I can't edit the above comment, I made some typos and
really bungled at least one sentence, which I would replace with:
> Maybe it's "typical" for people to pretend they have that right when they're being obedient to a pathological bigger structure
As for Sebastion Haffner and " Defying Hitler: A Memoir", here is a quick and bad translation of some of the parts I was thinking of -- but the whole book is super much worth reading, get the translation, don't hold my choice of words and sucking at punctuation against him.
About the time after 1926 Haffner wrote:
> There was freedom, quiet, order, well meaning liberality everywhere, good pay, good food and a little public boredom. Everybody was handed back to their private life and most cordially invited to create their life after their taste and become happy in their own way. But now something strange occured - and here I believe to point out one of the most fundamental political events of our time that was mentioned in no newspaper: this invitiation was mostly not followed. Nobody wanted to. It became evident that a whole generation in Germany had no use for the gift of a private life. Roughly 20 years of young and very young Germans had been used to getting the meaning of their life, all cause for deeper emotions, for love and hate, cheers and mourning, but also all sensations and thrills from the public sphere - even though it came together with poverty, hunger, death, confusion and danger. Now that this delivery stopped they were rather helpless, impoverished, robbed, disappointed and bored. To live from one's own, how one can make a small, private life big, beautiful and rewarding, how one enjoys it and where it becomes interesting, that they had never learned. Therefore they didn't experience the dissolution of the public tension as a gift, but as a robbery. They started to get bored, got stupid ideas, became bitter - and finally greedily awaited the first disruption, the first blowback or incident, to liquidate the peace times and begin new collective adventures.
> To be precise - and the matter deserves precision, because in my view it forms the key for the whole word historical epoch in which we live - : Not everybody, not every single one from the younger German generation reacted that way. There were those, who in this time, a bit awkward and belated, learned to live so to speak, who found a taste for their own life, who successfully got rid of the booze of war and revolution games and began to become personalities. In fact back then, completely invisible and unnoticed, the monstrous gulf was prepared which today separates the German people into Nazis and non-Nazis.
[..]
> The older generation had become insecure and shy in their ideals and ideas; one looked with a desired to retire onto "the youth", brownnosed it and expect miracles from it. This youth itself didn't know anything but public noise, sensations, anarchy, and the dangerous temptation of irresponsible number games.
[..]
> "Houben runs 100 meters in 10.6 seconds", that elicited exactly the same emotions as "20000 Russians captured", and "Peltzer wins English Word Championship in record time" was equal to events that never had occured during the war, like "Paris taken" or "England pleads for peace". I dreamed day and night of being like Peltzer and Houben. I didn't miss a sports event. I trained 3 times a week, I stopped smoking and instead exercised before going to bed. And I felt the full joy to be in harmony with thousands, ten thousands, actually with everybody. There was nobody of my age, no matter how unknown to me, no matter how uneducated, no matter how unsympathetic, with whom I couldn't talk for hours the first time we met - about sports, of course. Everybody had the same numbers in their head. Everybody thought, without saying it and as a matter of course,, that this was nearly as nice as it had been during the war. It was the same big game again. We understood each other without communication. The food of our minds was numbers, and our should trembled in anticipation: would Peltzer be able to beat Nurmi, too? Would Körnig reach 10.3 seconds?
[..]
> The weird things is, that the politicians from left to right couldn't laud this apparent mass stupefaction that came in fits enough. On top of partaking in that old vice of our generation again, the drug of the cold numbers game, unburdened by reality, this time we did it under the concentrated attention and unequivocal applause of our educators. The "nationalists", stupid and plump as ever, said we had with an healthy instinct found a replacement for the missing military draft. As if anyobody had cared about the physical training! The "left", overly clever and therefore in result nearly even dumber as the "nationalists" (like always), thought it a great invention that from now on the war like instincts would be "vented" on the peaceful field of running and exercises, and saw the world peace secure. They didn't notice that the "German champions" without exception worse black-white-red ribbons though the national colors then were black-red-gold. It didn't occur to them that the temptation of the war game, the old notion of the big, suspenseful competition of nations, just was practice and kept alive - not "warlike instincts" that were "vented". They didn't see the connection and not the relapse.