Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (24 page)

German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a ‘back to the countryside’ movement. There were special
Volk
schools, which stressed open-air life. ‘Mountain theatres’, shaped from natural amphitheatres, were built in the Harz Mountains and elsewhere, for dramatized
‘Volk
rites’ and other spectacles, an activity the Nazis later adopted on a huge scale and with great panache. The first youth movements, especially the highly successful
Wandervögel
, strumming guitars and hiking through the countryside, took on an anti-Semitic coloration, especially when they invaded the schools and universities. The ‘garden city’ movement in Germany was led by a violent anti-Semite, Theodor Fritsch, who published the
Antisemitic Catechism
, which went through forty editions, 1887–1936, and who was referred to by the Nazis as
Der Altmeister
, the master-teacher. Even the sunbathing movement, under the impulse of Aryan and Nordic symbols, acquired an anti-Semitic flavour.
³⁶
Indeed in 1920s Germany there were two distinct types of nudism: ‘Jewish’ nudism, symbolized by the black dancer Josephine Baker, which was heterosexual, commercial, cosmopolitan, erotic and immoral; and anti-Semitic nudism, which was German,
Völkisch
, Nordic, nonsexual (sometimes homosexual), pure and virtuous.
³⁷

It is, indeed, impossible to list all the varieties of ingredients which, from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, were stirred into the poisonous brew of German anti-Semitism. Unlike Marxism, which was essentially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a cultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism. It was Eugen Diederichs, the publisher of
Die Tat
from 1912, who coined the phrase ‘the new romanticism’, the answer to Jewish Expressionism. He published
Der Wehrwolf
, and at his house in Jena, surrounded by intellectuals from the Youth Movement, he wore zebra-striped trousers and a turban and launched the saying ‘Democracy is a civilization, while aristocracy equals culture.’ He also contrived to transform Nietzsche into an anti-Semitic hero. Other audacious acts of literary theft were perpetrated. Tacitus’
Germania
was turned into a seminal
Volkisch
text; Darwin’s works were tortured into a ‘scientific’ justification for race ‘laws’, just as Marx had plundered them for class ‘laws’. But there were plenty of genuine mentors too. Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion stripped of Christianity because it had been Judaized by St Paul, ‘the Rabbi’. Julius Langbehn taught that assimilated Jews were ‘a pest and a cholera’, who poisoned the artistic creativity of the
Volk:
they should be exterminated, or reduced to slavery along with other ‘lower’ races.
³⁸
Both Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Eugen Dühring stressed the necessary ‘barbarism’ or Gothic element in German self-defence against Jewish decadence and the importance of the ‘purity’ and idealism of the Nordic pantheon. Chamberlain, whom Hitler was to visit on his deathbed to kiss his hands in 1927, argued that God flourished in the German and the Devil in the Jewish race, the polarities of Good and Evil. The Teutons had inherited Greek aristocratic ideals and Roman love of justice and added their own heroism and fortitude. Thus it was their role to fight and destroy the only other race, the Jews, which had an equal purity and will to power. So the Jew was not a figure of low comedy but a mortal, implacable enemy: the Germans should wrest all the power of modern technology and industry from the Jews, in order to destroy them totally.
³⁹
Some of the German racial theorists were Marxists, like Ludwig Woltmann, who transformed the Marxist class-struggle into a world race-struggle and advocated the arousal of the masses by oratory and propaganda to mobilize the Germans into the conquests needed to ensure their survival and proliferation as a race: ‘The German race has been selected to dominate the earth.’

By the 1920s, in brief, any political leader in Germany who wished to make anti-Semitism an agent in his ‘will to power’ could assemble his campaign from an enormous selection of slogans, ideas and fantasies, which had accumulated over more than half a century. The Versailles Treaty itself gave the controversy new life by driving into Germany a great wave of frightened Jews from Russia, Poland and Germany’s surrendered territories. Thus it became an urgent ‘problem’, demanding ‘solutions’. They were not wanting either. There were proposals for double-taxation for Jews; isolation or apartheid; a return to the ghetto system; special laws, with hanging for Jews who broke them; an absolute prohibition of inter-marriage between Aryan Germans and Jews. A 1918 best-seller was Artur Dinter’s
Die Sunde wider das Blut (Sins Against the Blood)
, describing how rich Jews violated the racial purity of an Aryan woman. Calls for the extermination of the Jews became frequent and popular, and anti-Semitic pamphlets circulated in millions. There were many violent incidents but when, in 1919, the Bavarian police asked for advice on
how to cope with anti-Semitism, Berlin replied there was no remedy since ‘it has its roots in the difference of race which divides the Israelitic tribe from our
Volk’.
⁴⁰

