I’m in the midst of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, an account of the author’s walk across Europe in the mid-1930s. He was in Germany, in fact, just as Hitler came to power—a time when the flames of political rhetoric were, one would think, much more easily fanned than they are today.
Yet Fermor, as he was making his way through Bavaria just months before the Night of the Long Knives, wrote that “it was still possible for people to know each other fairly well without the dimmest idea of their opinions.”
What a magnificent time that must have been.
