A Golden Age of Tourism in the Shadow of Fascism | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations, No. 12

People often say travel is a matter of "seeing is believing." Is that really true? Why does travel hide more from us than it shows us — and why is the hidden part the more essential one?

A year has passed, and China's relationship with the world, society's relationship with the state, and the economy's relationship with our daily lives have all been swayed by large questions. In the shock of it, the voices of intellectuals have vanished, or been drowned in the noise, which only deepens our confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people of insight are what let us see the road ahead.

That is why our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations" sets out to introduce, as widely as we can, books we think are worth reading.

As in past years, every book that came within our view has been read by our editorial staff, who introduce it to readers in good faith.

We have also had the help of contributing writers, who are always ahead of the curve and see deeper. Our thanks to them.

This is the eighth piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and it looks at what foreign tourists felt and experienced when they traveled to Nazi Germany. The author, Xu Ben, is a professor of English at Saint Mary's College of California and an adjunct professor at Fudan University's Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences. He writes on public life, civic education, public cultural memory, and the building of civil society. His books include On What Grounds Do We Remember (《人以什么理由来记忆》), Public Life on the Road to Dignity (《通往尊严的公共生活》), Rule and Education (《统治与教育》), Luminous Dialogues (《明亮的对话》), and Reading Beyond the Classics (《经典之外的阅读》). He also edited The Returned Everyman (《复归的素人》), a collection of memoirs by his father, Xu Gansheng.

Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism, 1919–1945 (hereafter Travelers), the new book by the British historian and biographer Julia Boyd, came out in August 2018 and was widely praised in both Britain and the United States. The 1930s were the glorious years in which the Nazis rose to power and reached their peak, and they were also the years when foreign tourists, British and American above all, flocked to Germany. Germany had everything a traveler needed: the best roads, natural scenery like a painting, medieval towns full of charm, first-rate music and opera, the high culture of the Enlightenment shining alongside an avant-garde jazz-club culture, and every sort of hotel ball, hot spring, and nude bathing. And all of it was cheap. Even as foreign tourists enjoyed it, most of them saw nothing of the ominous things then taking shape in Nazi Germany: the suppression of civic and press freedom, antisemitic violence, one-party rule, totalitarian dictatorship, concentration camps, military expansion. This was not simply indifference or self-deception on their part, nor a deliberate stopping of ears and eyes. It was that tourism under Nazi rule presented a scene in which "normal life" and "party rule" existed side by side, apparently at peace with each other. Daily life in Hitler's Germany was Nazified through and through, with the dictatorship penetrating and controlling every corner of society and culture — yet the tourism offered to foreigners was carefully staged as an idyll of normalcy. Because that surface "normalcy" was woven together with an underlying "party rule," foreign tourists easily mistook a party-ruled Germany for a normal one. People often say travel is a matter of "seeing is believing." Is that really true? Why does travel hide more from us than it shows us — and why is the hidden part the more essential one? That is the question to think about while reading Travelers.

I. The Murky Weimar Years

Travelers runs to 21 chapters, which fall into three parts and together form a short history of Nazism. The first part is the opening five chapters, covering 1919, just after the First World War ended, to early 1933, when the Nazis took power. The second part is the next 14 chapters, from 1933 to Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The third part is the final two chapters, the Nazis' last days from 1940 to 1945. The second part takes up two-thirds of the book and is plainly its center of gravity. The question Boyd asks in Travelers is this: over those decades, and especially in the Nazi golden age of the 1930s, what did foreign tourists see in Germany? And how did they understand and explain what they saw and heard? If the answer to the first question has value as historical record, then thinking about the second may yield the hindsight we ourselves ought to have today. That hindsight is the lesson of history.

Boyd draws on a great many little-known diaries, letters, and other written records left by foreign visitors to reconstruct what people saw, heard, thought, and felt at the time. A good number of these visitors were famous: the inventor and explorer Charles Lindbergh, the writers Samuel Beckett and W. E. B. Du Bois, the British statesman David Lloyd George. Among them were also veterans of the First World War, foreign students, academics, journalists, artists, and Olympic athletes. But most were ordinary people. Their backgrounds differed widely. Some came to Germany for work, some for unhurried leisure, some for a quick look around. Their varied and sometimes contradictory impressions and opinions make up a rich, mottled picture of how foreigners observed and understood Nazi Germany, and give us an unusual vantage point on the Nazi rise to power.

