Never Again Is Now

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 156

How in the world did people become Nazis? How could it have happened? These are questions we grew up with and, maybe, always hoped against hope we wouldn’t be able to answer. There’s a comfort in them remaining mysterious, but in that comfort we’re vulnerable. How can we possibly make good on “Never Again” if we do not know how it happened? Sadly, today we’re threatened with the same menace. Sadly, today, we’re learning not how it could have happened, but exactly how it happened because it’s happening again around us. More and more of us know, with our stomachs sunken, that it is now time to speak up, but that raises another question: how? We don’t even know how it happened, much less what could have stopped it. Enter Melita Maschmann, former Nazi, and her admirable book (at least so far as I’ve read!), Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (1964). In this book, written in the form of a long letter to her teenage best friend, who was Jewish, she endeavors to explain how it could have happened to a good, respectable, well-off, conservative girl like her who went on to join the Hitler Youth and become a Nazi. She wrote it so we can know how it happened. She wrote it because “Never Again” means never. She wrote it in case “Never Again” ever again becomes now. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay introduces the book and reads a few poignant excerpts with ominous parallels to today. Join him, just in case “Never Again” really is now.

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