Memoirs of the German journalist and historian Sebastian Hafner (1907–1999), written in exile in 1939, cover the period from 1914 to 1933. The author tries to answer the question of how the events of this decade prepared the Germans to accept the power of the Nazis, how the multi-layered socio-political soil on which the Third Reich was built was created and fertilized.

The story that I am going to tell here is - the story of a kind of duel. This is a duel between two completely unequal opponents: an incredibly powerful, ruthless state and a small, nameless, unknown private person. It is not played out on the battlefield, as politics is commonly thought of as; a private person is by no means a politician, much less a conspirator or an “enemy of the state.” A private person is always on the defensive. He wants nothing more than to preserve what he considers his own identity, his own personal life and his own personal honor. All this is constantly subject to unimaginably brutal, albeit rather clumsy attacks from the state in which the private person happens to live and with which he therefore has to deal. With the most severe threats, the state seeks from a private person so that he betrays his friends, leaves his beloved, renounces his beliefs and accepts others prescribed from above; to say hello differently than he is used to, to eat and drink differently from what he likes; would devote his leisure time to activities that disgust him; would allow himself, his personality, to be used in adventures that he does not accept; finally, so that he would reject his past and his “I” and at the same time show irrepressible delight and endless gratitude. A private person does not want any of this. That's why he decides to duel - without any inspiration, rather shrugging his shoulders in bewilderment, but with a secret determination not to give up.