The impressions foreign tourists formed in the first part of the book can be summed up in one phrase: peering at flowers through fog. From 1919 to 1923, Germany was building new institutions and facing crises at home and abroad after its defeat in the war. For postwar Germany, the shift from empire to republic was a chaotic, uncertain process. Stability, peace, and the recovery of national dignity were what the people wanted, but how to get there was an open question, and that set off fierce political struggle. It was in exactly these conditions that Hitler's National Socialist party — the Nazis — was born, and the rise, growth, and eventual power of that party became the root of Germany's later catastrophe.

The first people to send home their impressions of Weimar Germany were the American soldiers who arrived with the occupying army. In 1919, defeated Germany was a depressed, run-down, hopeless place. Yet the American soldiers came away with a rather good impression of the enemy country — better, in fact, than their impression of their ally France. German towns struck them as cleaner than French ones, and the people as harder-working and more honest. They were struck too by how simple the Germans were: "The longer you live in Germany, the more the Germans amaze you — they are so simple (sometimes pitifully naive, sometimes downright foolish) and so friendly."

In January 1923, France and Belgium used Germany's failure to pay reparations as a pretext and sent troops to occupy the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland — a blow Germany could barely absorb. Germany lost the Ruhr because it could not pay its war reparations, and the huge sum France insisted on was in fact beyond what Germany could manage. In 1923 Germany owed the Allies 660 million pounds sterling (eight zeros), the equivalent of £28 billion in 2013 (eight zeros). Many people in Britain and America thought this was not only unjust but would bring serious political consequences: if the German economy collapsed, the ones to gain would surely be the Communists, backed by the Soviet Union.

Worse, the troops France stationed in the Ruhr included Black soldiers recruited in Africa. Stewart Roddie, a British member of the Allied military control commission, visited Friedrichshof and found "the place overrun with Black troops." He was angry about it. Racism still ran strong in the 1920s, and to Westerners of the day, putting "monkeys in uniform" in charge of civilized white Germans was a calculated humiliation. The Germans felt humiliated, and even the British and Americans objected, saying France should not treat the Germans that way.

One woman visiting Wiesbaden watched African soldiers parade by torchlight and found it terrifying. A French spectator beside her said this was a common sight: the French wanted to remind the Germans who had won the war. She wrote, "I shall never forget the expression on the faces of the silent Germans who stood watching the parade."

In 1924, what tourists saw was a Germany that combined economic ruin, political chaos, and cultural flowering in one strange mixture; they did not know what to make of the country. The inflation and currency collapse shocked them. One woman wrote home that two pounds sterling bought 200,000 marks — "a bundle of notes too heavy to carry." A British trade unionist found the Communist Party recruiting Germans between the ages of 15 and 50 in preparation for the election, and Berlin with "at least 15 parties or factions actively campaigning." At the same time, he found that Germans loved music to the point of obsession. Another tourist wrote, "At this moment, music has become the finest and deepest form of German expression."

In this defeated, humiliated Germany it was not only music but the whole culture that flourished — what came to be called Weimar culture. "Weimar culture" was not one distinct republican form but a collective name for the run of cultural phenomena that appeared during the Weimar Republic. At bottom it was a plural culture: it reflected how much Germany then tolerated in the way of creative work, and it also carried the range of feelings Germans had as they faced violent social change.

One visitor wrote in a diary, "Berlin is an interesting city, … life is rich but very expensive. Interesting people, three subsidized operas every night, packed houses. The theater is excellent, the films are also very good. I saw two Bolshevik films — first-rate photography, second-rate propaganda." It was not only Berlin; other cities were the same. The theater in Dresden staged five operas by Richard Strauss, all among the best in Europe. On April 12, 1929, it rearranged its scheduled program for the visit of Yehudi Menuhin, the 12-year-old British violin prodigy. That night he played violin concertos by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and held the whole house spellbound.

