1934: "Why Germany Endures Hitler"

The following is a five-part essay that appeared in the October 1934 edition of The American Mercury, a monthly magazine that featured writings on politics, foreign affairs, literature and events of the day. It is an in depth explanation of how Germans, an advanced and educated people, could support and condone Hitler and the Nazi movement.

The author, S. Miles Bouton, can only be described as prophetic in his evaluation of of Nazism and its implications for Germany and the world. His observations on German culture, behavior and character, though occasionally anecdotal, offer fascinating insight. They also offer a unique historic window on Germany and German society at a critical moment in history. For that reason, we have retyped the unabridged text for our readers' consideration. Links have been added to provide additional historic context:

WHY GERMANY ENDURES HITLER

BY S. MILES BOUTON

    How could Germany descend to the depths of brutality and ruthless crushing of all human rights that have marked the course of National Socialist rule from the beginning, culminating in the barbarous murders of June 30 last and the following days? The Germans are admittedly the best educated people in the world. Their contributions to the arts and sciences have been impressive, their contributions to letters respectable. On the purely material side of civilization Germany is a good half century in advance of the rest of Europe. There are probably more bathtubs in Berlin alone than in any entire country on the Continent.
    Why have not the Germans risen up against the crazed gangsters who have made the name of their fatherland a byword in the civilized world – who have placed a stain on it which a whole generation will not be able to wipe out? The history of most European countries and even of little Ireland is full of the names of voluntary martyrs, of men and women who deliberately courted death in opposing despotism. The revolution of November, 1918, in Germany produced only four genuine martyrs; two of these were Karl Liebknecht, the half-Jew, and Rosa Luxemburg, Polish Jewess; and Nazi Germany’s history contains no such names. The men and women clubbed to death, “shot while trying to escape,” “suicided” or slain by firing squads or murderous Black Shirts were done to death merely because of their opinions or their race. There are millions of Germans who hate Naziism and all its works. But even at the very beginning, when resolute opposition would have availed much, they kept silent, or permitted themselves to be “coordinated.”
    The reasons for all this are to be found in German history. They have nothing to do with race or blood. The “Aryan,” “Nordic Germanic” theories of Hitler and his followers are utter nonsense. The Germans are a conglomerate of many races–ancient Pruzzen, Wend, Sorb, Lithuanian, Celt, Alpine and other blood–yet the reactions and psychology of all these different races and mixtures are essentially the same in respect of the important phases of life and thought. They have been shaped in the same mold, chiefly a Prussian mold, by a common history and a common language. One notes the same process in America. Young immigrants settling in the East begin talking through their nose, chewing gum and reacting to their other surroundings precisely like native Americans within ten years. The German, smitten on the nose in Germany, calls for the police. Give him ten years in America, and he smites back.
    The end of the Thirty Years’ War found Germany’s intellectual and cultural life all but utterly destroyed. The century produced a few men prominent in physical science, but no literary light or other cultural leader to compare with dozens of names in France and England, which steadily increased their lead. French became the language of courtiers and the best society, and its influence grew as a result of the immigration of the Huguenots. King Frederick William I did not feel it necessary to have his children taught German. Frederick the Great wrote all his works in French, and spoke German–only to underlings who did not understand the more “elegant” French. Leibnitz wrote some of his principal works in French, and the same was true of other leaders of thought in his century. The only voice raised against this came from Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew, the great philosopher and great German patriot.
    It must be remembered also that Prussia and almost all other German states were under absolutist rule for more than six centuries after Magna Charta had been granted the English by a reluctant King, and for three-quarters of a century after the Constitution of the United States was adopted.

