There’s a phrase in German that is unfortunately not easy to translate into English: “vorauseilender Gehorsam”. It can be translated as “anticipatory obedience” but that doesn’t capture all the nuance of obsequiousness and eagerness[1]
This phrase is often used when talking about the Third Reich, especially the time before the Nazis took power. It describes the situation in which people, very often officials, did what they thought the Nazis wanted without them even having to ask, either because they were scared what would happen to them once the Nazis were in power, if they hadn’t shown enough obedience and weren’t seen as helping on the way up, or because they agreed with the Nazis and wanted to help even if they didn’t have to or weren’t officially allowed. This is what I’m seeing here.
The concept is somewhat similar to the legal concept of “chilling effect”, only it’s used in a moral and political sense rather than a legal one. The German Wikipedia page about vorauseilender Gehorsam also links to this Japanese word as its equivalent in English Wikipedia, but there’s honestly not that much overlap from what I can see: sontaku ↩︎