A week earlier Menuhin had played in Berlin, and Einstein, the famous director Max Reinhardt, and every poet and musician in the city came. The performance was an enormous success, and afterward Einstein, in tears, told Menuhin, "My dear child, no one has given me a lesson like the one you gave me tonight in years." Menuhin was Jewish, and at that very moment Hitler was already shouting in Germany that the Jews should be killed.

The rise of Hitler and the Nazis happened while almost no one was paying attention. Before Hitler launched the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, few people knew who he was. In 1922, Truman Smith, an assistant military attaché at the American embassy, was told to write a report on a party called the "National Socialist Party" (the Nazis), so he got in touch with it. He was first invited to watch Hitler review the "Hundred-Man Companies" (Hundertschaften), and later wrote that it was "a startling sight — 1,200 of the most powerfully built men I have ever seen marching in review before Hitler, carrying the flags of the old empire. … Hitler shouted 'Kill the Jews' and so on. The crowd cheered wildly — I had never seen anything like it in my life." A few days later Hitler received him. The reception room was "like the bedroom of a run-down New York apartment, lifeless, cold and cheerless, almost unbelievably so." Smith later regretted that he had never imagined Hitler would become what he became, and that he had not used the chance to study the man's character and habits at close range. As late as 1923, the French war ministry had not heard of Hitler, and had to ask the British who exactly this hater was who denounced everything, France included.

The Nazi Party grew out of the German Workers' Party, founded in January 1919 as a workers' political organization that meant to build a proletarian society. In September, Hitler joined, and the organization changed beyond recognition. He rebuilt it institutionally; in February 1920 the name became the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party for short, with a charter Hitler drafted himself. From the summer of 1921 the party adopted the "leader principle," the beginning of one-man rule inside it. During this period Hitler organized demobilized soldiers and volunteer corps members into the "Storm Troopers," who wore brown uniforms and were known as the Brownshirts. By November 1923, party membership had grown from 55 to 55,000, drawing in a good many people from the lower and middle classes.

In November 1923, Hitler and his followers launched an uprising in Munich. It failed, and Hitler and several other Nazi leaders were arrested. The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch was the turning point in the party's development. People at the time seemed unsure what to make of it — "few doubted that this was the end of Hitler's political career." But the next day Britain's Manchester Guardian reported: "Hitler is the hero of the hour. Many of today's morning papers give his defense speech extensive multi-column coverage, and it made a deep impression." Hitler became the focus of attention in Germany overnight: "he passionately denounced the Weimar government, the Jews, and the Treaty of Versailles, and struck a chord with many Germans." The trial was a public-relations victory for him, though he was still sentenced to nine months. In prison he wrote Mein Kampf, setting out the Nazi Party's political program, and also decided to change tactics and take the path of legal struggle. After his release he put these ideas into practice fast, and became the party's unchallenged leader. He was 34.

II. From Peering Through Fog to Turning a Blind Eye

In the years when the Nazis had not yet taken power but were already rising, Hitler's fierce antisemitism met with more understanding than condemnation. The economist John Maynard Keynes deeply respected his Jewish friends Einstein and the banker Carl Melchior, yet after a visit to Berlin he wrote: "If I lived there, I too would become an antisemite. Because the poor, slow, heavy-footed Prussian simply cannot keep up with those alien Jews. They are not sprites but servants of the devil, with horns on their heads, sharp teeth, and greasy tails." Seeing German civilization "despoiled by this pack of rich, cunning, filthy Jews," he said, was extremely unpleasant.

The British writer and journalist Cicely Hamilton, a thoughtful traveler, held that Hitler's antisemitism was no more than ordinary envy and nothing to make a fuss about: "A people who have suffered greatly and are dirt poor, seeing another race grow rich beyond measure on the ruins of their own wealth, will naturally feel envy, gnashing their teeth as though every member of that race had struck it rich." The British writer Wyndham Lewis went further: when the British and Americans made an issue of antisemitism, he argued, they were merely "seizing on a pretext" — it should not be an issue at all.

