One summer day, years ago, I chanced upon the diary of a German soldier from the early 1940s in a flea market in New York City. It was buried among a bunch of other random items — hat blocks, Matchbox cars, an Underwood typewriter. There was so much I might have missed it, but I am Jewish; books adorned with eagles perched on swastikas tend to catch my eye.
It was a small notebook, filled with German writing. Though I don’t speak German, I was able to make out the months — Februar, März, April — and the year. The black-and-white photographs of the soldier’s life, tucked into the yellowing pages, were what interested me most: a photo of the beaming young diarist in his sharp new uniform, a rifle slung over his shoulder; one with his fellow soldiers in a countryside somewhere on what appeared to be a pleasurable weekend furlough of some kind, their field caps tipped back upon their heads; others featured him with what I assumed to be his family — an older couple, perhaps his parents, and a group who might have been siblings, gathered at a festive dinner. There were a number of him posed beside a pretty young woman I assumed to be his wife or girlfriend.
Young love.
To me, what was most notable was what I didn’t find: There were no photos of death camps, or mass graves, or starving prisoners. Instead, there was one of him with his parents in front of their house. Proud.
I shook my head at what I saw as this man’s almost pathological ability to compartmentalize the madness he likely played a role in and the quaint, pastoral life he led at the same time. It reminded me of something I was told as a child.
“How could people do such things?” I often asked, around age 9 or 10.
That’s Germans, I was told by my parents and teachers. They were evil. It was in their blood. The only good German is a dead German, they would say.
Most of my grandparents’ families were murdered in the Holocaust. And so in my upbringing, there were no “ordinary” Germans, to borrow a phrase from the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning. They were all hateful, fascist murderers — fools who could be led by a fearmonger to commit atrocities he claimed were necessary and good. How the Germans came to be this way, no one could say. One thing was certain, though: We, thank goodness, were not like them.
We were Americans.
We weren’t so easily fooled.
We were different.
I recalled that certainty in recent days, reading about the murder of Renee Nicole Good. I read about how the Trump administration quickly labeled her a terrorist. About how federal officials blocked the investigation by the state of Minnesota. About how our leaders accused her of trying to ram an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent when the videos of the incident seemed to clearly show otherwise. “Who are you going to believe,” asked Chico Marx, “me or your own eyes?” I suppose, in the eyes of this administration, that makes me a Marxist now.
None of this surprised me. After all, the shooting was just one day after the administration published a propaganda website saying the Jan. 6 insurrection was the fault of the Democrats and the Capitol Police.
I am a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, proudly so, and don’t trust any state, religious or corporate entity. So I knew that a lie told enough becomes the truth, that terror is a government’s method of control, that fear is its greatest motivator.
But that’s the Trump administration, I reassured myself, not the American people.
Americans aren’t so easily fooled.
Americans are different.
Alas, my comfort was short-lived, as I made the mistake, then, of sinking into social media. There I encountered ordinary Americans who believed the Trump administration without question. Ordinary Americans who blamed Ms. Good, who repeated the things they learned from the government, like that she was a paid agitator, a far-left radical who got what she deserved. Ordinary Americans who said the armed agent who killed an apparently unarmed woman was a hero, defending his nation from undesirables. Ordinary Americans who, soon enough, blamed the whole thing on Democrats, antifa, Gov. Tim Walz, Jews, women and gays.
Past or present, it’s not the leaders who disappoint me. It’s the led.
Which brings me back to that flea market find, to that old diary I didn’t buy. I was a young, broke writer at the time. I opted to spend what money I had on the old typewriter.
But I miss those days.
I miss the comfort of believing Germans were different.
I miss believing that we Americans could never be led by a fearmonger to commit atrocities he claimed were necessary and good.
I miss believing we are not like them.
I am forced to wonder, now, if that long-ago German diarist wasn’t evil after all. If he had been led to believe by a terrorizing state that what he was doing was good. That he was defending his nation from undesirables. That he was a hero.
And I wonder if someday, at some distant flea market, a young man will chance upon an old iPhone from 2026, and scrolling through it — through pics of the owner’s friends, vacations, festive dinners — will wonder how this unbothered American went about his normal life as the country was descending into fear-induced psychosis at the hands of an autocrat.
“Thank goodness,” he will comfort himself, “we’re not like them.”
Shalom Auslander writes the Substack newsletter The Fetal Position. His latest book is “Feh: A Memoir.”
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