Gideon Rachman: “It struck me as significant that we had both been reading about the 1930s to try and make sense of 2019. Neither of us believe that Mr Johnson or Donald Trump are reincarnations of Hitler or Mussolini. But we had both found Haffner’s memoir interesting for another, more subtle, reason. It provides an extraordinary insight into what it feels like to live through a period of political turmoil.”
“Haffner’s memoir was written in 1939 — just before the outbreak of the second world war and the Holocaust. He was seven at the start of the first world war in 1914 and left Germany to go into exile in 1938. His book (which was only discovered by his son in 1999, as he cleared up his father’s papers after his death), provides a contemporary sense of what it felt like to watch the Nazis rise to power — and the fears, doubts and moral dilemmas that are thrown up as a new and disturbing kind of politics emerges.”
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