The Jews tried everything to combat the poison. Some brought up their children to be artisans or farmers. They enlisted in the army. They attempted ultra-assimilation. A Jewish poet, Ernst Lissauer, wrote the notorious ‘Hate England’ hymn. They went to the other extreme and tried Zionism. Or they formed militant Jewish organizations, student leagues, duelling clubs. But each policy raised more difficulties than it removed, for anti-Semitism was protean, hydra-headed and impervious to logic or evidence. As Jakob Wassermann put it: ‘Vain to seek obscurity. They say: the coward, he is creeping into hiding, driven by his evil conscience. Vain to go among them and offer them one’s hand. They say: why does he take such liberties with his Jewish pushfulness? Vain to keep faith with them as a comrade in arms or a fellow-citizen. They say: he is Proteus, he can assume any shape or form. Vain to help them strip off the chains of slavery. They say: no doubt he found it profitable. Vain to counteract the poison.’
⁴¹
Mortitz Goldstein argued that it was useless to expose the baselessness of anti-Semitic ‘evidence’: ‘What would be gained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine. When all calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable.’
⁴²

Germany’s defeat in 1918 was bound to unleash a quest for scapegoats, alien treachery in the midst of the
Volk.
Even without collateral evidence, the Jews, the embodiment of Westernizing ‘civilization’, were automatically cast for the role. But there was evidence as well! The influx of Jews in the immediate post-war period was a fresh dilution of the
Volk
, presaging a further assault on its martyred culture. And Weimar itself, did it not provide daily proof, in parliament, on the stage, in the new cinemas, in the bookshops, in the magazines and newspapers and art galleries, everywhere an ordinary, bewildered German turned, that this cosmopolitan, corrupting and ubiquitous conspiracy was taking over the Reich? What possible doubt could there be that a crisis was at hand, demanding extreme solutions?

It was at this point that the notion of a violent resolution of the conflict between culture and civilization began to take a real grip on the minds of some Germans. Here, once again, the fatal act of Lenin, in beginning the cycle of political violence in 1917, made its morbid contribution. Anti-Semitism had always presented itself as defensive. Now, its proposals to use violence, even on a gigantic scale, could be justified as defensive. For it was generally believed, not only in Germany but throughout Central and Western Europe, that Bolshevism
was Jewish-inspired and led, and that Jews were in control of Communist Parties, and directed Red revolutions and risings wherever they occurred. Trotsky, the most ferocious of the Bolsheviks, who actually commanded the Petrograd
putsch
, was undoubtedly a Jew; so were a few other Russian leaders. Jews had been prominent in the Spartacist rising in Berlin, in the Munich Soviet government, and in the abortive risings in other German cities. Imagination rushed in where facts were hard to get. Thus, Lenin’s real name was Issachar Zederblum. The Hungarian Red Revolution was directed not by Béla Kun but by a Jew called Cohn. Lenin’s Red Terror was a priceless gift to the anti-Semitic extremists, particularly since most of its countless victims were peasants and the most rabid and outspoken of the Cheka terrorizers was the Latvian Jew Latsis. Munich now became the anti-Semitic capital of Germany, because it had endured the Bolshevist-Jewish terror of Kurt Eisner and his gang. The
Münchener Beobachter
, from which the Nazi
Völkische Beobachter later
evolved, specialized in Red atrocity stories, such as Kun or Cohn’s crucifixion of priests, his use of a ‘mobile guillotine’ and so on. And many of the news items reported from Russia were, of course, perfectly true. They formed a solid plinth on which a flaming monument of fantasy could be set up. Hitler was soon to make highly effective use of the Red Terror fear, insisting, time and again, that the Communists had already killed 30 million people. The fact that he had added a nought in no way removed the reality of those first, terrible digits. He presented his National Socialist militancy as a protective response and a preemptive strike. It was ‘prepared to oppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater terrorism’.
⁴³
And in that ‘greater terrorism’ the Jews would be hunted down not as innocent victims but as actual or potential terrorists themselves.

