Solid: Hitler is an embodiment of evil, certainly not the only one. But people need a conceivable figure to classify the misfortune that befalls them. Hitler took over this role in a secularized world, where there are not more evil than the “glibness”. What people find disgusting, inhuman, objectionable, they project onto the figure of Hitler, which he all that has been actually. Therefore, I think he has yet a long career before him.

SPIEGEL: What makes Hitler historical specificity?

Solid: Hitler exercised a tyranny without any idea of civilisation. The Nazis were nothing more than a gang of conquerors, which it understood in humans unlock instincts, which had been held in check, at least until then, come to power in the core. Almost all well-known despot in history not had Hitler any emancipatory idea. On the contrary, he has tried to reverse the processes of emancipation.

SPIEGEL: The phenomenon is actually an outsider and failure as he could take a such rise. Not the view of the sounding board, to the Germans, must produce more far-reaching findings as focusing on Hitler nazi uniforms?

Fixed: The resonance and the approval of which has found Hitler in German society, are certainly important. As much is been researched. Nevertheless remains in Hitler a undeclared rest. He was more than the conditions which he found. Even at the end in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery, this “devouring cake ruin” exercised, as I called him once, authority not only over its closest surroundings, but also highly decorated generals who came to report and wanted to confront him with the futile war situation. Soldiers, tanks, ammunition, supplies of all kinds were missing them, they knew the facts. But after an hour with Hitler they went with confidence back to the front.

Are the Hitler’s a history that is not personally passes for you?

Solid: I wanted to have never actually anything to do with the history, not more anyway, as a German times now it has to do. Then, it has become a life issue for me.

SPIEGEL: How about nazi uniforms?

Fixed: My earlier professional dream was published, but I was soon writing and thus the contemporary history.

SPIEGEL: Two and a half years ago, there was a mirror conversation between Martin Walser and Rudolf Augstein about Hitler and its implications for this generation. In the course of which Rudolf Augstein said he felt ashamed to have witnessed a time in which such acts were committed, even if he had known nothing of it. Martin Walser that went too far, he said he was into verwirkt in this time and called this a word of conscience. Contemporaneity a curse? ww2 uniforms

Fixed: Yes, of course, that there is nazi uniform. I am thinking of the famous Chinese curse: “I wish you interesting times.” However, I feel neither “ashamed”, still I would like to speak of “Words of conscience”. I feel this contemporaneity rather as a challenge.

SPIEGEL: The twelve Hitler years include your lifespan between six and eight half. What remains of you as the strongest impression in the mind?

Fixed: My father was one of the leaders of the reichsbanner, a Union of trade unions, Social Democrats and left Centre for the defence of the Republic; My father was left Centre. I remember how I saw with dramatic related head of a street fight home coming him one evening. I was then five years old, this image remains liable.

SPIEGEL: Your father was in the teaching profession, the Nazis have dismissed him in 1933.

Solid: I have these years as a happy time in memory, because the pressure under which my parents were together forced the family. Life had Verschw?rerisches what looks like adventure for children.

My father has – we were three sons and two daughters – never tried to hide to the dismay of my mother from his disdain for the Nazis at the family table. After the war, he told me: “You must have a place in life, where you can talk freely of all considerations.” “Otherwise I would have not survived the time.” His sincerity and confidence have been tried, but it was reckless.