How Was It Possible?

The current that drew me from Gottfried Leibniz to curiosity about the remarkable history of the Hohenzollern dynasty and the rise (and fall) of Prussia, led, thanks to a recommendation from my sister Amy Leonard, who is a Reformation historian at Georgetown University, to Hans Rosenberg’s Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660-1815, first published in 1958.

I just finished reading the Postscript, in which Rosenberg, a refugee from Nazi Germany who emigrated to the United States in 1935, explains why he pursued his research topic.

How was it possible that one of the great European nations, which in the course of its history had contributed so much to the common treasures of Western civilization, exhibited such recklessness in the crucial years of decision? How, above all, was it possible that so many of “the better people” – the kind of experienced, educated and well-mannered people who for generations sat in the driver’s seat – revealed such an astounding lack of discrimination and of plain common sense by giving aid and comfort to a screeching gang of fraudulent political gamblers? How was it possible that so many gentlemen, and among them some of the sensitive, high-spirited and selfless, for a long time sought to promote nationalist conservatism by totalitarian methods and, consequently, rallied to the support of the hideous apocalyptic horsemen who had appeared on the horizon? How was it possible that so many in responsible positions came to rub their hands gleefully at the wreck of the Weimar Republic? How could it happen that they anticipated salvation from the leveling tendencies of industrial democracy by delivering themselves to the monstrous new barbarians, skilled mainly in the arts of bending and cracking heads?

How, indeed?