II

The result of all this was that a feeling of inferiority, which had already been engendered by the backwardness of the Germans in comparison with the peoples of the kingdoms to the west, was rendered more acute. The French Revolution stirred such feelings mightily. “Liberty, fraternity, equality” across the Rhine, but absolutism and despotism at home. England had long had popular government, and across the Atlantic a new Republic had come into being, dedicated to the proposition that all men are born free and equal.
    The subjugation of Prussia by Napoleon in 1806 was received by the bulk of the people with complacency. The leading newspaper of Berlin praised the French commandant of the city, and expressed the hope that he might long continue in his post. “Rattle your chains,” said the great Goethe. “The man [Napoleon] is too strong for you.” And he entertained French officers in his home while the Prussians were under the iron heel of their conqueror. The attitude expressed by the newspaper and by Germany’s mightiest literary figure is typically German. It helps make understandable why the masses of the people have so meekly submitted to the despotism of Adolf Hitler and his lieutenants. I have pointed out in an earlier article (“Germany Sinks into Slavery,” in THE AMERICAN MERCURY for May) how the Germans rushed to do obeisance to the Poles after the latters’ victory at Tannenberg in 1410, how stalwart monarchists became equally stalwart republicans after the revolution of 1918, and how ardent haters of Hitler became his bootlicking sycophants after his accession to power.
    As the Napoleonic yoke grew heavier, a reaction began to make itself felt among the more articulate part of the nation. Only a little more than a century earlier French troops had ravaged the Palatinate. The general level of well-being was still lower at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century than in 1618. And now a foreign conqueror held the country. Why all this series of catastrophes? Could it be due to defects in the German character? Obviously no German could admit that. The real reason could only be that the Germans were a people of such surpassing excellence and generally superior qualities that they had become the objects of envy for all other–naturally inferior–peoples.
    This was the genesis of that arrogant boasting which I described in the article referred to above–that the whole world would some day “regain health through the German character”; that the coming Federation of Europe would fly the German flag “because all that is great, fundamental and eternal in every European institution is German”; that it is the Germans’ mission “to civilize the earth”; and that hundreds of other equally arrogant boasts, which have continued down to today and even grown more boastful, so that we hear the cherublike Dr. Frank, the youthful Nazi Minister of Justice, proclaiming that “the blood-substance of the Germanic race constitutes so preeminent and unique an asset of the world as a whole that we can justly regard it as the duty of the entire human race to safeguard this basic German element out of gratitude.”
    The defeat of Napoleon, although accomplished only with the aid of the Russians, gave a tremendous impulse to this arrogance, and then came Gobineau, the Frenchman who, trying to establish his descent from the Vikings, published his essay on the inequality of human races. And the Germans learned that they were even better than they had supposed. The “Germanic Aryans,” it appeared, were the sole originators and furtherers of civilization and culture. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Germanicized Englishman, carried on the work, and under Hitler the “Aryan” nonsense–exposed almost forty-five years ago by Huxley as a ridiculous error–has been accepted as a gospel in a Germany where even ethnologists do not know that the word merely designates a language-group and has nothing to do with blood or race. And that the Sumerians and other pre-Aryan families, to quote Professor Gordon Childe of the University of Edinburgh, created the civilization of which we are the heirs at a date when “the ancestors of the Germans and Anglo-Saxons were filthy savages, picking up shellfish on the shores of the Baltic. There is not a trace of Aryan elements in any sense among the creators of civilized life.”
    Accepting even the Germans’ own theory of what constitutes an “Aryan,” the great majority of the people do not satisfy the requirements. In 1895 Professor Otto Ammon was gravely disturbed when his researches showed that only 1.45% of the inhabitants of Baden could be regarded as belonging to this alleged race.
    Yet a highly educated nation has reached a point where it believes not only that “non-Aryans,” that is, in effect, Jews, not only never made any contribution to German civilization, but even that they are an unqualified evil, and that all of Germany’s misfortunes are due to them.
    Here again the people’s historical heritage furnishes the explanation. No other country on earth has such a long record of persecution of the Jews as has Germany, going back to the first Crusade. Optimists who believe that Hitler may eventually modify some of the laws against this people have no conception of the extent to which the Germans’ minds have been poisoned against the Jews for nine centuries. Anti-Semitism, the chief point in the Nazi leader’s program, appealed to a greater part of the German people than did any other point. In almost every department of life the Jews were represented out of all proportion to their numbers. This was especially true in the arts, sciences and learned professions. Only 1% of the whole population consisted of Jews, but 28% of Germany’s Nobel Prize winners belong to that race. The explanation lies, of course, in the Jews’ greater intellectual alertness, persistence and energy, but a people taught to regard itself as the real Chosen People, and at the same time burdened with the inferiority complex engendered by their long history of travail and disaster, could naturally not accept such a conclusion. For them the explanation lay in Jewish dishonesty, tricky and unfair dealing, and thus between three and four million Germans–for one-quarter of “non-Aryan” blood is as bad as 100%–have been reduced to the status of pariahs, with less rights than are enjoyed by foreigners, and many have been beaten, robbed or even murdered.

III

Another reason for the failure of the Germans to offer any opposition to the murderous Nazis is that they lack what has been elegantly termed “intestinal stamina.” This may seem at first sight an astonishing assertion regarding a militaristic nation, but it is none the less true. The German will not fight when the situation becomes hopeless. When I went to Germany for the first time in 1911 I was much interested in pugilism, and took in many matches. I was astonished to see what a great number of them were ended by throwing up the sponge in the midst of the conflict. I had never seen an American pugilist give up, and instances of such quitting probably do not happen in America once in a hundred fights, but they are common in Germany.
    When Great Britain entered the World War the Kaiser is reported to have said:
    “The English are tough opponents. They are so dumb that they don’t know when they are licked, and they keep right on fighting.”
    Probably he did not say it, but he could well have done so, and this bulldog spirit marks the difference between the two peoples. A friend of my son’s, a medical student, said to him:
    “I don’t mind fighting, but when I get hit so hard it hurts, I don’t want to fight any more.”
    This young man–he is now a physician–epitomized in these words the attitude of his people. I have seen many blows struck in Germany, but I have never seen a man thus struck attempt to defend himself.
    Perhaps the most striking testimony to this lack of the bulldog spirit is the accepting by Germany of a treaty containing the famous “war guilt paragraph,” Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles. It is improbable that any other nation on earth would have signed such a document in any circumstances. Certainly America would not sign such a treaty, Great Britain would not, France would not, Poland would not, even little Ireland would not. But the Germans signed, and their lack of “intestinal stamina” has proved a curse not only to them, but for the whole world. There would have been no Hitler, no massacre of men and women at the order of this Twentieth Century Ivan the Terrible, if the alleged statesmen at Versailles had framed an intelligent treaty.
    Back of the submission of the German people to Nazi rule lies, as the really dominant factor, the glorification of Authority, with its corollary, Obedience. Karl Friedrich von Moser (1725-1798) wrote in his essay, “Vom Nationalgeist”: “Every nation has its great motive-principle. In Germany it is Obedience.” This principle of obedience to authority rests on the German conception of the state. For politically enlightened nations the state exists for the people: for the Germans the people exist for the state. They have no rights as against the state, and the state is Authority, incorporated in its Beamten, its officials, from the head of the government down to the pettiest rural constable.
    “To whom God gives office he gives also understanding” (Wem Gott ein Amt gibt, gibt er auch Verstand) says an old German proverb. Even when Germany had a civilized form of government, this belly-crawling submission to Authority reached, for free peoples, extraordinary and even laughable forms. The “Cobbler of Koepenick” will be recalled–the little shoemaker who donned the uniform of an army captain, commandeered a squad of soldiers and led them to the city hall in Koepenick, where he ordered the mayor to hand over the City’s funds, dismissed the soldiers, and went home with the cash-box. The whole world laughed about it at the time, and even some unregenerate Germans also laughed–or were ashamed.
    An “insult” to an official was much more severely punished than an insult to an ordinary citizen. One of the things that most impress–and delight–the newly arrived German immigrant in America is that he can call the President an ass or an idiot without being punished for it.
    Under Hitler this glorification of Authority has reached heights unknown since the Eighteenth Century. In his speech before the Reichstag on July 13 last, in which he attempted a “justification” of the summary murder of seventy-seven men and women (and there were undoubtedly many more, for no official statement of this government deserves an iota of credence), he declared that he himself was “the supreme court” in such cases. During the trial of the men accused of burning the Reichstag, the attorney for one of the defendants made a timorous attempt to discredit the testimony of an official of the Department of Justice. The presiding judge interrupted him.
    “It is unheard of,” he said, “that the word of a German official should be discredited.”
    There can be no justice in a land where the word of a witness cannot be impeached because he is an official.
    The Socialistic reforms instituted by Bismarck in a vain attempt to check the growth of the Social-Democratic party were a further step inclining the Germans to look to the state for everything. “Get yourself born: the state will do the rest,” became the slogan, and the Germans became even a still more regimented people, who, apart from the routine of their daily occupations, look to Authority to manage everything for them.

