July 2025

What I’m reading now

• The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt
• Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968, edited by Lotte Kohler
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, by Ray Monk.
• The Crisis of Narration, by Byung-Chul Han
• Misbehaving at the Crossroads, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own, by Paul Elie
• Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation, by Margaret Canovan
• Weimar Culture, by Peter Gay

Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month

Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power

by Timothy W. Ryback

Ryback says that his goal in writing this book was “to recount the last six months of Hitler’s ascent to power as it was reported and perceived at the time” (p. 314). His approach – focusing on how the process “was reported and perceived at the time" – frustrated me a bit. I frequently found myself hoping for more historical and cultural context as I read. Still, I couldn’t resist comparing news reports about Germany in late 1932 and early 1933 to contemporary news accounts about happenings in the United States.

Click here to read more.

Ryback begins his account after the July 1932 elections, in which Hitler’s party surprised everyone by securing 37% of the vote – more than any other party, but not enough to secure a majority government in Germany’s Reichstag. While ordinarily such a margin would lead the German president to invite Hitler to form a government, President Hindenberg was not prepared to do that. It’s worth noting that this 37% is the high mark of Hitler’s electoral success; his party’s share of the vote went down in each subsequent election until after he became Chancellor. Even then, and despite his efforts to suppress the vote of many, he failed to gain a majority of those voting.

Ryback offers many examples illustrating how political, business, and media leaders in Germany miscalculated in their dealings with Hitler.

• The conservative media figure Alfred Hugenberg, whose Telegraph Union had something like 1600 affiliated newspapers, developed that media empire to counter what he saw as a mainstream media controlled by Jews and dangerously liberal. His goal was to fragment the country with lies and half-truths, thinking that the center could not hold. He also thought that any reasonable person would see that Hitler was a buffoon not qualified to lead.

• General Kurt von Schleicher fancied himself a strong-man leader who thought that everyone would see that Hitler was a crazy man, but that Hitler’s campaign for a powerful man at the head of the government would inspire the masses to turn to a real strongman, namely Schleicher.

• The New York Times reporter didn’t see Hitler coming – after the President dissolved the Reichstag in September 1932, countering a political move by Hitler’s party to push their own agenda, reporter Frederick Birchall wrote that “the government goes on as smoothly, efficiently and peacefully as in any of the world’s well-established democracies, a marvelous tribute to the inherent law-abidingness and solid characteristics of the German people” (p. 118).

In short, while there is evidence that other conservative politicians and leaders in Germany might have prevented Hitler’s coming to power, they didn’t do that. Ryback focuses primarily on these conservative leaders, suggesting that if they had worked together instead of fighting among themselves they might have been successful. He writes less about those in the center or on the left of the political spectrum.

Hitler had several opportunities to join the government in the six months discussed in this book. He refused several times, saying that he wouldn’t join a government unless he was made Chancellor; by November 1932 he was also insisting that as Chancellor he must be given to rule the country as he saw fit.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Ryback’s detail, I found myself confused by the last pages of the book, which describe the lead-up to the conversation in late January 1933 when President Hindenberg finally offers the Chancellorship to Hitler. Earlier that week, Hindenberg had dispatched Schleicher and then moved to counter the coup that Scheicher contemplated in response, having finally decided that he had no choice but to ask Hitler to assemble a cabinet. Hugenberg was present at the meeting when Hitler was declared Chancellor, but came very close to calling everything off when Hitler insisted that he would be calling for new elections in the coming months. Hitler sought to placate Hugenberg, saying that election results, no matter what they were, would not lead him to reorganize his cabinet. Hugenberg gave in, saying the next day that “I just made the biggest mistake of my life.”

And so Hitler became Chancellor. He called for new elections, scheduled for March 5. The New York Times headline: “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to Be Dictator.” On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was destroyed by fire, and Hitler persuaded Hindenberg to sign an order that did away with basic human rights. The elections proceeded as planned, with Hitler severely restricting participation by Communists, Socialists, and other parties of the left. Still, Hitler still did not receive his majority, capturing only 43.9% of the vote.

But he pressed ahead, pushing the Reichstag to give him still more emergency authority. In June 1934, he ordered the assassination of several of his opponents and forced others to leave Germany during the so-called Night of the Long Knives. Hugenberg lost his seat in the cabinet and Hitler gained what he wanted, fulfilling his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbel’s early vow: “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction. … We enter the Reichstag to use the arsenal of democracy in order to assault it with its own mechanism” (p. 110).

Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin

• by Seyla Benhabib (notes pending)

Perfection

by Vincenzo Latronico

It’s a commonplace to say that one’s carefully curated online persona leaves out much of the drudgery and discomfort of life in the “real” world. Perfection hones this observation carefully and subtly, suggesting the risk that one might attempt to live the online world to perfection, seeking to avoid the IRL trauma. Latronico admits his indebtedness to Georges Perec, whose novel Things: A Story of the Sixties evidently described the lives of people who found their identity in the things that they owned. (I say “evidently” because I’ve not read Perec’s novel – yet another book to add to my TBR pile!)

Click here to read more.

The novel’s protagonist(s) is (are) the couple Anna and Tom. I make the plural parenthetical because they are presented throughout the book as one – I admit I didn’t count, but it seems that there are more references to “Anna and Tom” and “they” than there are to either of them separately. They are expats, having moved from an unnamed south European city to 2010s Berlin, making their living in online design and branding. The online presences they create for their clients mirror the online presence they create for themselves. The digitized version of their carefully curated apartment, offered as a short-term rental when they leave town for a few days, functions also as their living space. If only their experience IRL could live up to the ideal that they were presenting to the world.

The author (and, I suppose, translator Sophie Hughes) write in a deadpan style that reminds me somehow of the voice over narration of Detective Friday from my childhood’s “Dragnet” television series. I found it a good approach. The book is a quick and easy read. I found the novel to be slightly unsettling, but in a good way — what, after all, is the relationship between the digital world of non-things and the concrete world of material things that we attempt to hold together in one life these days?

When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains

by Ariana Neumann

Ariana Neumann was born and grew up in Venezuela. She knew that her father had emigrated from Prague to Caracus, and even as a child she had hints of his painful past. But he told her next to nothing about his former life in Europe. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he told her next to nothing about his former life while he was still alive. However, after he died, she found a box of documents and photographs that he left for her. A box that invited her to piece together his story, which is also a story of Nazi Germany. In this book she tells his story, and also the story of how she discovered his story.

Click here to read more.

Neumann begins her story with an account of her visit to an old synagogue in Prague in 1997. As it happens, I was in that synagogue last spring, and I also saw the tens of thousands of names written on the walls, names of residents of the area who died in the Holocaust. I wish that I had known then to look for the name Hanus Stanislav Neumann. Neumann didn’t know to look for that name either; she reports that she discovered the name quite by chance. Seeing her father’s name was quite a surprise to her. Her father was still alive in 1997. But it was also puzzling that her father’s name was the only name in the synagogue with only a birth date next to it. Every other name on the walls had both a birth and death date. Why would her father’s name be there, and how is it that his birth date was followed by a question mark instead of a date?

I choose to see see the question mark as a stand-in for the growing list of questions Neumann had about her father’s life. While he was still alive, she chose to live with those questions, in large part because it was clear to her that her father did not want to talk about his past. “Sometimes you have to leave the past where it is — in the past,” he said.

When she found the box of documents and photographs after her father died, she thought it might be his way of planting the seeds of his story, of helping her to look for answers to her questions. Initially, she was afraid. What might she learn? But she eventually set out on a quest, in part because she decided that learning about her father would also be a way of learning about herself and her family. “…as we reared our family, other, more intrinsic questions arose about identity, to do with heritage and traditions, about what it is that one, as a parent, needs to pass on. Gradually, I realized that uncovering what had remained concealed concerned me and my children as much as it did my father. Finding out about those who came before us had as much to do with the present and with the future as it did with the past. The desire to understand my father was there all along. And despite my original hesitation, my burgeoning little family provided further motivation. Yet I was still afraid” (p. 34).

Despite her fear, she persevered, enlisting the help of a Czech researcher who translated the documents and sought information in the official records. The search led her to other family members — people she didn’t know — some of whom had additional photographs and documents. She managed to visit many of these people, both face-to-face and by email and telephone. Conversations, photographs, documents, and public records together corroborate a story of her father’s remarkable survival and also his transformation from a happy-go-lucky child and teenager to a severaly disciplined and successful businessman.

As I said up top, there are really two stories here: the story of Neumann’s family, and also the story of her discovery of this story. Both of them are riveting. And I’ll include one small spoiler from near the end of the book. Neumann’s father had his own explanation of the question mark next to his name. “I tricked them. I lived.”