The Danish communist lawyer Carl Madsen visited a bourgeois family in Potsdam in 1923 as a young law student. What he experienced sickened him. In this extract from his 1973 autobiography Fortids møre mur, which I have translated, he recalls the class contempt, militarism and reactionary ideology he encountered in Weimar Germany, and reflects on their role in the rise of Nazism. Writing decades later from the German Democratic Republic, he contrasts the social hierarchies he saw in his youth with the peaceful and egalitarian nature of socialist society.

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I have already said a good deal about the contrarian stance I took at an early age in response to my family’s hostility towards Germany. Later, at a time when Danish citizens in general, and students in particular, had become — as Professor Birck put it — like jackals gathered around the carcass of the fallen German lion, in inward protest I developed a pronounced sympathy for Germany.

At a time when the bourgeoisie spoke French and English, I began studying German on my own and cultivating German connections.

In this way, I discovered at an early age that, besides the Germany I was so fond of, there was another one. A dangerous and repulsive one.

The Germany of the petty bourgeoisie, where Nazism sought and found fertile ground for its criminal ideology.

During those years of study, I came to know something of this Germany, and I should now like to cast a little light upon it.

Once — probably in 1923 — I visited a bookseller’s family in Potsdam, to which the girl from Altena I have mentioned belonged.

It was a time of inflation and hardship. I knew perfectly well that the family could afford practically nothing, and that for the woman of the house to put meat on the table on the day I arrived was like a victory on the battlefield. We ate our way through the tough, stringy beef or horsemeat, accompanied by mashed kohlrabi.

During the meal, there were a couple of hysterical outbursts. The war, with all its privations, and now inflation had worn their nerves to pieces. The slightest thing, an innocent remark, and one or another of the grown-up or half-grown children would burst into tears, or the man would erupt in anger, while his little wife, utterly emaciated, wrinkled and shrunken, tried to make herself invisible.

She was the very embodiment of self-denial.

After the meal, an incident occurred that I have never been able to forget, insignificant and trivial though it was in itself.

On the plates from which we had eaten lay a little mash and a few utterly inedible sinews. All that happened, really, was that the wife, meek and whimpering, rang for the maid, whom one otherwise never saw, but who lived a hidden life in the farthest recesses of the spacious apartment.

The door opened a crack, and the most emaciated and pitiful little girl crept into the room.

She curtsied in the doorway and came closer at a gesture from the mistress.

The bookseller’s wife now took each plate in turn and scraped the gnawed little scraps together onto one that the girl had brought with her. These unappetising leftovers she handed to the girl, who took them, curtsied and whispered:

“Schönen Dank, gnädige Frau.”

When she had left the room, I asked in disbelief:

“Was that her dinner?”

“Yes, what else?” the master of the house replied sharply.

From that moment on, I could not stand the family, but gradually began to glimpse something of the German people’s misery, and of what the German worker had to struggle against.

The family was pious. Prayers and Bible readings. I went with them to services at the famous garrison church in Potsdam, where Frederick the Great lies buried, and where the ageing President von Hindenburg would later recognise the Austrian corporal Hitler as Chancellor of the Reich. I paid little attention to the sermon and the hymns, but looked around instead. There was a private box, closed off from the rest of the church, with several empty chairs in it. A wreath lay on one, flowers on the others.

It was there that the imperial deserter and his exalted family used to sit in days gone by.

And, I’ll be damned, if people passing by did not curtsey or bow their heads in mournful tribute.

Everywhere in the old Prussian garrison town, you could feel that the past had not been laid to rest.

Even after the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was, after all, to have a Reichswehr. One of 100,000 men. It is a well-known fact that German officers sabotaged this restriction — and every other one — and secretly built up the new army that was once again to assault the neighbouring countries.

I witnessed the German bourgeoisie’s passion for the military one day when a squadron of uhlans rode out of a barracks. With faces hard as carved wood, the uhlans led their horses through the streets, gripping their long lances, from whose tips fluttered pennants in the Prussian colours of black and white. It was — admittedly — a magnificent sight. The townspeople stood in tightly packed crowds, watching. In silence. Many had tears in their eyes, but you could sense that their fists were clenched in their pockets. I turned to the bookseller standing beside me and said:

“Ah, so this is what disarmed Germany looks like.”

He went pale. Then he whispered:

“Be quiet. For God’s sake, don’t let anyone hear you say such things, least of all a foreigner. Come, let’s go.”

In the family I am speaking of, there was a young fellow who had just taken his school-leaving exams — or perhaps he was still at secondary school. Whenever he went to Berlin on the suburban train, he travelled first class. It went without saying that he, a future doctor, could not possibly demean himself by mixing with ordinary people, “das einfache Volk”.

A German of the better sort avoided all contact with the ordinary working man. He would not even want to encounter him in his own stairwell.