IV

This crushing out of all initiative manifests itself constantly in happenings that amaze the beholder from a free country. Not long after I reached Berlin with my family in 1911, my wife and I were awakened one night by sounds of dissension in the Holsteinischerstrasse in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, directly in front of our apartment. I looked out the window and saw a man lying on the sidewalk, surrounded at a respectful distance of some twenty feet by a dozen men and women. I drew on my trousers over my night attire, stuck my feet into slippers, and went outside. The man on the sidewalk was only semi-conscious. I lifted him to a sitting posture, and discovered that his nose had been smashed in–by a blow with brass knuckles, as I afterward learned. He was bleeding profusely. I called to the bystanders to bring some water, and after I had repeated the demand two or three times one man brought a pitcher, handed it to me, and retreated to a safe distance. I washed the victims face and got a little water between his teeth. After perhaps ten minutes a policeman appeared and took charge of affairs.
    And then I learned that one of the bystanders was the victim’s brother! He had left it to a foreigner, newly arrived and still speaking German with an accent, to look after his own flesh and blood.
    So abject has the submission to Authority become that the German does not dare defend himself from assault. I have told above of seeing many blows struck, but none returned. The extent to which this goes is shown by many happenings.
    Two or three years before the war a young woman was annoyed by a masher in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Unfortunately for the masher, she was a member of a troupe of athletes, and she dropped him with an uppercut to the jaw. The man rose, called a policeman, and the young woman was arrested.
    The judge fined her 25 marks for assault!
    In 1912 my wife and I were returning home about midnight when we heard voices raised in the Mehlitzstrasse, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. (I name these streets in order to give verisimilitude to narrative which might otherwise seem “bald and unconvincing” to readers in a free country). Two men and their wives were using heated words. Suddenly one of the men began striking the other man’s wife over the head with his walking stick. The husband of the woman attacked ran down the street crying: “Herr Schutzmann! Herr Schutzmann!” (Mr. Policeman! Mr. Policeman!)   
    In 1911, only a few weeks after I reached Berlin, an altercation arose in a subway car at a late hour in the night between a tall young man and a slight girl. Suddenly he darted across to her and struck her in the face. This was new for me, and I knocked the fellow into a corner and gave him a second blow for good measure.
    “You will get off with me at the next station and I’ll have you arrested,” he said between sobs.
    “With the greatest pleasure,” I replied.
    A German behind me whispered: “Don’t do it. You’ll be fined heavily.”
    I could not believe it, but I took his advice–luckily, for he was right. There is no doubt that all the other passengers in the car regarded me as a low, brutal rowdy, who ought not to be permitted at large in a country with real Kultur. It is obviously easy to cow into submission people whose natural human reactions have thus been harnessed by Authority.
    All these incidents–and they are but a few of the many I have personally witnessed in the last twenty-three years–are typically German. They illustrate strikingly how the Germans look to the state and its duly constituted authorities to do everything for them except eat, breathe, sleep and work. But they can be very punctilious in insisting that things be done by the competent authority. This was amusingly shown in Berlin less than a year ago. A drunken man was creating a disturbance in a restaurant, and the owner, intending to dial “K I”, the emergency police call, mistakenly dialed “K 2”, the fire department’s call. The fire department arrived and the situation was explained.   
    The drunken man refused to leave at the fire chief’s order. It was his right, he declared, to be thrown out by the police, and he stood on his rights. So the police were called, the disturber of the peace was taken into custody in due form, and the firemen returned to their quarters.
    But even a show of authority is at times sufficient to produce results. On April 1, 1933, it will be remembered, a nationwide boycott of all “non-Aryan” places of business was carried out. On that day I found a young Storm Trooper standing in front of the entrance of a store where I wanted to buy something. He remained there although I made a movement to enter the place. I looked him in the eye, and said:
    “You have instructions, have you not, to use no violence?”
    “Jawohl, Herr,” he replied.
    “I have no such instructions,” I said. “Step aside.”
    He stepped aside with great celerity. Yet he had a sheath-knife on his hip, and he knew that any assault on a Storm Trooper had been made a felony by order of the Cabinet, the only law-giving body in Hitler’s Germany.
    A uniform of almost any kind, especially if a sword or dagger be worn with it, always inspires respect, and the same is true of civilian dress of a kind showing that the wearer belongs to “the better classes.” When wearing a top hat, cutaway and striped trousers, I have never been addressed by a lesser title than Herr Doktor, and often as Herr Baron. The head game-keeper on a large estate in Eastern Germany, where I was shooting deer and partridges two years ago, insisted on addressing me as Herr Baron even after I had told him that I was a mere commoner. Any man invited by the Gutsherr, the owner of the estate, himself a nobleman, to shoot his game and be his house-guest could not be of smaller rank than baron for the game-keeper.
    One of Hitler’s professed aims is the abolishing of all class distinctions. Even if he should hold power for years longer than there is any possibility of his lasting, he will not and cannot succeed. Respect for der bessere Herr (the man of better class), for titles and for nobility and royalty is too deeply ingrained in the German character to make it possible for one or even two or three generations to undo the development of centuries.