In the 1930 Reichstag election the Nazi Party won 130 seats and became the second-largest party. Lord Rothermere, the British press baron, happened to be in Munich, and was delighted by the Nazi success; the British, he thought, should recognize what fascism contributed to Europe, especially against the Communists. But Sir Horace Rumbold, British ambassador in Berlin from 1928 to 1933, did not rate the Nazis highly in his reports to King George V. He described uniformed Nazi delegates walking into parliament as "most unedifying, most childish," then added, "yet they have certainly awakened a new spirit in the country, an expression of the desire to 'go forward.'" In a letter to his mother, Rumbold sneered at the delegates' "play-acting" and also wrote, "they will soon be at each other's throats with the Communists. The two parties abuse and insult each other in parliament — both are extremely childish and unedifying." To the British, everything happening in Germany was unfamiliar, hard to understand and hard to explain. They only hoped fascism could hold back the Communists they feared; as for what fascism itself would bring the world, they did not know and had no way of knowing, which at the time was forgivable.

Before the Nazis took power, and even in the first few years after they had, neither the British nor the Americans could possibly have understood fascism and totalitarianism as we do today. Fascism lay outside their experience. The only thing they knew from experience was Stalin's Soviet Communism, which — through savage class struggle, party purges, labor camps, famine, and dictatorship — had become for Westerners the embodiment of modern barbarous tyranny. The British believed liberal democracy was no match for Communism, and that only a highly organized fascism could be its nemesis. That, to them, was what fascism contributed to Europe. The Western democracies appeased the Nazis, thinking they were fighting poison with poison, not knowing they were quenching thirst with poisoned wine — and they suffered badly for it in the Second World War, a fate they had largely brought on themselves. That lesson matters a great deal for anyone today guarding against fascism and totalitarianism alike.

In the 1932 Reichstag election the Nazis won 230 seats and became the largest party, though they still held only about a third of the seats and were not a majority. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor. When that cabinet was formed, German politics was not yet entirely in Hitler's hands. In January 1933, Hindenburg still watched this former corporal with suspicion. The Nazi Party still had to answer to other parties. Local political forces were not under central control, and the opposition could still stage a comeback. Even inside the party, the left wing was not to be taken lightly. To break out of these constraints as fast as he could, Hitler took a series of steps to transform Germany's political system at the root. History knows this change as "coordination" — that is, one-party rule. Until then, the institutions of Weimar Germany still had a chance to stop the Nazis from turning Germany into a dictatorial party-state. That chance vanished for good in a little over six months.

Establishing Nazi one-party rule was Hitler's first goal. To that end he began by stripping the left-wing parties of their legality. In late February 1933, using the Reichstag fire as a pretext, he pressed Hindenburg into signing the emergency decree "For the Protection of the People and the State," which abolished the basic rights the Weimar Constitution granted citizens and led to mass arrests of left-wing politicians. He also enlarged the government's powers, leaving parliament an empty shell. In March, after fresh Reichstag elections, he canceled the Communist Party's seats and forced through parliament the "Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich" — the Enabling Act — which handed the government legislative power. From that point the political achievements of Weimar democracy were extinguished. In July, the Social Democratic Party lost its representation in every institution, and all other parties were forced to dissolve themselves. Hitler promulgated the Law Against the Formation of New Parties, declaring the Nazi Party Germany's only legal party. Germany became a one-party dictatorship, plain and complete, and after that no institution and no political force remained that could stop the Nazis from doing whatever evil they liked.

By around 1936, Nazi malice and violence were increasingly on show to the world: anti-democratic one-party rule, the suppression and abolition of civil liberties, the ban on press and speech freedom, party-state indoctrination of the people, the jailing and abuse of political opponents, a terror maintained by heavy police repression, the open stripping of Jews' civil rights and German citizenship, the ban on marriage between Germans and Jews, the wrecking of their synagogues, and the wholesale seizure of their property. Even so, British and American tourists kept pouring into Germany — American tourists alone numbered close to 500,000 a year. The great majority held that tourism had nothing to do with politics, and so they kept their eyes half-shut to Nazi crimes and atrocities, and saw nothing.

