To say it in advance: This book is a great success, far more than a continuation of titles such as Florian Illies' “1913” or Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's “1926”, which combines historical key data with cultural upheavals, a synchronous dimension of history visible made: non-simultaneity is the right word for it. In his essay on Laocoon, Lessing speaks of the most fertile moment that the artist must choose in order to make an event, including its history and aftermath, visible. “February 1933”, which Uwe Wittstock documents with meticulous attention to detail in his book, was and is such a fruitful moment - more precisely: a terrible moment.
A comparison with pictures and reports from Kabul during the invasion of the Taliban is not too far-fetched: After Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor, the SA, SS and the police, which Göring brought into line, hunted down Social Democrats, Communists, Jews and unpopular intellectuals. Like the Taliban in house-to-house raids, they broke into apartments, smashed the furniture, confiscated or burned manuscripts and books, as in the left-wing artists' colony on Laubenheimer Platz, where Berlin passers-by actively participated in attacks. Those admitted to Columbiahaus and other improvised torture prisons could be lucky if they got away with their lives. Similar to the evacuation of Kabul airport, the Anhalter Bahnhofwhere Heinrich Mann and other luminaries of art and literature hid in the crowd, disguised as travelers with umbrellas and light luggage, to escape to Vienna, Prague or Paris. Many of them never returned from emigration or only after a lengthy odyssey to Germany.
Destroy and exterminate, nothing more
Uwe Wittstock was well advised to concentrate on the fate of artists and writers whose ordeal began in 1933 and did not end in the "box seat of exile", as claimed by bad speakers: Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin attended the Escape from the Nazis life - just to name these names.
No less shocking is the record of acts of violence and murders, which not only fell victim to Social Democrats and Communists, but also SA people and bystanders, so that one can speak of a Bartholomew Night from which Germany only awoke in 1945.
In February 1933, a few weeks were enough to overturn the constitution, abolish freedom of expression and assembly and replace the democratic constitutional state with a terror regime that was hard to beat in terms of human contempt. Hermann Göring, at that time the Prussian Minister of the Interior, disclosed the goals and methods of Nazi rule with cynical brutality: “My measures will not be offended by any legal concerns. Here I have no justice to do, here I only have to destroy and exterminate, nothing more! "