V

In view of what I have set forth thus far, Hitler’s accession to power should be more understandable. And there are other factors in his favor. One is the Germans’ amazing lack of any self-critical faculty and of any sense of the ridiculous–and this is true of all parties and sects. During the campaign preceding the elections to the National Assembly of 1919 the Vorwaerts, the central organ of the Social-Democratic party, which had for decades been carrying on a rabid campaign against all churches and all religion, headlined an article:
    “Women! Protect your religion! Vote for the Social-Democratic Party of Germany!”
    Some months ago the Nazi government gave solemn assurances that there should be no more attacks by radio on Austria from Munich by Theodor Habicht. When the attacks continued and Austria protested, it was solemnly stated by Berlin that Herr Habicht’s broadcasts were now meant “only for German hearers.” The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, “coordinated” as soon as Hitler came to power, published on August 17, 1933, a report from Vienna that all Austrians carrying on anti-Austrian propaganda abroad would lose their citizenship, and that the property of political parties whose activities were prohibited in Austria would be confiscated. This was precisely what had been done in Germany, but the Allgemeine headlined its report indignantly:
    “Deprivation of rights in Austria!”
    Nazi Germany has thrown tens of thousands of men and women into concentration camps, where many of them were murdered and thousands beaten. Yet a common headline in German newspapers has been:
    “Unheard of outrages in Austria! Nazis thrown into concentration camps!”
    On May 2 last the main German radio station reported solemnly “a reign of terror” in the Saar district, and complained bitterly of prohibitions of newspapers there. Eighteen days later is was asserted from the same station that the head of the provisional Saar government “complains of terrorism while he himself brutally terrorizes the inhabitants.” And Joseph Goebbels, the ineffable “Minister for Public Englightenment and Propaganda,” has the effrontery to declare that the German press is not muzzled.
    Any people but the Germans would either weep or laugh at all these things, but the Germans have been taught to believe what Authority tells them. The situation, by the way, is extraordinarily depressing for American and British wives of German citizens, who, themselves German by marriage, may neither weep nor laugh for fear of compromising their husbands, and who must also submit to seeing their children of tender age compelled to make long night marches with pack, or else, refusing to let them join the Hitler Youth, rob them of all chance to enter a university, since only students approved by the Nazis are permitted to enter the institutions of what is still called higher learning in Hitler’s realm.
    The reason for the Germans’ failure to react to the bloody terrorism of their rulers as other peoples would react can also be found in their history of seventeen centuries of almost continuous warfare. This long preoccupation with war made the profession of arms–in other words, militarism–appear the highest calling for a man. The Germans of today are the natural heirs of that Frederick William I who is glorified as “the Soldier King,” and of his son, Frederick the Great, who despoiled the Empress Maria Theresa of some of her choicest provinces in a shameless war of conquest and took the province of Posen from helpless Poland. Building on this heritage, Hitler has brought militarism to heights that make the last Kaiser look like an extreme pacifist. It is this that makes the Nazis’ Third Reich a menace to the peace of Europe and of the world.
    The coarsening effect of militarism is probably responsible also for a marked obtuseness toward mental suffering. A Jewish woman whom I know heard her little boy praying: “Please, God, let me not be a Jew.” This is a profoundly pathetic thing, but Germans to whom I reported it were not impressed. “The Jews have themselves to blame.”
    Another factor–and one which calls for a degree of charitableness in passing judgment on the Germans as a whole–is that the great masses do not know what is happening in their country nor in what light their rulers are viewed by the outside world. Their press is told not only what it must print. The condemnation of Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag on July 13 last was universal in the civilized world, but here are some of the headlines over the German papers’ foreign correspondents reports:
    “The World Admires the Leader”; “Strengthening of Hitler’s International Authority”; “The Impression Abroad–The Leader Has Increased His Authority”; “Hitler’s Position Stronger Than Ever Before.”
    German-language papers from other countries, especially Switzerland, are carefully watched and confiscated when they contain news or comments unfavorable to the Nazis. Frequently they are barred from Germany for weeks at a time. Until the official murdering of June 30 and the following days evoked a wave of horror and condemnation in the press of the whole world, the foreign-language newspapers had suffered rather less than those printed in German, but wholesale prohibitions of papers from almost all countries then followed. Hence the only way the Germans have of knowing what is happening is by word of mouth, and the country is so infested by spies, both volunteer and paid, and punishment is so certain and so drastic, that the colporteurs of such news risk their liberty or even their life.
    Readers of any good newspaper in foreign countries know more about the happenings in Germany than is known to all but a comparatively very few Germans themselves. This is especially true as to the United States and Great Britain, where the people are kept in touch with German affairs by a news service which does high credit to the honesty and intelligence of the correspondents furnishing it.
    But the end of Hitlerism will come, and it would come very soon, despite all the factors described, were it not for one further factor which cannot be lightly disregarded. It is expressed by the anxious question, which I have heard literally hundreds of times from patriotic Germans who hate Hitler and all his works:
    “Aber wenn Hitler geht, was dann?“ (“But if Hitler goes, what then?”)
    Communism? Civil war? Chaos?
    A people accustomed to freedom would not hesitate. But the Germans have never known freedom as it is known by politically enlightened peoples. The chief hope of civilization lies today in the steadily worsening economic situation in Germany. When Jeshurun waxed fat he kicked, but the Germans kick when they begin to have to draw in their belts. The revolution of November, 1918, was really a hunger revolt–nothing more. So also was the Kerensky revolution in Russia in 1917. The Germans do not worry much about freedom, but any hungry people will fight for bread.
    History is getting ready to repeat itself in Hitler’s Third Reich. The only question is how long the martyrdom of this so great but so tragically misled and deceived nation must go on.