To attract tourists, the Nazis spared nothing on propaganda. They treated foreign travel to Germany as an excellent chance to blunt outside criticism and blame, to make foreigners drop their suspicion and hostility toward fascism, and to leave them feeling Germany was a country worth being friendly with. Nazi Germany's tourism posters in the United States never used Nazi language, never mentioned the Nazi Party, and never showed the swastika (which became the official design of the German flag at the Nuremberg rally in September 1935); they used poetic, affecting language to describe Germany's captivating landscapes and cultural sights. One German advertisement from 1935 sold the low prices and high quality of German travel this way: "Rail fares cut by 60 percent, and (inflation-proof) 'Travel Marks' sold below the usual market rate — no worry about dollar devaluation on your German holiday. Take your holiday at German health resorts such as Baden-Baden, Nauheim, Wiesbaden, and Wildungen. Enjoy life to the fullest by the shimmering water. Here are beautiful woods, opera and music, golf and tennis, boating and swimming, dancing, happy hours at the casino, tea parties and garden parties at fine hotels, to suit every budget, from luxury hotels to quiet private houses with gardens. Amid flowers, sunshine, and music, build up your health or restore your strength by the water. Enjoy Germany's famous hot springs and their curative effects — healthy and happy, a joyful holiday without a care." A wonderful holiday indeed, and a bargain besides.

Most foreign tourists who went to Germany came away feeling Hitler's Germany was still a country of old-fashioned charm, beautiful country, and distinctive folk custom. To them, Nazi Germany was not the "Third Reich" but a lovely, enchanting land of scenery: women in dresses, blond boys and girls, unspoiled Gothic villages, warm and healthy-looking people. These were exactly the pleasing sights the tourists had paid to come and enjoy, sights that let them relax completely. As for the country's political darkness and social oppression, none of it was any business of theirs.

Even tourists who felt some discontent with Hitler's dictatorship tended to think that what was going on in front of them was Germany's own affair, and that it was fine so long as nothing of the kind happened at home. They praised Germany and hoped their own country would never be like it. A British officer named Crosfield, visiting Germany as a representative of First World War veterans, had a chance to meet Hitler. He described his impression this way: "Hitler is a man apart. He inspires in the Germans a single-minded devotion that has no equal. We had the honor of an hour and a half with him, most of it spent on our experiences in the First World War and the situation on the various fronts. … His directness, his sincerity, his fanatical devotion to his country left a deep impression on us; we felt he was genuinely working to avoid another world war."

But Crosfield did not think German politics would work in Britain. He disliked the way the Nazis crushed political dissent and banned all criticism. He did not accept the Nazi hierarchy in which the longer you had been in the party, the greater the "maximum privileges" you were owed. The Nazis claimed their anti-Jewish policy was aimed only at the "lowest-class Jews" who had poured into Germany after the First World War; Crosfield did not believe it, and like many British tourists he was no fool. But since the German government had entertained them so warmly, they naturally preferred not to press too hard on sensitive Nazi subjects and embarrass their hosts. Ordinary tourists, including those in Germany on business, all saw the fervent parades, rallies, and mass movements. They found them merely curious and interesting. And even when it left them uneasy or tired of it, "politeness" kept them quiet.

Most tourists believed it was improper and impolite to comment on a host country's internal affairs, let alone criticize its government's policies. More than a few, in fact, went home genuinely believing the Führer was a man who loved peace. The former British prime minister David Lloyd George called Hitler Germany's George Washington. Others saw Hitler as Germany's great savior and a sage, a man who had restored the shattered pride of the German people and given them a direction and a goal worth striving for: rebuilding Germany into a great nation worthy of its standing.

Boyd stresses again and again in Travelers that the Nazis were skilled propagandists, forever proclaiming that Germany alone was the main bulwark against the Russian-Jewish-Bolshevik threat. Receiving visitors, Hitler always managed to display his full personal charm, letting them see what a "polite, calm, and patient" leader he was. When ambassadors and dignitaries toured German labor camps, what they saw was the party-state "re-educating" people who had gone astray; they came away with a lasting impression of how healthy and contented the prisoners were, never realizing that the "prisoners" were guards in disguise.

Through the whole period between the two world wars, many foreigners believed Nazi propaganda. It reassured them, and gave them the false feeling that the world, thanks to Germany, was becoming safer and moving in a better direction. Such lies fit the visitors' own hopes and expectations. Out of that illusion and wishful thinking, the Germany they saw was marching forward again, its industry booming, everything orderly and advancing steadily. When some diplomats and nearly all foreign correspondents warned about Nazi demagogy, lies, and racism, many people took it for alarmism, or simply for bad judgment on the part of journalists and diplomats.

