But thepressure to comply was unmistakable. Dürkefälden’s father-in-lawwas out every night one week in August 1933 because he had toattend meetings or risk losing his garden plot.

The ubiquitous fundraising made it possible for poorer peo-ple like the Dürkefäldens to participate more fully in public life:dinner or snacks were served at party events and entry fees lifted atsport competitions.

In addition, Goebbels tried towin over proletarian celebrities.

plac-ing leading functionaries of the regime in Germany’s factories.

Hitler registered to vote in the working-class Berlin precinct Siemensstadt, and enjoyed a great propagandabonanza when he spoke from the floor of the Siemens factory in anationally broadcast radio address on 10 November 1933.

Evenbefore Hitler spoke (8:00 p.m.), the choreography of May Day hadfastened the links between workers and the nation, between ma-chinists and machine-age dreams, between technical mastery andnational prowess

This is thesignificance of the Day of Potsdam: the images of unity were madeavailable for national consumption. The growth in radio ownershipespecially in 1933 and 1934 indicates how great the desire was topartake in Nazi spectacle, although the fact that radios remainedmuch less common in rural areas

Hitler repeatedly addressed workers as patriotswho had built Germany’s industrial strength and served honorablyin the war, but who had been unjustly oppressed by liberal eco-nomic orthodoxies. He employed a rhetoric of understanding andcompassion that recognized the perspective of the working class.Reviving the Nation • 47

“Something had to be done”—these were the simple, conclusive words voiced by a friend of KarlDürkefälden’s, jobless and a new convert to Nazism. His wordswere echoed by thousands of workers in the winter and springof 1933; though a socialist, Karl himself understood—“it’s truetoo,” he added parenthetically in his diary entry.

Dürkefälden wasalso able to describe something Elisabeth Gebensleben could not,namely, the story of how working-class conversions helped to cre-ate National Socialism.

When Karl pro-tested that local Nazis had arrested young workers in the neigh-borhood and seized a trade union building, his father retorted indialect, “Ordnung mot sein,” “You have to have order.”

Socialists around the worldhad celebrated May Day as a festival of labor since the 1880s; butin Germany they had failed to get the official recognition the Nazisnow offered. So strong were the hopes for national unity that theGerman Free Trade Unions welcomed the Nazi gesture and encour-aged members to participate in the celebrations.

the stunning media spectacle of thespeeches and celebrations of 1 May also contrasted with 2 May,when stormtroopers sealed off and took over the operations of thesocialist Free Trade Unions and incorporated them into what be-came the German Labor Front, an integral part of the National So-cialist apparatus.

The construction of the firstconcentration camps to media fanfare in March 1933, and therapid migration of the shorthand kz, for Konzentrationslager, intoordinary speech, left the public well aware that Nazis recognizedonly friends or foes;

the Nazis recognized only Volkskameraden, people’s com-rades, and Volksfeinde, enemies of the people, whom they sub-jected to deliberate and refined cruelties in a “willful transgressionof norms.

The state of permanent emer-gency declared by the National Socialists helps explain the tremen-dous efforts that they and their followers made to reconstruct thecollective body and the satisfaction they took in images of unityand solidarity. It also helps explain the violent exclusions they ac-cepted as part of the rebuilding process.

National Socialism offered acomprehensive vision of renewal, which many Germans found ap-pealing, but they combined it with the alarming specter of nationaldisintegration.

. It was the experience of conversion, which left peoplelike Dürkefälden and Ebermayer isolated, that was new and pro-vided the Third Reich with legitimacy and energy.

He repeatedly described Ger-many as a nation that had come home to itself. While Erich hatedthe Nazis, he loved the Third Reich.

the desire to be part ofnational unity was so strong that it pulled even an anti-Nazi such asErich into the new political community

“he doesn’t want to take part in any waragain,” Karl reported; “he has had enough.”

the prospect of a new war, a topic Germanfamilies discussed frequently in the years after 1933

restricting their rep-resentation in the professions to their proportion in the population:“that is one percent.” Moreover, she explained, “Jews want to rule,not serve.” The proof: “have you ever heard of a Jewish maid or aJewish laundry woman?”

In the national broadcast, selected party members spoke out thescripted reactions of “ordinary citizens,” who, appearing from allwalks of life, expressed support for Hitler.

The strong presence of the police,who tended to sympathize with the National Socialists, restrictedthe mobility of opponents, while Nazi toughs broke into SocialDemocratic or trade union offices and Nazi officials banned so-cialist newspapers.

Held on 21 March 1933 in Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche, whereFrederick the Great lay buried, the Day of Potsdam aligned Hit-ler with revered Prussian traditions, the Hohenzollern dynasty andthe founding of the German Reich some sixty years earlier, andthe heroic sacrifices of the Great War, represented by the “hero ofTannenberg,” President Paul von Hindenburg,

“I was overcomewith a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was amatter of life and death.” Maschmann herself was drawn to the“socialist tendency” of the Nazi movement, the idea of the people’scommunity,

the “August Days” of 1914, when thou-sands of Germans rallied in the streets to support the national causein time of war, revealed extraordinary emotional investment in thepromise of national unity.

The enduring popularity of the Nazis rested on the idea of theVolksgemeinschaft, or people’s community.

Germans converted to National Socialism out of fear and for thesake of appearances. Indeed, each diary refers to concentrationcamps, arrests, and other violence. Moreover, pressure to conformto Nazi expectations persisted, a fact that Karl’s father tried topoint out. Like Friedrich Kassler, Germans also converted becausethey were persuaded finally that Nazism represented a “new direc-tion,” which offered opportunities and to which citizens simply hadto adapt. In addition, there were countless people who mistrustedthe Nazis, misunderstood their racial precepts, and resented theirhostility to the churches, but nonetheless endorsed the “nationalrevolution” of January 1933 and the political reconciliation it ap-peared to achieve. In some ways, Erich Ebermayer falls into thiscategory. Finally, Germans converted because they were genuinelyattracted to the social and political vision of National Socialism andparticularly to the promise of the people’s community.

the officially organized boycott of Jewish businesses on 1April 1933 required a more considered answer. Elisabeth beganwith a concession, contrasting the “happiness” of the world-histor-ical events taking place in Germany with her “sympathy” for “thefate of the individual.”

ample, “is now a Nazi because of his job, but only for show.”Peine’s barber was in the SA, but Karl thought for “professionalreasons” only.

what he saw was an increas-ingly Nazified community in which neighbors now took notice ofKarl’s behavior and club members adjusted their own. What Karlwas resisting as he stood alongside his wife was the pressure to con-form, if only for the sake of appearances.

an Umwälzung, a sudden, unexpected overthrow, in which many ofhis neighbors underwent a rapid Umstellung, an adjustment or con-version, to Nazism.

sincediscussions about Jewish suffering frequently switched to the sub-ject of German suffering: “Versailles” had taken the “opportunitiesfor life” away from Germans, who were now “completely under-standably” fighting back on behalf of their “own sons.”