(End of text - typed by Ray Drake)

Comments

[Pamela]

Holy moly, how did you guys find this?!

I have a busy morning, so I can't write all I would like, but I wanted to point out something that some here may not be aware of.

Jeshurun is actually an epithet for Israel. Quoting Robert Alter from The Five Books of Moses:

"Since the etymology suggests "straight", its use here is ironic, as the poem pointedly associates crookedness with Israel."

back later

[WhatDoIKnow]

Lots of interesting stuff. Thanks!

The stories about the obsessive submission to Authority (of any kind) are jaw-dropping. Things have changed a lot in Germany and Germans today do protest a lot against Authority. However, pretty much every foreigner living there that I met was struck by the still existing faith in Authority as final regulatory instance. As I said, things have changed radically but not completely.

[Helian]

It's interesting that this article appeared in a magazine originally edited by none other than H. L. Mencken, the great sage of Baltimore, a man of German background, and, in fact, a great Germanophile. The fact that such an article appeared in one of his magazines, even though he gave up his formal editing responsibilities in 1933, is no accident. He was a great man, and a great editor. Today, the pecksniffs he fought against his whole life have started a whispering campaign against him because of his manifest political incorrectness by the standards of the early 21st century. My advice is, read him and learn something. You may not agree with him, but, if you have any grey matter at all, you will learn something from him and be entertained by him.

[Pamela]

Oh, poop, this is such a busy time of year......

First thoughts; Germans on this site have been more than generous in trying to educate the Americans here on the '68'ers'. They were the social forces that challenged the knee-jerk submission to authority and I wonder if that was at least in part how they claimed their moral authority.

For this post, I will address just the anecdotal evidence presented by the author: the hesitance/failure of one man to come to the aid of his own brother; and the dependence of another man on the police when his wife was being beaten.

When I first thought about the arguments presented in the article, I could not get from the arguments to the fact that German soldiers sent women and children to the gas. I could not go from these arguments to the film I saw of a German soldier taking an infant from its mother, throwing it up in the air, and bayonnetting the baby on the way down. (If this is difficult for German readers to read, the film I watched was taken by the German military. We have something here called The History Channel. All your propaganda films are public record in the U.S.)

But mulling it over I wonder if maybe this might explain at least part of it: When a man will not help his brother and a husband will not help his wife, have not they been dehumanized themselves? And if that is true, then how much easier must it be for them to dehumanize 'the other'?

[Orbit Rain]

lgf has a title "history doesn't repeat, it stutters"

I see a lotta parallels, actions and memes repeated by actors holding today's stage.

"There can be no justice in a land where the word of a witness cannot be impeached because he is an official."

[Pamela]

Helian

I don't think I have ever read a more disappointing post from you. The literary heritage of the magazine (that apparently ended up being an anti-semitic rant box) is completely irrelevant.

Get in here and start kicking ass.

[Helian]

@Pamela

"I don't think I have ever read a more disappointing post from you. The literary heritage of the magazine (that apparently ended up being an anti-semitic rant box) is completely irrelevant."