III. Tourists Who Were Fooled and Tourists Who Were Not

Travelers shows us the different experiences and different understandings of different tourists inside a totalitarian state. Some were completely taken in; others were not. Why the difference? Boyd does not answer directly, but we can try to answer for ourselves. The Nazis used tourism as advertising for their own record and achievements, and in doing so equated Nazi Germany with Germany, and Nazi culture with German culture. The party culture of the Nazis thus stood in for German culture, and Hitler's party-state stood in for Germany. Some tourists believed this lie, or this myth; others did not. Those in the second group traveled to Germany and loved Beethoven's music and Goethe's literature, but did not identify with Hitler's party culture, and knew exactly how evil it was.

Travelers opens its preface with an anecdote: "Imagine it is the summer of 1936, and you are on your honeymoon in Germany. The sun is shining, the people are friendly — life is good." Suddenly a Jewish woman comes toward you, "her face full of anxiety, gripping tightly the hand of a lame girl in thick-soled orthopedic shoes." Seeing the nationality sticker on your car, she asks you to take her daughter to England. You have lately heard disturbing rumors about German Jews, even talk of improper euthanasia — how do you meet this woman's desperate plea? "Do you turn and walk away in fear? Do you tell her, with sympathy but honestly, that there is really nothing you can do? Or do you take the child somewhere safe?"

This is one of the stories in Travelers, and its protagonist is a British woman, Eithe Byrne, along with her new husband. Eithe's father, Sir Joseph Byrne, was a brigadier general and at the time the governor of Kenya. The newlyweds were honeymooning in Germany, planning to drive from Germany to Marseille and then take a boat to Kenya. Someone advised them to fly a Union Jack on the car; instead they used a large "GB" sticker signaling Anglo-German friendship. All along the way, Germans who saw the "GB" were especially friendly to them.

When they reached Frankfurt, something unexpected happened. They had just parked the car when a Jewish woman with a child of about ten came up to them. The child was lame, one foot in a thick-soled shoe. The woman said she had seen the sticker on the car and knew they were English, and so she had come to beg them to take the child out of Germany. Traveling in Germany, this English couple had seen with their own eyes what Jews were suffering. They knew what fate awaited a lame Jewish girl there. Eithe decided on the spot: she would take the child. What Boyd wants readers to notice is not only Eithe's kindness but, still more, the trust this Jewish mother placed in her — "which shows just how desperate this mother must have been" — to hand her child to complete strangers from England.

Eithe and her husband went straight to the British consulate in Frankfurt, completed the necessary papers, took the girl with them, and later went on to Kenya. Under totalitarian rule this was only a lucky story; it could never be a moral model for real life. Eithe's family background let her get the documents done quickly. How many Jews could have such luck? And an ordinary tourist who wanted to help German Jews — what could they actually do? So all Boyd seems able to do is hint at the question: if you were traveling in a totalitarian country and ran into something like this, what would you do? It is not an easy question to answer.

People always travel to another place or another country carrying some preconception or expectation, and that largely decides what they choose to see, what they ignore, and how they understand and explain what they see. In cognitive psychology this is called framing. People always use a particular frame of understanding to make sense of their situation and the behavior tied to it. Tourism is itself a cognitive frame. Tourists, unlike journalists, spend money, time, and effort to go somewhere unfamiliar for pleasure, not to go looking for unpleasantness — so what they see with their own eyes tends to be the agreeable, cheerful view. Which means that so long as the trip goes smoothly and nothing upsetting happens, what they bring home is mostly a good impression.

Different travelers facing the same situation can reach different readings and different meanings, depending on their frame of understanding. Travel can change a person's frame, and it can also harden it. 1936 was a friendly period between Britain and Germany — the British prime minister even called Hitler Germany's Washington — and Eithe and her husband were traveling in what was, for them, a friendly country. But "Anglo-German friendship" was not the frame this newlywed couple used to understand the Jewish girl in front of them; or rather, what they had seen and heard in Germany had already changed the frame they arrived with. They knew about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and however warm their own reception in Germany, they knew Germany was a country that treated Jews with extraordinary cruelty and inhumanity. That is why they decided to take the Jewish girl.

