In 1941 the American journalist Dorothy Thompson published an essay in Harper’s Magazine called “Who Goes Nazi?” in which she imagines herself looking around a gathering of her acquaintances and privately asking that question.
Thompson was an influential journalist of her time (she had met and interviewed Hitler and been deported from Germany) but the essay is very dated now. It was published in August 1941 and the references to Jews may grate on the modern reader given that we know the first massacres of the Holocaust were happening in eastern Europe around that time. So may Thompson’s assumptions about the “American spirit” and the lack of any acknowledgement of American racism, other than anti-Semitism.
But with those caveats, the exercise she proposes is a one that, unfortunately, has become a lot more relevant than it would have been even a few years ago.
In the essay, Thompson identifies various types of people in her social circle who would be willing to join the Nazis, as well as some other types who would absolutely not.
Mr B is a wealthy member of the American upper classes with all the attributes they value in a man: he’s rich, popular, successful in business and sport and married to a society belle.
Thompson observes that Mr B: “has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class-no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful.”
So if Nazism were to succeed in America, Mr B would go Nazi to be part of its success.
Then there is Mr C, a brilliant and bitter intellectual from a poor background who has risen to high positions through hard work, but at the cost of being patronised by the likes of Mr B who exploit his talents without ever acknowledging him or his wife as social equals.
Mr C longs for a position of power over others that would protect him from ever being humiliated again. He is not a born Nazi but would rise high in a Nazi regime, Thompson says, because he is clever and ruthless.
Mr D, on the other hand, is a born Nazi. A spoilt and selfish misogynist who loves sensation and attention, he would be drawn to Nazism by the opportunity to strut around in a fancy uniform and lord it over others.
Mrs E, says Thompson, would go Nazi for different reasons. She’s the doting wife of an arrogant man who treats her dreadfully and “will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.”
Nowadays we would probably see this as a case of coercive control by the husband rather than a “masochistic” woman. More likely to feature in a modern version of the game would be a confident, ambitious woman who has made her own way up through the male-dominated world of the Far Right. It’s easy to think of several of these in the US and Europe.
Mr G is a brilliant thinker who is incapable of fixed intellectual loyalties and loves to play the contrarian. He will reluctantly throw in with the Nazis and be executed in a purge.
The final character in Thompson’s room who’d go Nazi is Mr L, a trade union leader who has become powerful by pitching himself as a man of the people and enjoys an opulent lifestyle which he pays for by appropriating the funds of his members.
Mr L “agrees with the very largest and most powerful industrialists in the country that it is the business of the strong to boss the weak.” He is the “strongest natural-born Nazi in this room”, with an infallible instinct for power. If Nazism were to arrive in America, Mr B would use Mr L as a political tool while secretly hating and despising him.
There are two Jewish characters in this imaginary room. One is a rich and conservative industrialist who plays down the dangers of Nazism. The second is a writer who automatically aligns himself with the anti-Nazis in the room. The first of these examples is an uneasy read nowadays, not because such men could never have existed but because we know what happened to those of them who fell under the power of the Nazis.
After portraying various people in the room who would never be drawn to Nazism, Thompson concludes that: “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.” Those who do are the resentful and the thwarted, the scared, success-hunters and thugs who love power.
She ends: “It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.”
It’s easy to play nowadays, unfortunately, and you don’t even have to go to a party: it’s enough just to follow what appears daily online. When I reread the essay I found that my imagination was adjusting some of the characters to fit them to certain public figures in the UK.
The social context may be very different and mainstream assumptions about human psychology have changed since 1941, but it’s pretty clear that the private mental wardrobes of some influential people in our societies, from politics to the media to the senior ranks of business, contain a well-ironed brown shirt.
Puck 