Hitler's rise to the tune of ordinary lives

By MARGIE THOMSON

They are not intended as companion volumes, but these two books seem destined to be together. Each is set around 1933 and concerned with ordinary German people in Hitler's rise to power.

Haffner's is near-miraculous. Written in 1939, it lay in its author's drawer until his death in 1999, when his son discovered it; he has now published it. On reading it you can only be relieved he did.

Haffner exiled himself from Germany to England in 1938, appalled at what was happening in his country. His chronicle assumes his own experience will have been echoed millions of times over, so his history is in the guise of personal memoir.

He begins at the outbreak of World War I when he was 7, and explains the heady excitement of those years, followed by the tumultuous ones of inflation and revolution.

The Weimar Republic offered the German people stability, but they rejected the offer, "having had their capacity for private happiness sapped by years of having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis by the public sphere".

He thinks deeply about people's options in the face of encroaching brutality, and slowly comes to realise he cannot stay and be implicated. It's stimulating stuff, beautifully written.

Address Unknown is almost a tandem read: a short novel, a reprint of what has become an American classic from 1938, told through the letters of two German friends, one a Jew now living in the United States, the other a non-Jew who has gone back to live in Germany. Slowly their letters reveal the reality of the 1933 world, the choices that must be made, and what those choices can do to one's soul. Devastatingly simple and powerful.

Sebastian Haffner: Defying Hitler: A memoir

Weidenfeld & Nicolson

$39.95

Kressmann Taylor: Address Unknown

Souvenir Press

$29.95