Sorry, but I'll put in a good word whenever I can for an outstanding man who is currently under attack by the professionally virtuous. Among other things, they want us to believe that a man who hammered the Ku Klux Klan repeatedly and effectively in almost every issue of his magazine, at a time when the Klan was a power, and not just in the South, a man whom the troglodytes on Maryland's eastern shore tried to lynch because he fought lynching and humiliated the lynchers, was a "racist." No doubt he was a "racist" by the standards of the early 21st century. He was also a more effective fighter against racism than any of his ostentatiously virtuous critics. What happened to the Mercury after Mencken was dead, and long after he had any editorial control over it, is irrelevant. Sorry, Pamela, but my attitude towards Mencken isn't the only instance of my diversion from today's Conservative party line.

[Gabi]

Great stuff to read. I will take it with me to my parents house: It is already Holy Night here.

Merry Christmas to David and Ray. Merry Christmas to all!

This weblog with all its postings and commentaries helped us to survive in Germany. :-)

Gabi and N. Hale

[Paul]

No simple answer to the complex set of contradictions that was H. L. Mencken, American iconoclast and independent thinker, and son of German immigrants, like another American I admire, Eric Hoffer.

“[a]mong the most intriguing aspects of Mencken is the number of paradoxes in the man. … this most famous twentieth-century opponent of “puritanism” was, in many respects, a puritan himself. He was famous as a South hater who, on more than one occasion, proclaimed himself a Southerner; a conservative who, in the 1920s, was lionized by liberals; a man who spoke of “niggeros,” “blackamoors,” and “coons,” yet (and this as a half Southerner) had black writers into his home as dinner guests and championed more African-American writers than any other editor of his time. He was…an apparent anti-Semite in much of his writing, both public and private, yet a man most of whose closest friends and associates for a time were Jewish, as well as one who gave a great deal of time and effort to helping individual Jews escape Hitler’s Germany. He was a reformer who hated the notion of reform. And he was the American writer of the twentieth century who would seem to be most nearly devoid of what Mark Twain called “the moral sense,” yet was a man always guided by fixed notions of right and wrong.” (Hobson, Mencken: A Life (1994), pp. xvii-xviii).

Even Hannah Arendt revered Martin Heidegger. Had I been introduced to him, I would not have deigned to shake his hand, if only because of his treatment of Husserl, but Arendt may have been on a higher level of conciliation than I can reach.

But I diverge... or maybe not, for Arendt coined the phrase the "banality of evil," and that brings me to Pamela's question, "When a man will not help his brother and a husband will not help his wife, have not they been dehumanized themselves?" The sobering answer to that may be not that they are dehumanized, but all too human, because it is the tendency of most to obey orders from above and conform to mass opinion without much thought or reflection.

It is highly ironic that many Sixty-Eighters, reacting to the gray Adenauer years, questioning the moral lapses of their parents, yielded to knee-jerk anti-Americanism and regimented thinking, and supported the terrorist murder of innocents and paid homage to dictators. Calling themselves anti-fascist, on many regrettable occasions they have been fascists themselves.

Among the insults I have heard Americans called in Germany, there is none I like better than the leftist cliché "cowboy." We just recently read it in a post from a distressed woman, booted off this blog, apparently, for her language, which included puerile comments about participants' cockmanship, or lack thereof.

Call me cowboy, if you like: not what you picture, a reckless, irresponsible show-off, but a man of the open spaces who is determined to hold on to his freedom and to think and act independently, whether on a subway car in 1930's Berlin or in Germany right now.

Yes, ma'am. Call me cowboy. That's an honor.

Better John Wayne wearing spurs and Stetson than Gerhard Schroeder in Armani suits, smoking Cuban cigars.

[Pamela]

@Paul
but Arendt may have been on a higher level of conciliation than I can reach.

I'll say. They had an affair when she was his student and she rekindled it for just a bit when she visited him after the war.

[Pamela]

Oh, I forgot to ask a question I have. The story of The Cobbler of Koepenick - is that a true story or just a little cultural joke Germans tell about themselves?

[Gunter]

Yes the cobbler of koepenick is a true story that happened 1906 in Berlin.

Ten Days afterwards, he was arrested, and sentenced to prison for four years.
The Emperor was so amused by the story that he pardonned him :)

[Pamela]

Oh no Gunter! That's hilarious!

[Ambrose Wolfinger]

@ Pamela,

1. I'm with Helian on H.L. Mencken. I had the exact same thought as he when I read that this article appeared in the American Mercury in 1934. I'll recommend to anyone Mencken's Carnival of Buncombe for political writing that is just as valid and enjoyable today as the day it was published.

2. Mencken, like others in the past, was a contradiction when it came to his attitude about and actions toward minorities. In the end, all you can do is look at the sum total and decide. That's why I would put Mencken in the same category as Truman and Nixon; that is, men whose actions outweigh their private comments.

3. You can read about Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt, the Captain of Koepenick (or as it was spelled in 1906, Coepenick), at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Voigt. I believe the more common title is the Captain of Koepenick or der Hauptmann von Koepenick. Anyway, what Bouton wrote is accurate enough. I've visited Koepenick countless times, as my wife grew up just east of Koepenick in Wilhelmshagen. I'll recommend the Rathskeller in Koepenickrathaus (same one that Herr Voigt visited one hundred years ago) if you like traditional cuisine. Their Berliner Eisbein is the best in the city, in my opinion.

4. I thought the most interesting part of Bouton's article was in regard to how willingly the Germans in the past have submitted to foreign conquerers. That behavior may still exist. A few times, I've observed to some German colleagues and friends that: a) an Iran that can wipe Israel off the map can also wipe Berlin off the map and b) Germany's biggest threat is her birthrate. I've always received the same response, which is a helpless shrug and comments to the effect that there is nothing that can be done. I doubt these reactions would surprise Bouton.

