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[NW-Bound]

Turf Wars.

It's been quite a while, and the name of the book has slipped my memory, but writer Patrick Leigh Fermor* traveled as a young guy throughout pre-WWII Germany.

At one point he's in a bar with Brownshirts...turns out they all used to be communists but switched en masse - same side of the same coin.

* https://www.nyrb.com/collections/patrick-leigh-fermor

Added: Found it:

From A Time Of Gifts:
https://www.nyrb.com/products/a-time-of-gifts?variant=1094928933

Fermor meets a group in a "Workmen's bar" and is offered a cot for the night in a room that turns out to be a "Shrine of Hitleriana".........I have transposed some of the subsequent conversation here:

You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite! I used to punch the heads of anyone singing the Horst Wessel Lied! It was all the Red Flag and the International then! I wasn't only a Sozi, but a Kommi, ein echter Bolschewik!" He gave a clenched fist salute. "You should have seen me! Street fights! We used to beat the hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us. We laughed ourselves silly - Man hat sich totgelacht. Then suddenly, 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!" He snapped his fingers in the air. "And here I am!"

What about his old pals, I asked. "They changed too! - all those chaps in the bar. Every single one! They're all in the S.A. now." Had a lot of people done the same then? A lot? His eyes opened wide. "Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!"

Humble apologies for the hijack.

The story of a young Englishman who traveled on foot from Holland to Constantinople sounded somewhat familiar, but I was sure that I had not read the above book.

I now remember that I read an excerpt of the book A Time of Gifts from a collection of travel memoirs called The Norton Book of Travel, edited by Paul Fussell, 1987. I just dug out the latter and looked through it to refresh my memory.

I meant to read this entire book by Patrick Fermor, but kept forgetting. I noted that it was interesting that he made the trek on foot in 1934 when he was 19, but did not publish this memoir until 1977. I have just reserved this book from the local library.

And by the way, I got The Norton Book of Travel during my RV travel when I stopped by a small town library in Alaska. The spanking unread book with the intact dust cover was donated to the library which sold it for $1 for fund raising. How fitting was it, for me to read a book about travel while cocooning in a motorhome parked in the middle of nowhere?