“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National...
“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. 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. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. 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. 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. 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.
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. 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.
Milton Sanford Mayer (1908-1986) was a journalist and educator. He was the author of about a dozen books.
He studied at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928 but he did not earn a degree; in 1942 he told the Saturday Evening Post that he was "placed on permanent probation for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window." He was a reporter for the Associated Press, the Ch...
Milton Sanford Mayer (1908-1986) was a journalist and educator. He was the author of about a dozen books.
He studied at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928 but he did not earn a degree; in 1942 he told the Saturday Evening Post that he was "placed on permanent probation for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window." He was a reporter for the Associated Press, the Chicago Evening Post, and the Chicago Evening American. He wrote a monthly column in the Progressive for over forty years. He won the George Polk Memorial Award and the Benjamin Franklin Citation for Journalism.
He worked for the University of Chicago in its public relations office and lectured in its Great Books Program. He also taught at the University of Massachusetts, Hampshire College, and the University of Louisville. He was an adviser to Robert M. Hutchins when Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
Mayer was a conscientious objector during World War II but after the war traveled to Germany and lived with German families. Those experiences informed his most influential book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45.
Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consequence, not the cause, of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.
Freedom is nothing but the habit of choice. Now choice is remarkably wide in this life. Each day begins with the choice of tying one’s left or right shoelace first, and ends with the choice of observing or ignoring the providence of God. Pressure narrows choice forcibly. Under light pressure men sacrifice small choices lightly. But it is only under the greatest pressure that they sacrifice the greatest choices, because choice, and choice alone, informs them that they are men and not m... (查看原文)
只看了豆瓣上的試讀就找到若干翻譯錯誤 「没有忘记1940年夏天的英国人，看到德国新国防军（Wehrmacht）在英国土地上进行演习，会感到失望」--------不明所以的神翻譯 （the englishman who remembers the summer of 1940 is dismayed to see the new german wehrmacht cond...
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米尔顿·迈耶 作者
经观书评
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4 有用 Young_To 2018-07-24 09:00:04
他们曾经以为的黄金时代，却是众人口诛笔伐的时代。写作者是一直把自己放在对立面去看这些受访人，以一个美国人的姿态，这样ethnographic的视角也会多少有失偏颇吧。
3 有用 陈灼 2021-03-31 18:48:01
此书的精华在第一和第二部分，第三部分可略读。战后历史证明先进制度可以长久促进经济发展和创新，涤荡民族主义，改造国民精神；但这种规模和程度的改造，前提是彻底和无条件的战败。没有毁灭就没有新生。
0 有用 Le Flaneur 2022-09-22 16:11:47 上海
原本以为会有很多普通人的故事，结果是大段大段的对话和理论，有点枯燥
2 有用 不过四随便记录 2022-04-23 13:14:26
历史的echo和rhyme
0 有用 风一样的桌子 2022-12-22 04:14:53 美国
像
0 有用 33 2023-01-25 18:36:32 四川
@2022-09-26 10:58:55
0 有用 风一样的桌子 2022-12-22 04:14:53 美国
像
0 有用 Le Flaneur 2022-09-22 16:11:47 上海
原本以为会有很多普通人的故事，结果是大段大段的对话和理论，有点枯燥
2 有用 不过四随便记录 2022-04-23 13:14:26
历史的echo和rhyme
3 有用 陈灼 2021-03-31 18:48:01
此书的精华在第一和第二部分，第三部分可略读。战后历史证明先进制度可以长久促进经济发展和创新，涤荡民族主义，改造国民精神；但这种规模和程度的改造，前提是彻底和无条件的战败。没有毁灭就没有新生。