[Paul]

@Pamela

To my knowledge, Arendt did not resume her affair with Heidegger after the war. They did meet briefly. Supposedly, Heidegger told his wife afterwards that Arendt had been his "life's passion" and the inspiration for his work.

Their relationship is one example among many of how interwoven the lives of Jews and Germans were--and still are: a reason why Germans, should a second Holocaust occur, would suffer a blow to the heart of their culture.

There's no doubt that Arendt had thought long and hard about questions of reconciliation. Among others, she wrote: "Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell."

That's quite an insight, and at this time of year, it seems so appropriate.

I think, in particular, of these posts of mine here, as well as others', the hostility in them, a response to the hostility I, we, experience, originating in the darker undercurrents of German history and tugging us along... we must struggle against it.

Whichever side of the fence we are on, we should be courageous enough to withdraw from all our projections and, before facing the darkness in others, come to terms with the darkness in ourselves.

[Pamela]

Paul, IIRC it was in a letter to Mary McCarthy that Arendt wrote about her seduction of Heidegger during her visit - a one night stand that she seemed to think of as a form of revenge. I'll see if I can find the book. But it's been at least ten years since I did the Arendt/McCarthy book tour, so I'll have to double check.

Arendt was never an observant Jew, but forgiveness is very much a part of the culture. A slightly different slant than what one finds in Christianity tho'. In Christianity, the emphasis is on the wronged person's obligation to forgive. In Judaism, the person who committed the wrong is obligated to ask for forgiveness. Yom Kippor is the holiday dedicated to just that.

But in both religions, the need to forgive one's self is addressed as something separate. In Judaism, we talk about acts of atonement. In Christianity, well, I'm not sure - the Catholics have confession but the other sects? All of which is a roundabout way of saying I think Germans really need to start forgiving themselves. There is indeed a spell that needs to be broken.

Ambrose Wolfinger

I'm not argueing with Helien - or you - about Mencken, only stating that I think that discussion is so off-topic as to be irrelevent to the thread. That's all.

I've always received the same response, which is a helpless shrug and comments to the effect that there is nothing that can be done

Nihilism, pure and simple. We have the problem over here also. The new head bishop of the Episcopalian Church, a woman whose name I must find forgettable as I can't remember it, gave an interview recently.
She was asked about the dwindling membership roles. Her explanation was that because Episcopalians have a higher level of education than members of other denominations, they deliberately under breed so as not to use more of the Earth's reasources. This is not faith, this is The Cult of Gaia.

Last year I went to the funeral of a friend who was not religious, but his widow felt there should be some such component for tradition's sake if nothing else. So, a minister from the Unitarian Church did the honors. There was a lot of blather about 'The Spirit of Life and Love', but never were the words 'G-d', 'Jesus', 'Christ' or even 'amen' spoken.

When I later commented about that to a friend, she snorted, "The only time you will ever hear the words 'Jesus Christ' uttered in a Unitarian quote unquote church is when the janitor falls down the stairs."

This is not to say that I think everyone has to believe in G-d. I don't. I know more than my share of atheists who understand quite well the civilizational strengths that the Judeo-Christian ethic has given Western Civilization.

Nihilism, collectivization and totalitarianism are not among them.

[John F. Opie]

Hi -

I studied philosophy in Freiburg (1981-1986) and did a lot of work with von Hermann, who was functionally Heidegger's last student.

We talked about Heidegger and Husserl at some length, as I was going to do my PhD thesis on exactly that relationship. Didn't do for a lot of reasons.

The Husserl family is still in Freiburg and has never, ever, ever forgiven Heidegger for what he did. Nor will they ever.

Heidegger himself was horribly embarrassed by what happened. To a certain extent he is to blame; in a different extent, he was used by the National Socialists to achieve their ends.

Fundamentally, Heidegger betrayed his teacher and mentor in order to ensure that the University got a maximum of money and support from the new regime. This was done in an opportunistic manner, and Heidegger was, bluntly, naive and stupid for believing that he could stay out of politics and simply do his beloved research and support his students. He gave several speeches where his naive political ideas of German uniqueness was given public airing, resulting not only in the public parading of his naivete, but also the abuse of his office and reputation by the National Socialists in order to further their own goals.

Like I said, the Husserl family has never forgiven Heidegger. Heidegger and Husserl met before Husserl's death, but there is no record of the conversation that I am aware of: just the report that Husserl gave him the tongue-lashing of his life, and that Heidegger was forever ashamed for his actions, but never willing to acknowledge how badly he had behaved. Heidegger in his personal life was a bit of a bully, especially with his women, and I can well imagine Arendt sleeping with him out of a sense of curiousity and also to be in control: after all, she chose to do so, and never ended up as a one of his conquests.

And if you don't think that there's isn't a lot of this in philosophy, you've never been a philosophy grad student... :-)

John

JohnF

[Pamela]

JohnF

In her end notes on a paper titled "What is Existential Philosophy?" Arendt writes a bit about Heidegger's behavior. Get this:

...that this entire mode of behavior has such exact parallels in German Romanticism that one can hardly believe them to result from the sheer coincidence of a purely personal failure of character. Heidegger is really (let us hope) the last Romantic-an immensely talented Friedrich Schlegel or Adam Muller, as it were, whose complete lack of responsibility is attributable to a spiritual playfulness that stems in part from delusions of genius and in part from despair."

