Sleepwalking
Patrick Leigh Fermor's experiences in 1930s Germany remind us how quickly a nation can normalize dangerous ideas.
“Appalling things had happened since Hitler had come into power ten months earlier; but the range of horror was not yet fully unfolded. In the country the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence. Occasionally it rose to fanaticism. Often when nobody was in earshot, it found utterance in pessimism, distrust and foreboding, and sometimes in shame and fear but only in private.” – Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (1977)
As 1933 turned to 1934, British writer Patrick Leigh Fermor was passing through Germany in the early stages of a long walk across the breadth of Europe. When he began writing about his journey in the autobiographical A Time of Gifts, four decades had passed. By then, Leigh Fermor’s reputation as a Second World War hero was well-established, boosted by a 1957 Hollywood movie glorifying his role in the liberation of Crete.
But as he wrote about his much younger self, Leigh Fermor was careful to emphasize his political naivety at the time of his walk, when he had been only 19 years old, fresh out of boarding school, and equipped with only vague left-leaning political views. “This is a long rigamarole,” he wrote, “but it does show how ill-prepared I was for any form of political arguments. In this respect, I might have been sleep-walking.”
Germany in the 1930s, of course, was not a place where politics was easy to ignore. Many of the working-class Germans that Leigh Fermor met in public places were supporters of the Nazi party, though some were more eager than others to discuss the topic with a foreigner. Deep political discussions were complicated by Leigh Fermor’s intermediate German language skills: although he proved to be a fast-learning polyglot, he was still early in his journey. But he understood more than enough to notice recurring patterns. In A Time of Gifts he wrote:
Those Bavarian inn conversations reflected opinions which ran from the total conviction of party-members to the total opposition of their opponents and victims; with the difference that the first were loud and voluble while the second remained either silent or non-committal until they were alone with a single interlocutor.
Traveling through Germany, Leigh Fermor became something of a one-man fact checker, quickly learning it was best to have ready responses to his hosts’ inevitable political questions. He wrote:
When they asked, and they always did, what the English thought of National Socialism, I would stick repetitively to three main objections: the burning of the books, of which lurid photographs had filled the newspapers; the concentration camps which had been set up a few months before; and the persecution of the Jews.
Leigh Fermor admitted that his responses were not particularly effective, and he described the resulting debates as “too familiar for repetition”. I am reminded of today’s online discussion forums where the left and right talk past each other, each firmly entrenched in their own echo chamber. In those environments, where like minds cluster, one person can rarely change minds with external facts or ideas.
In Germany, Leigh Fermor was shocked by how fast the population had apparently embraced Nazi ideology, writing:
In a workmen’s bar late at night I made friends with several factory hands in overalls who had come off a late shift. They were about my age, and one of them, an amusing, clownish character, said: why didn’t I doss down on his brother’s camp bed at his place? When we climbed the ladder to his attic, the room turned out to be a shrine of Hilteriana. The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His S.A. uniform hung neatly ironed on a hanger.1
It turned out, all this paraphernalia was new:
‘Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite! … You should have seen me! Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us.’
His conversion from far left to far right had been swift:
‘Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!’ He snapped his fingers in the air. ‘And here I am!’
If there was any hope that this young man was an aberration–perhaps one misguided geek who’d fallen down the wrong rabbit hole–it was quickly shattered:
What about all his old pals, I asked. ‘They changed too!–all those chaps in the bar. Every single one! They’re all in the S.A. now’ Had a lot of people done the same, then? A lot? His eyes opened wide. ‘Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!’
Even this newly minted Brownshirt himself expressed surprise at how quickly the German people’s political views had changed. The usual explanations are well worn. Germany’s economy, dour since the country’s First World War defeat, worsened in the early 1930s, as it did almost everywhere during the Great Depression. Hitler, initially elected with a minority government in 1933, exploited the burning of the Reichstag parliament to ban opposition parties, then tightened his grip on power until internal resistance was impossible.
But this does not satisfactorily explain why the masses embraced Nazism so completely, and so quickly. Hitler’s notorious rallies played a part: for someone standing elbow-to-elbow in a crowd of thousands, with everyone enthusiastically repeating the same slogans, it must have been difficult to imagine that those slogans could be completely misguided. But crucially, after 1933 the Nazis also took control of Germany’s radio stations and newspapers, repurposed the printing presses of the now-defunct opposition parties, and coerced all remaining publications to censor what they wrote. From then on, there were no dissenting voices inside Germany to counter their narratives.
