Even sharp intellectuals treated fascism’s rise as less real than sensational crimes
Evidence
Many Germans, as well as other people around Europe, watched this rapid sequence of events in horror but felt unable to do much about it. Beauvoir later marvelled at how little she and Sartre worried in the early 1930s about the rise of Nazism in Germany — and this from two people who later became fiercely political. They read the papers, she said, but in those days they were more interested in murder stories or tales of psychological oddity, such as the Papin sisters’ killing of the employer for whom they worked as maids, or a case in which a conventional couple brought home another couple for a sexual foursome then committed suicide the next day. Such incidents were curiosities of individual human behaviour, whereas the rise of fascism seemed an abstract matter. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 256
Categorization
- QUESTION: Why did individual-horror stories feel more real than systemic fascism to intellectuals? Parallels present-day desensitization to large-scale threats.
- XREF: connects to: Sophisticated rational forecasting proved systematically blind to Fascism’s rise; The Rosenberg executions alarmed European intellectuals as a foretaste of fascism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 770
Broader Connections
- Sophisticated rational forecasting proved systematically blind to Fascism’s rise
#corroborates(0.92) - The Rosenberg executions alarmed European intellectuals as a foretaste of fascism
#exemplifies(0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 770