Read that again. Ok, now read it again.

Look at what she just did to Heidegger. She absolves him of any moral responsibility by consigning him to the Romantics, for whom she had little regard, and while crediting him with talent, his lack of true genius gets him off the hook.

Castration.

Whatever happens, don't ever let them give you to the women.

I was a philosophy major and very good friends with the wife of one of the profs (from the Netherlands who was good friends with Husserl)- she hired me to teach a pass/fail beginning course in her high school. I got the real skinny on Sartre and Simone. Truly appalling people.

[John F. Opie]

Hi Pamela -

Ouch. "...delusions of genius and in part from despair."

Part of my thesis would have shown that Heidegger's Sein und Zeit owed so much more to Husserl than Heidegger would have been willing to admit, and that his later philosophy was terribly flawed due to his romanticism, whereas Husserl, as mathematician first and philosopher later, was the true master.

:-)

And Heidegger did despair, but less of his own failings and much more of how he was either fatally misunderstood or despaired of the stupidity of his public and the inability to understand how noble, truly noble, the Germn soul was. He preferred the friendship of the local farmers and the wisdom of the "Stammtisch" to intellectual honesty, and I think his work after the war wasn't much besides coasting on his fame and reputation.

And the parallels of German Romanticism and its ties to some of the most virulent anti-Americanism are well hidden and deep: German romanticism is fundamentally a long-term problem of the German psyche and collective soul, such as it is.

And the French existentialists really were appalling folks, appeasers and useful idiots along the lines of Fonda and a significant portion of the US left.

JohnF

[Pamela]

JohnF
And the parallels of German Romanticism and its ties to some of the most virulent anti-Americanism are well hidden and deep

Good point. The dominant strain of German romanticism imbued the term Volk with concepts that were, are, and ever will be, completely alien to Americans.

To this day, I don't think most Americans hear what Germans heard when Hitler used the term. Quite cleverly, I might add.

And regarding Sartre and Simone -

I had just read her book and was talking to my friend about it when she just got exasperated. "Look, it's all a pack of lies. Jean-Paul is one cruel SOB, she's a sniveling hypocrite who pretends not to care. She became trapped in an abusive relationship for the needs of her own ego." (My friend was a shrink.) Her contempt had nothing to do with the politics, but much more with the personal.

And writing this now, the Clintons come to mind.

[Pamela]

JohnF.

Quick question. The paper I cited "What is Existential Philosophy?" was apparently published in 1946. The editor's note I have ("Essays in Understanding 1930-1954") says Arendt wrote in the American (not the German) edition:

Finally, it has been rumored that he [Heidegger] has placed himself at the disposal of the French occupational authorities for the re-education of the German people.

Do you know if that rumor is correct?

[John F. Opie]

Hi -

That's a tad complicated: at the time, Heidegger was effectively persona non grata with the university and the French occupying Freiburg. He didn't "place himself at the disposal" but rather was working his way back into the good graces of the university. Part of that was a willingness to basically agree not to expound on the virtues of "Germanness" as he had under the National Socialists. But to put himself at the disposal?

Only in the most limited of senses...

And nice call on the Clintons... :-)

[Paul]

@Pamela

"I think Germans really need to start forgiving themselves. There is indeed a spell that needs to be broken."

Yes. "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," coming to terms with the past, must include reconciliation.

I knew and loved a German woman, when a student, in the seventies, a leftist. When she was six, while vacationing with her parents on a beach in the Netherlands, a man, hearing her speak German, strode up to her and slapped her in the face. She told her parents, but they, she said, only looked at her sadly.

The irony is that her father, a minister, had once spoken unfavorably of the Nazis from the pulpit, and suffered subsequently.

My relations with the woman ended, among others because of her politics, and because of her bitterness, pessimism, and hatred. I thought of her when recently reading the lines:

"Ich fang an, müd zu sein des Sonnenlichts,
Ach, stürze gleich der Weltenbau zu nichts."

Coming to terms with the past means not only overcoming the stigma of Nazi crimes but also the despair and hopelessness bequeathed to Germans born after the war. The obviously false choice is denial of the past, the more subtle, also false one surrender to shame and despair.

As for the role of religion, I don't believe that a clear conscience can be coerced either by religion or state. It's up to Germans themselves, as individuals.

@JohnF

"And the French existentialists really were appalling folks, appeasers and useful idiots along the lines of Fonda and a significant portion of the US left."

I hope you're excluding Albert Camus.

Like Orwell and Koestler, he saw through the "historical necessity" cited by French communists in their defense of Stalinists, and criticized "fellow travelers" at considerable risk to himself. Later, it was no surprise that the French leftists of 1968 rejected Camus as too moderate and anti-communist.

His dismissal of leftist utopias and analysis of terrorism remains valid today.

[Pamela]

@Paul
She told her parents, but they, she said, only looked at her sadly.

Unbelievable. If her parents made her feel like she deserved that, it's no wonder she grew up pessimistic. BTW, I went looking for my Hannah Arendt books to confirm that Heidegger relapse. Those books were nowhere to be found. Then I remembered - I never owned them. I borrowed them from the library! HA! Amazon loves me, tho' and they should be here in a few days.

JohnF, thanks. That makes more sense. Arendt wrote a snide piece about him as a fox that spent so much time in other people's traps he actually thought they were burrows.