Among the foreign travelers who went to Germany under Nazi rule there were others like the Byrnes, people with a sense of justice and compassion. They may not have understood one-party rule and totalitarianism as we understand them today, but they had sympathy, they thought with their own heads, and — more important — they did not shut their eyes to what was happening around them. So they saw what Nazi propaganda did not want them to see, and had thoughts the Nazis did not want them to have. Travelers mentions two Chinese of this kind. One is named Shi Min (transliterated), the other went on to become a famous professor at Peking University: Ji Xianlin. Both were students in Germany at the time.

Shi Min was a good observer and had some grasp of the position of German Jews. He wrote: "The Jews have no influence at all on the government. They have no power to protect themselves, but they are wealthy. The police treat them very roughly. They can only obediently submit to the 'Regulations on the Administration of Jews,' living like meek daughters-in-law." He thought there was no way to know how many people truly believed in Hitlerism, and he found the Germans' endless shouting of "Heil Hitler" tiresome. His impression of ordinary Germans was good. He found that "they are all very self-respecting, walking upright in the street, their noses (Germans all have small noses) in the air — they really do look like a superior race of the world." He also noted that the police often stopped Chinese students in the street to ask whether they were Japanese. When asked, the Chinese students always blushed and admitted awkwardly that they were Chinese, because the Germans "sympathize with the Chinese but look down on them."

Ji Xianlin went to Germany to study in 1935, thinking it an ideal country for scholarship, but he went at the wrong moment. Arriving in Göttingen, he found everything quite unlike what he had imagined. He had meant to take his doctorate in two years and go home; he stayed ten. He lived through the whole of the Second World War, and his diary holds many entries about hunger, air raids, and fear. In 1938 Germany invaded Austria, and he realized war could not be avoided and that he would not be able to get back to China. On April 10 that year, Germany held a national referendum on the annexation of Austria, which passed with 99.7 percent in favor. Ji Xianlin wrote in his diary that it was Germany's election day, that everyone had pinned on their badges and gone out into the street, and that black dogs (the SS) and yellow dogs (the SA) stood at the doors of the polling stations. The next day he wrote again: in the middle of the night he was jolted awake. Downstairs a radio was roaring — surely old Hitler or someone else screaming. Then came thunderous applause, cutting through the silence of the night like the shriek of a banshee. The Germans had all gone mad, he wrote; the day of Germany's collapse would not be far off.

The 1930s were the golden age of the Nazi regime, and many foreign visitors were captivated by it, full of admiration. They took Hitler's Germany for a bulwark against Communism: the enemy of their enemy became their friend. It was their own groundless wishes and credulity that kept them from seeing the catastrophic changes underway in Germany, and it was exactly this weakness that Nazi propaganda worked on. Boyd says that to see the Nazi evil beneath the surface of Germany's golden age took "a trained eye" — "to the untrained eye, the precise distinction between Nazism and Bolshevism was confusing. Hitler's suppression of every individual freedom, his tight control over every aspect of state and family life, his use of torture and of interrogations staged to make an example of people, his reliance on an all-powerful secret police and on vile propaganda — all of it was of a piece with Stalin's methods." Yet close as Nazi evil was to Stalinist evil, Germany had its own complicated totalitarian features, some of them plain to a sharp-eyed foreign tourist and some not. Germany had music, literature, art, education, philosophy, and other cultural achievements particularly good at drawing foreign visitors in, and that past diluted the fascist present. As Boyd stresses, too many people, holding a country's glorious past in awe, twisted out of shape their own moral disgust at its ugly present. For us today, that is a lesson worth thinking about.

Appendix: A Few Books on Related Subjects

Matthew Hughes and Chris Mann, Inside Hitler's Germany: Life under the Third Reich. Brassey's, 2000. [On leisure and off-duty life in everyday society under the Nazis]

John K. Walton, ed., Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict. Clevedon, 2005. [On domestic tourism under Nazi rule; an essay collection]

Kristin Semmens, Seeing Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. [On domestic tourism in the Nazi period; I have written a separate essay on this book]

Götz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Trans. Jefferson Chase. Metropolitan Books, 2007. [On how Hitler's rule made ordinary Germans feel they were getting something out of it; I have written a separate essay on this book]

Cover image: a still from the film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Source: Douban.