When I convinced Mallory that I needed to spend a summer in Germany to improve my German, the better to read German philosophers, her mother wasn’t thrilled, but her grandmother invited her into her apartment for tea and spoke to her in German. Mallory knew that she spoke Yiddish, Polish (she was from Poland), French and Flemish (because of living in Belgium), Russian (required by Russian authorities in Poland), Spanish (from living in Ecuador after escaping the Nazis), and English (from moving to America). But apparently she knew some German as well. Mallory agreed to go with me to Germany if we would visit a concentration camp memorial, which I would have done anyway.

What we experienced in Germany in the summer of 1978 ended up furthering my understanding of the Holocaust. In fact, it confirmed Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil. In her reports on Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker in 1963 (later published as a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem), Arendt famously argued that Eichmann was not actively evil like Hitler, that he was instead a follower. He got meaning from belonging to something and being told what to do. Ergo his defense that he was only following orders. What we saw in 1978 was something of that same culture, even among left-wing university students who believed that Hitler had nothing to do with them. I remember walking the streets of Heidelberg with a German friend one night after midnight. We came to an intersection and the light said don’t walk. There wasn’t a car running anywhere in town.  We, the Americans, looked both ways, and, seeing no cars, crossed the street.  The left-wing German dutifully waited for the light to tell her she could cross the street. We had a similar experience when my wife attended an international folk dancing group at the English Department building. The Englishman we were staying with, who taught at the University of Heidelberg, was the sponsor. He explained that, although the sponsor had to be present for students to be in the building after hours, he would be a bit late; so he warned us that the Hausmeister might try to throw us out. Since the sponsor wasn’t there when we started, sure enough the Hausmeister told us we all had to leave. The German students dutifully lined up and started to march toward the door. The only ones who argued were the three Americans. A young American with impeccable German led the resistance. We had just arrived so our German, unfortunately, was not impeccable, but we offered as much moral support as we could.

All humans have a tendency to go along with the crowd in order to belong, including Americans, as recent political developments demonstrate. But from what we saw ourselves, the Germans have a special penchant for going along. A professor of Russian and American literature in Heidelberg told us that, unlike Americans, Germans have no folk heroes who stand up to the crowd. His example for Americans was High Noon, which got a lot of attention in Germany when it came out in 1952. There’s a good side to people wanting to belong.  If there’s a good idea, they go along, whereas in our individualist culture, no matter how good the idea, someone will say, hell no, I won’t go. But, as Arendt so brilliantly explored, there’s a bad side. Reasonable loyalty is a good thing, but unthinking loyalty is dangerous.

My stories of German compliance take place in Germany of 1978, and I’m sure there have been changes. One of the strongest European supporters of Israel in 2026 is Germany, and the steps they took after the war, initially under the guidance of the Allied Forces, to make sure that anti-Semitism wouldn’t take hold again have been admirable. Ernst Wolfgang Orth, a philosophy professor who put us up for the month of August in his house in Trier, grew up in the rubble of Hitler’s Germany, and he saw the Americans as liberators. When a geology professor who bragged about his father-in-law’s Prussian dueling scars claimed that most Germans should not be blamed for going along with Hitler because they didn’t find out about the concentration camps until late in the process, Orth answered that that was no excuse. The Germans, he said, should have stood up to the Nazis as soon as they started to discriminate against the Jews, certainly by Kristallnacht in 1938. I don’t think we are on the way to concentration camps, but, as Orth so clearly saw, the time to stand up against growing anti-Semitism is long before that might happen.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)