I was out of the country on a family trip during President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. I would not have watched the debate anyway, since watching and listening to Biden stumble through almost every encounter has become too painful. His obvious impairment will almost certainly result in the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office—with God only knows what consequences.
Our family trip initially included a four-day stop in Berlin, where we were planning to visit the buildings where my wife’s parents lived before the Nazis exiled them in 1938 and 1941. It was a pilgrimage she had hesitated to make, but she finally consented at the urging of our three grown children. As fate would have it, the trip to Berlin was aborted when our first flight from Boston to London was canceled in the middle of the night. With no hotel rooms available and no help from the airline, we were forced to take a hair-raising Uber drive back to Connecticut, arriving home at 4:00 a.m. exhausted and bewildered. Rescheduling the brief visit to Berlin was beyond our capabilities, but we did fly to London three days later for the second stage of the family vacation: a week in the Cotswolds.
A highlight of that week was a visit to Chastelton House in Oxfordshire. Built between 1607 and 1612 by Walter Jones, a wealthy wool merchant, the house had fallen into disrepair before being acquired by the National Trust in 1991. The founding family, the joke goes, had lost its money “in the war,” meaning the English Civil War (1642–51). Fighting for the Royalists, Jones’s grandson lost a battle against Cromwell’s Roundheads, and had to be hidden from his pursuers in a secret room off one of the house’s bedrooms. That room is now open for inspection. Also on display in the manor is the Bible used by William Juxon, the bishop of London, at the execution of Charles I (1649). Such history can seem irrelevant, but—as we’ve all been reminded more recently—deadly political chaos can return in the blink of an eye.
While looking for something to read during our vacation, I came across an old copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s much-celebrated travel book, A Time of Gifts. The book’s marginalia indicated that at some point I had read about fifty pages but then put it aside. I suspect it was Fermor’s ornate prose style that had put me off, although I later read and admired his book Traveler’s Tree and his only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, both set in the Caribbean. A Time of Gifts is the first part of a trilogy relating how Fermor walked from Holland to Constantinople as a romantic and headstrong nineteen-year-old. He set out in 1934 and reached his destination in 1937, but he did not begin to write about the journey until more than thirty years later. A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, when he was already established as one of England’s great travel writers. Fermor was also a decorated war hero who had fought on Crete, where he masterminded the kidnapping of a German general.
Fermor’s famous walk across Europe began in Holland around Christmas and ended on the border of Hungary at Easter. On the road, he slept in barns and hostels or even police stations, but just as often was taken in by well-to-do friends of friends or curious locals eager to hear about his impressions of their city and country. The hospitality of strangers is one of the gifts Fermor celebrates.
Fermor’s erudition is daunting. He has a keen eye for landscape and architecture, and a genuine curiosity about everyone he encounters. He entered Germany not long after Hitler became chancellor, and as the totalitarian reign of Nazism was becoming apparent. In fact, the impending cataclysm is the subtle backdrop of Fermor’s elaborate disquisitions on the long history of Middle Europe’s various wars and conquests, both religious and ethnic. “Appalling things had happened since Hitler had come into power ten months earlier; but the range of horror was not yet fully unfolded,” Fermor writes of his stay in Bavaria. “In the country the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence. Occasionally it rose to fanaticism. Often when nobody was in earshot, it found utterance in pessimism, distrust and foreboding, and sometimes in shame and fear but only in private.”
In a working-class bar he met a young man who offered to put him up for the night. Fermor was shown an attic room that his new acquaintance, a member of the S.A.—the Nazi paramilitary group eventually purged by Hitler—had turned into “a shrine of Hitleriana.” Flags, posters, and photographs of the Führer covered the walls. Soon the young man was showing off his Luger pistol and dancing joyously around the room. When Fermor expressed some reservations about the profusion of fetish-like objects, his host wryly confessed that a great change had come over him in the recent past: only last year the walls had been decorated with pictures of Lenin and Stalin and other Communist paraphernalia, and he had been a warrior for that radical cause. “We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us,” he exclaimed. But things changed completely when Hitler came to power. “I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden.” Fermor asked him if he thought other Germans felt the same way. “Millions! I tell you,” the young man replied. “I was astonished how easily they changed sides!”
When I read this, I was reminded of two things. First, I remembered Mitt Romney’s revelations about the role fear played in preventing other Republican senators from voting to impeach Trump. Then I remembered the remarkable interviews Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra did for her documentary The Insurrectionist Next Door. In talking to a handful of men convicted of various crimes committed during the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Pelosi discovered motivations strikingly similar to those of Fermor’s young Bavarian acquaintance. Few of Pelosi’s interviewees seem to have been moved by any coherent politics or ideology. Their reasons for going to the rally were personal and idiosyncratic, almost adolescent. The promise of spectacle and the possibility of violence was a big part of the attraction. Yes, they proclaimed their alienation and anger, but the source of their dissatisfaction was vague. What seemed to unite them was the conviction—founded on the fabrications of a sitting president of the United States—that “it was all nonsense and lies.” Trump was the man for them mainly because he validated their nihilism.
Of course, Trump couldn’t care less about them. As Fintan O’Toole has written in the New York Review of Books, “Trump’s faithlessness makes the faith of his acolytes all the purer,” and “what it really amounts to is a gradual replacement of coldly self-serving shrewdness with genuine fanaticism. The first is corrupt; the second is deadly. Those who embrace the possibility of pain for themselves are all the more willing to inflict it on others.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor seems to have understood that kind of fanaticism when it emerged in 1930s Germany, as did my wife’s parents. It is far from clear that most Americans understand it in 2024, or even care to understand it
