Depth of Influence...

Experience, not perception, of events and circumstances build reactions and philosophies. Until something actually affects our inner being and our private life, it cannot fundamentally changes our values and beliefs.

In his book, Haffner writes of the Nazi "takeover" of Germany:

All this was still something one only read about in the press. You did not see or hear anything that was any different from what had gone on before. There were brown SA uniforms on the streets, demonstrations, shouts of "Heil," but otherwise it was "business as usual." In the Kammergericht, the highest court in Prussia, where I worked as Referendar as the time, the process of the law was not changed at all by the fact that the interior minister enacted ridiculous edicts. The newspapers might report that the constitution was in ruins. Here every paragraph of the Civil Code was still valid and was mulled over and analyzed as carefully as ever. Which was the true reality?...

I must admit that I was inclined to view the undisturbed functioning of the law, and indeed the continued normal course of daily life, as a triumph over the Nazis. They could behave as raucously and wildly as they wished. They could still only stir up the political surface. The depths of the ocean of life remained entirely unaffected.(109-110)

Confusion and difficulty to perceive events breed inaction, as Haffner writes:

Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background. ... now it was no longer possible to deny that daily life itself had become hollow or mechanical. Every minute merely confirmed the victory of the enemy forces flooding in from all sides.

Strangely enough, it was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horror....

It was hindered by the mechanical continuation of normal daily life.... It is the cause of his reluctance to do anything that could "derail" his life -- something audacious or out of the ordinary. It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense catastrophes of civilization such as the rule of the Nazis in Germany.

...In this way, unsure of myself, temporizing, I performed my routine daily duties. At home, I gave way to fruitless and ridiculous outbursts at the dinner table. Excluded from events and passive like millions of others, I let events come at me.

And they did. (137-9)

How poignant his words, but how true to our experience! It seems even with the momentous days that we live in, my inner being and my reason for living have remained the same because my inner life has been unaffected. Part of it is youth and ignorance, and part of it is simply absence or distance from the happenings. I don't live in Washington or New York City, so how does it really affect me? True, prices have increased and the administration is about to change, but that remains far from my private life because it does not touch my inmost being.

How scary this was for Haffner who looked back and realized that a generation of Germans had allowed their country to be taken over by the Nazis all because it did not affect them. How could it? He says, "I was inclined not to take them very seriously -- a common attitude among their inexperience opponents, which helped them a lot, and still helped them." (104)

It's food for thought at least.