Read More about They Thought They Were Free Read Less about They Thought They Were FreeĪfterword by Richard J. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil. There was so much going on.’' 'Your friend the baker was right,' said my colleague. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. One had no time.' 'Those,' I said, 'are the words of my friend the baker. Whatever you think of Mayer's views during the war, this passage is an account of a German reflecting on what had happened. First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. Lastly, They Thought They Were Free wasn't about his recollections, but rather recollections from interviews with Germans that lived in Germany during that period.
His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.Ī new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J.
Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. Editions for They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45: 0226511928 (Paperback published in 1966), (Kindle Edition published in 2017), 022652583X (. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany.
And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did-what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. Published in 1955, this book is a collection of stories by Mayer, a Jewish-American, as he interviewed 10 Germans in Kronenberg. That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer Ben Sima They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer My notes from They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.” ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public.
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