In many stairwells there was a sign: “Aufgang nur für Herrschaften” - access for Gentlemen only.

This old Prussian Potsdam is quite simply one of the most loathsome, and also one of the most dangerous, places I have ever known. Once, while I was staying with the family, they had visitors.

We sat down to coffee. The coffee was ersatz — brewed from some kind of charred kohlrabi, or God knows what.

Things were no different in Germany in those days.

I listened intently to the conversation, which concerned nothing but the old days in general and the imperial family in particular. The ladies who were visiting wanted to know from me whether our Danish royal house was “beliebt” — popular with the Danish people.

The atmosphere turned icy when I said:

“No. And unfortunately, we failed to kick the lot of them out when we had the chance in 1920.”

There was a scene after the guests had left. My friend snorted with indignation.

“You could have made a brilliant communist, one of those Lausejungen.”

“I certainly hope so,” I retorted.

The following day I left Potsdam, and I had not been back until now, when the city lies within the GDR.

Some may think I dwell too much on these matters, and that they have little to say to a young Dane today.

What I am trying to give a sense of is the rottenness of the Weimar Republic. Potsdam may indeed have been the most reactionary city in the German republic, but the bourgeois family I am speaking of was typical. Otherwise, I would not have devoted so much space to it. It was from families like that that these anti-worker bureaucrats, judges and officers emerged, undermining the republic until it collapsed like a house of cards when the moment came.

It was a profoundly sinister process of development that unfolded during the Weimar years. The schools were staffed by teachers who had served as conscripts or volunteer non-commissioned officers in the Imperial Army, and who were now breeding a German youth steeped in fervent nationalism and thirsting for what they called “revenge”.

In the schools of the Weimar Republic, boys were already singing, from the earliest grades, of their readiness to die for Germany’s coming greatness. They sang of the narrow boyish chest, broad enough to take an enemy bullet, but also broad enough, should it survive and continue to breathe, to bear the badge of valour, “das Eiserne Kreuz” — the Iron Cross.

The “Hitler Youth”, those millions of young, fanatical worshippers of the “Führer”, had already been bred before the seizure of power.

Far too few people know this, but that is how it was. The Weimar Republic had handed its younger generation over to reaction and allowed reaction to retain all the positions of power in society.

That white-hot, fanatical youth was ready when Hitler came to power. To understand something of what happened, you must have known these legions of superbly fit, healthy young people, with their selfless enthusiasm for the barbarism they perceived as the greatness of their fatherland. Never had a country possessed a youth so fervently enthusiastic, so utterly contemptuous of death — a veritable cult of death was fostered among them — and so magnificent in the madness they failed to see through as Germany’s youth under the Weimar Republic.

It had been trained and regimented during the days of the wretched republic and placed at Hitler’s disposal by its leading Social Democratic figures. In reality, the Social Democratic leaders never controlled the Weimar Republic, but merely watched and tolerated its being undermined.

Nazism grew out of millions of German bourgeois households of the kind represented by the family in Potsdam. The fact that things turned out as they did was due solely to the Social Democratic demagogues’ failure to smoke out the reactionary vermin, and to their tolerating — and indeed encouraging — a development they knew full well was under way.

It is precisely because I have a fairly solid understanding of how false and worm-eaten the Social Democratic republic of the interwar years was that I feel joy and pride in the present-day People’s Democratic Republic, where, incidentally, I am staying at a large sanatorium near the Czechoslovak border as I write these lines.

The spacious parks and sanatoriums, originally laid out and built for the upper classes of old Germany, are now filled with rheumatics and heart patients, many of them severely disabled. They are a representative cross-section of the ordinary people of socialist Germany. Most are elderly or advancing in years.

Last night I attended a party for the patients. The sanatorium’s young, extremely busy chief physician took part with all his heart and soul. He told anecdotes and, to the patients’ delight, made ironical remarks about the rigidity of certain regulations.

He encouraged the patients to tell their own stories, to sing, and those who were able, to dance to the music of the sanatorium orchestra. He himself danced one swooning waltz after another with elderly working-class women, their limbs twisted by arthritis. They all love him — and he loves his patients.

Great joy filled my heart as I took part in this experience, while at the same time allowing my thoughts to return to what things were like fifty years ago, a time I knew so well.

The great is reflected in the small, and something truly great has happened in this country between those days, when an academic hooligan like that bookseller’s son from Potsdam I have just mentioned, whom I knew so many years ago, could never have imagined sharing a railway compartment with an ordinary working man, and the present happy People’s Democratic Republic, where no one is overlooked and all who are willing to work are held in equal esteem.

What a blessing for the GDR, and for all of us, that there is no longer a Potsdam within its borders like the one I learned to despise in my earliest youth. That all power has been taken from reaction; that no teacher is permitted to teach unless imbued with the spirit of peace and socialism, and no judge is permitted to sit in judgement unless he wholeheartedly accepts socialism.