This media control enabled Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to craft a consistent message, one that assured the German people that the Nazis alone could solve Germany’s problems and restore the country to greatness. They also used that media control to scapegoat selected “others” as targets of blame for the nation’s challenges. Some former socialists and communists ended up as political prisoners in concentration camps, but many others, like the Brownshirt youth Leigh Fermor met, converted to the Nazi cause with great enthusiasm. Historian Konrad Heiden later branded these converts Beefsteak Nazis: brown on the outside (for the uniforms of the SA) and red on the inside (for their communist origins).2
Today, this transformation feels all too familiar. In the United States, many people have been astonished to see the opposition figures who decried Donald Trump as a dictator-in-waiting during the 2024 election campaign fall silent after his victory, even as Trump proceeds with a barrage of executive orders and bureaucratic purges that look very dictatorial indeed. When a single Democratic congressman mustered the courage to protest a Trump address to congress, ten other Democrats later voted to censure him. Corporations that recently embraced diversity and social change are already abandoning these pledges, scrubbing evidence of their previous social stances from their websites. Republican politicians have deleted old social media posts critical of their now-president. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, has broken with his party regarding some aspects of transgender rights.
For many Americans, with varying motivations, the benefits of being on the winning side now clearly outweigh any supposed ethical justification for their political views. To a progressive, the speed of their opportunistic ideological flip-flop has been shocking and distressing.
As in 1930s Germany, the ruling party has been instructing the population about what ideas it finds acceptable, and what ideas it wants rejected. Modern politicians of all stripes—and especially Donald Trump—continue to hold political rallies. But it is the political right’s aggressive domination of social media, streaming news, online newspapers, podcasts, and generative AI that has created a powerful multi-pronged system for changing opinions and rallying their supporters. The right-leaning tech billionaires who own and operate many of these platforms are no longer shy about tweaking algorithms to amplify the political messaging they prefer, while simultaneously censoring and sidelining dissenting voices.
The Overton Window—a concept introduced in the 1990s to describe the range of ideas considered acceptable for discussion—is oscillating faster. It took decades for progressives to shift public support of same-sex marriage from a radical fringe position into the mainstream. But suddenly, established norms on free trade, the rule of law, immigration, expansionist nationalism, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and racial equality are being challenged anew. In 2025, what began as a preposterously unthinkable idea—the annexation of Canada by the United States—became a subject of popular discussion in a matter of weeks. Blatant lies, including the fiction that Canada is rife with fentanyl labs run by Mexican drug cartels, have already become dogma for some far-right Republicans.
Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler, and the United States today is not 1930s Germany. But the lessons Patrick Leigh Fermor learned during his pre-war travels remain applicable. Corrosive ideas, once they become established and well-propagated, can be impossible to reverse with facts or logical reasoning alone. Only a few years after Leigh Fermor finished his walk, he was fighting soldiers willing to kill and die for the same ideas he had calmly but futilely debated in festive Bavarian beer halls.
When the Allies defeated Hitler, they pushed the ideology of Nazism out of the Overton Window for at least 80 years, but only after the loss of tens of millions of lives. Today, new technologies are manipulating public opinion to drag old and ugly ideas back into popular consideration. When powerful voices do not immediately condemn them, these ideas risk being normalized. In the US, unfortunately, the response from most Democrats since the election of Donald Trump has been only silence, acquiescence, or equivocation. Like Leigh Fermor in 1934, Americans may be sleepwalking into a situation that is more dangerous than they realize.
References
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Faguy, A., & Drenon, B. (2025, March 6). Democrat Al Green censured over Trump speech disruption. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8v369gdjdo
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Heaton, R. (2025, February 11). What companies are rolling back DEI policies in 2025? WhatIs. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/What-companies-are-rolling-back-DEI-policies
Kaczynski, A. (2025, January 14). In deleted tweets, Trump’s incoming AI and crypto czar argued Trump Jan. 6 rhetoric not covered by First Amendment. KTVZ. https://ktvz.com/politics/cnn-us-politics/2025/01/14/in-deleted-tweets-trumps-incoming-ai-and-crypto-czar-argued-trump-jan-6-rhetoric-not-covered-by-first-amendment/
Kratz, J. (2019, June 26). Milestones on the Road to Marriage Equality. Pieces of History. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2019/06/26/milestones-on-the-road-to-marriage-equality/
Leigh Fermor, P. (2013). A Time of Gifts. John Murray. (Original work published 1977).
The Overton Window. (n.d.). Mackinac Center. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow
Powell, M., & Pressburger, E. (Directors). (n.d.). Ill Met by Moonlight. The Rank Organisation, Vega Film Productions. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049357/
The Press in the Third Reich. (n.d.). In Holocaust Encylopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-press-in-the-third-reich
Ronchini, Maria-Anita. (n.d.). What Was the Sturmabteilung? TheCollector. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://www.thecollector.com/what-was-the-sturmabteillung/
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The SA or Sturmabteilung (also known as Brownshirts due to the colour of their uniforms) were a prominent Nazi paramilitary organization during the early years of the regime. They provided security for the party and engaged in acts of violence to intimidate opponents.
Some have referenced the “Beefsteak Nazi” phenomenon as part of a questionable effort to reframe Nazism as a left-wing ideology, but political scientists are very clear: Nazism was a far-right fascist ideology. Those who remained socialists and communists in Nazi Germany were declared enemies and persecuted.
So many echoes of our current time. Great piece, Gary!