must have been a remarkable feat of chance. I could not begin to understand how the National Socialist Party had, with such a miserable and offensive political platform, managed to gain power in Germany, nor how, with such cruel and oppressive practices, they managed to keep it.Klaus Manns Mephisto answered a number of these questions for me. Though it did not trace the Nazis rise to power outside of mentioning a few highlights, it did impersonate in a frighteningly matter-of-fact manner the social and ethnic climate of that crucial time period the dying y ears of the Weimar Republic, and the wee years of the Third Reich. Specifically, it reassured me that the whole of Germany had not welcomed the Nazi coup with open arms, nor enjoyed the years spent living under the Reich.Was it possible? Manns caseful Hendrik wondered upon receiving the news of Hitlers appointment as chancellor. (Mephisto, 156) The blustering lout whom his brilliant and state-of-the-art friends had so often ridiculed had now suddenly become the most coercive man in the country This is horrible, thought the actor Hendrik Hfgen.