The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary stage in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German body politic. The German state was a huge creature with a small and limited brain. The Easterners, following the example of Bismarck, grafted onto the Prussian military state a welfare state which provided workers with social insurance and health-care as of right and by law. As against the Western liberal notion of freedom of choice and private provision based on high wages, it imposed the paternalistic alternative of compulsory and universal security. The state was nursemaid as well as sergeant-major. It was a towering shadow over the lives of ordinary people and their relationship towards it was one of dependence and docility. The German industrialists strongly approved of this notion of the state as guardian, watching over with firm but benevolent solicitude the lives of its citizens.
⁴⁴
The philosophy was Platonic; the result corporatist. The German Social Democrats did nothing to arrest this
totalitarian drift when they came briefly to power in 1918; quite the contrary. They reinforced it. The Weimar Republic opened windows but it did not encourage the citizen to venture outside the penumbra of state custody.

Who was in charge of this large and masterful apparatus, now that the Easterners were in opposition? The answer was: nobody. The bureaucrats were trained on Prussian lines. They followed the rules and when in doubt waited for orders. The architects of the Weimar Republic made no attempt to change this pattern and encourage civil servants to develop a sense of moral autonomy. Presumably they feared that the officials of the new regime might be tempted to disobey their new parliamentary masters. At all events they were exhorted to regard obedience as the supreme virtue. In a famous lecture given in 1919, Max Weber insisted: ‘The honour of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of superior authorities.’ Only the politician had the right and duty to exercise personal responsibility.
⁴⁵
It would be difficult to conceive of worse advice to offer to German mandarins. Naturally, it was followed, right to the bitter end in 1945.

The moral abdication of the bureaucrats might not have mattered so much if the politicians had followed the other half of Weber’s counsel. But the parliamentarians never provided the vigorous and self-confident leadership needed to make Weimar a success. When in doubt they always fell back on Article 48, which was first used in August 1921 to forbid anti-republican meetings. It was as though they were conscious all the time that the bulk of the nation had reservations about Weimar, regarded its élites as lackeys of the Allies,
Erfüllungspolitiker
, men pledged to fulfil a hated treaty. Often they gave the impression that they shared these doubts themselves. The Socialists set this pattern from the start. Called to office for the first time in 1918 they made no real attempt to change the basic structures of an overwhelmingly authoritarian country. The SPD leaders were worthy, toilsome men: Ebert a saddler, Noske a basket-maker, Wels an upholsterer, Severing a locksmith, Scheidemann a printer. They were dull, unimaginative, sneered at by the Left intelligentsia, despised by the academics. They relinquished their grip on office all too easily as soon as the Centre-Right recovered its nerve. They lacked the will to power.

They were, moreover, thrown off balance right at the start by the decision of the Far Left to follow Lenin’s example and opt for violence against parliamentananism in the winter of 1918–19. We see here, once again, the disastrous consequences which flow when men use the politics of force because they are too impatient for the politics of argument. The Left
putsch
drove the Social Democrats
into a fatal error. Afraid to use the regular army units, which might have proved mutinous, Gustav Noske asked the old High Command to provide him with a
Freikorps
of demobilized officers. They were, of course, produced with dispatch. The
SPD
ministers thus gave legitimacy to a movement which was already spreading in the East, where German settler communities were fighting the Poles, and which was from the start violently and incorrigibly anti-Weimar. Soon there were no less than sixty-eight of these bodies, sometimes called
Bunds
or
Ordens
, with burgeoning social and political aims and a taste for street-fighting. One, the
Bund Wehrwolf
, fought the French – and the Socialists – in the Ruhr. Another, the
Jungdeutscher Orden
, had 130,000 members by 1925.
⁴⁶
It was from such an
Orden
, run by Karl Harrer, that the Nazis emerged, Hitler turning it into a mass-party, with the
SA
or Brownshirts as a reminder of its
Freikorps
origins.
⁴⁷