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The centrality of Harry’s diaries and letters in this book makes it necessary to establish their relationship to other such writings devoted to Germany in the 1930s. Uncounted diaries were written by Germans and other Europeans in 1933-45, some published and more unpublished (or lost), many of them concerning the war period and thus beyond the scope of this book. Of those focusing on the 1930s and published, only one diary raises the possibility of comparison with Harry’s. In manuscript until an edited version appeared in 2009, An American in Hitler’s Berlin: Abraham Plotkin’s Diary, 1932-33 covers the period of four and a half months when Plotkin, a forty-year-old trade unionist, lived in Berlin while undertaking an intensive study of unions and labor conditions in Germany. Differences in their ages, personalities, and purposes, as well as Harry’s far longer stay and his immersion in a large Jewish social circle, make Plotkin’s and Harry’s diaries complementary rather than duplicative. While, for example, Harry felt safer if he avoided demonstrations and read about them in the newspapers, Plotkin sought them out and described them vividly. Harry’s stance as a historian-in-training contrasts with Plotkin’s thin knowledge of current and past German history: Plotkin’s allusion to “anti-Semitic riots in the University of Breslau…against Prof. Cohn” (otherwise unexplained) is complemented by Harry’s detailed analysis of Ernst Cohn’s travails. Harry wrote his diary for himself, with the intimacy that such a reader implies; Plotkin, envisaging publication, wrote reportage for future public use and did indeed publish an article on his return. Plotkin’s advantage over Harry lay in his long analytical interviews with union leaders, some of whom escorted him to meet the kinds of slum-dwellers about whom Harry only read. Overall, Harry’s intensive reading of newspapers and his discussions with friends gave him a considerable advantage in assessing the dizzying developments of the early Nazi period; he understood immediately the consequences of Hitler’s seizure of power. Plotkin was not so certain: while anticipating some kind of dictatorship, he thought that Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German National People’s Party, might well prevail over Hitler.4

Other published diaries and letters differ more markedly from Harry’s than does Plotkin’s diary. The diary and letters of the artist Oskar Schlemmer, for example, who moved to Berlin in 1932, focus on Nazi oppression of artists. The diaries of Count Harry Kessler, who was in Berlin for much of the 1920s and early 1930s, have nothing in common with Harry Marks’s except left-wing sympathies and a revulsion against the Nazis. None of the (relatively fewer) volumes of published letters of the period are comparable; one can hardly put Thomas Mann’s letters and Harry’s in the same category. Harry’s diary and letters are distinguished by his foreignness, his youth and inexperience, the intensity of his gaze, and–most notably–his self-education as a historian.

Memoirs and oral histories give another kind of witness to the times than do diaries and letters. Memoirists or interviewees who have sought verification may sometimes be more reliable than on-the-spot reporters, but they lack the immediacy of diaries and letters, with their fluctuating moods, their errors, and their self-correction. Memoirs and oral histories are, furthermore, selective, sometimes deliberately so. Harry’s own oral history (1980), for example, omits his own leadership role among Harvard’s student Communists.5

The most famous example today of a German diarist is Victor Klemperer, a professor of Romance literatures at Dresden Technical University who was determined to “bear witness.” His anticipation of arrest or death at any moment–which did not come–fueled his efforts. Klemperer’s feelings were far more intense than those of a temporary resident like Harry: fear, “disgust and shame” at the ready capitulation of so many Germans, and “shame for Germany.”6 Because Klemperer was so keen an observer, his diary for the 1930s contains information and observations that complement some of the letters that form the basis of my fifth chapter. He was also close in background to the members of Harry’s circle: like Harry’s teacher Gustav Mayer, he was an academic and a Jew; like Harry’s Uncle Alfred Hirschbach’s nephews, he was a Jew who had been baptized a Protestant. Klemperer also shared some commonalities with Harry, notwithstanding differences in temperament and age. Like Harry, he was awkward in social settings yet confident within academia; like Harry, he was indifferent to religion; like Harry, he was given to grandiose dreams of his future accomplishments.7 In Klemperer’s case, his dreams were fulfilled partly while he was alive, but most remarkably long after his death, when the publication of his diaries created a sensation in Germany.

In contrast with Harry’s and Klemperer’s diaries, those kept by the German journalist Bella Fromm and by three Americans–the journalist William L. Shirer, and the diplomats James G. McDonald and William E. Dodd–cover much more, and very different, ground. These diarists’ professions brought them in frequent contact with power-brokers, which was hardly the case for either Harry or Klemperer. Fromm had access to the highest echelons of Berlin political society, about which she wrote in self-censored columns in the Vossische Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt (among Harry’s favorite papers until ruined by Nazi controls). Meanwhile she kept a secret diary trenchantly expressing her real (and often prescient) views. Although Jewish, she was exempt for some years from anti-Semitic restrictions because the Nazis feared adverse publicity from the diplomatic corps, with which she was well connected. McDonald, High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany under the League of Nations, dictated his minutely detailed diary as a historical record and for the information of his co-workers. Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany, used his diary as a historical record; his children edited it for publication shortly after his death. Shirer, who reported for three years from Berlin (in 1934-37), “watched with increasing fascinating and horror” as Europe “plunge[d] madly down the road to Armageddon.”8

Klemperer, Fromm, Dodd, McDonald, and Shirer wrote their diaries from a moral compulsion; they all felt an imperative to “bear witness.” Harry’s impulse was different, although also informed by morality. As a foreigner on a short-term assignment, he lacked the immersion of journalists like Shirer and two other American journalists whose books on contemporary Germany he greatly admired–Edgar Ansel Mowrer (Germany Sets the Clock Back) and H. R. Knickerbocker (The German Crisis). Seeing himself as a future historian of Germany, he wanted to understand the evil that was thrust in front of him. As the tempo of the crisis increased, so did his drive to learn contemporary history. With the truths of events obscured by Nazi rant and lies, he meant to be a vigilant witness, to verify what he could and to expose falsity whenever possible.