History of the Jews (84 page)

 

One cannot of course accept that Freud or Adler is a generally valid representative of European mankind…. The Jew as a relative nomad has never created, and presumably never will create, a cultural form of his own, for all his instincts and talent are dependent on a more or less civilized host people…. In my view it has been a great mistake of medical psychology to apply Jewish categories, which are not even valid for all Jews, to Christian German and Slavs. In this way the most precious secret of Teutonic man, the deep-rooted, creative awareness of his soul, has been explained away as a banal, infantile sump, while my warning voice, over the decades, was suspected of anti-Semitism…. Has the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism, at which the whole world gazes in astonishment, taught them to know better?
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Scientists were similarly found to invalidate Einstein’s work as ‘Jewish physics’.

Indeed, the German academy, taken as a whole, far from acting as a barrier to Hitlerism, assisted its progress to power. A key element in the Nazi triumph was the generation of schoolteachers who matured in the last decade of the nineteenth century, were infected with
Völkisch
anti-Semitism, and had become senior teachers by the 1920s.
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The textbooks they used reflected the same influences. The university academics similarly contributed to the rise of Nazi influence by preaching national salvation through panaceas and ‘spiritual revivals’, instead of sceptical empiricism.
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Above all, Hitler achieved his greatest success among university students. They were his vanguard. At each stage in the growth of the Nazis, student support preceded general electoral support. The Nazis worked in the first place through the student fraternities, which in 1919 adopted the ‘Eisenach Resolution’, excluding Jews on racial as well as religious grounds.
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As they grew more influential, they worked through the students’ union, the Hochschulring movement, which dominated student life in the 1920s. Finally, towards the end of the decade they set up their own student party. The success of the Nazis was due to the willingness of enough young fanatics to devote themselves full-time to the effort, to the party’s egalitarianism and radical programme.
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But an important bond between the Nazis and the students was the use of violent demonstrations against Jews. The students were among the first to organize boycotts and mass petitions to force Jews out of government
jobs and the professions, especially teaching, and these forms of action soon developed into actual violence. In 1922 the threat of a student riot led to Berlin University cancelling a memorial service for the murdered Walther Rathenau. This would have been inconceivable before the war, and what was most sinister was not just the threat of violence but the pusillanimity of the university authorities in bowing to it. Attacks on Jewish students and on Jewish professors, who were forced to give up their lecture courses, increased to the point in 1927 when the government withdrew recognition from the Deutsche Studentenschaft because of its support for violence. But this made little difference and no resolute action was ever taken by the universities themselves to curb the student thugs. It was not that the professors were pro-Nazi. But they were anti-Weimar and anti-democratic and, above all, they were cowardly in standing up to student acts which they knew to be wrong—an adumbration of the more general cowardice of the nation later. As a result, the Nazis effectively controlled the campuses two or three years before they took over the country.

The climate of actual violence which nourished Nazism was itself sustained by growing verbal and pictorial violence in the media. It is sometimes argued that satire, even of the most savage kind, is a sign of health in a free society and that no restrictions should be placed on it. Jewish history does not lend support to this view. The Jews have been more frequently the target of such attacks than any other group and they know from long and bitter experience that the violence of print is often the prelude to the violence of blood. Weimar was, by German standards, an ultra-liberal society and one of the effects of its liberalism was to destroy most restraints in the press. Just as the Arab extremist newspapers took advantage of Samuel’s liberalism in Palestine, so the Nazis revelled in Weimar’s licence to insult. There had long been a pornographic side to anti-Semitism, especially in Germany and Austria; the
Judensau
theme itself was often a symptom of it. But Hitler’s stress on the sexual, race-defilement issue combined with Weimar permissiveness to produce a peculiarly vicious form of anti-Semitic propaganda epitomized by the weekly
Der Stürmer
, run by the Nazi boss in Middle Franconia, Julius Streicher. It helped to spread and intensify one of the chief, perennial sources of anti-Semitic violence: the notion that Jews are not part of humanity and therefore not entitled to the protection we instinctively accord a human being. It was by no means the only such publication. But it set the increasingly unrestrained tone of visual assault on Jews. Under Weimar’s laws it was exceedingly difficult to prosecute, for Streicher enjoyed immunity
as a Landtag and later a Reichstag deputy. It seems to have sold only 13,000 copies in 1927 (the only reliable circulation figure), but in the last phases of the Nazi ascent to power it won a national audience.
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Unfortunately, the media violence was not one-sided. Just as Communist street gangs, as well as Nazis, took violence systematically into the streets, and so co-operated in preparing national violence, a great deal of verbal savagery was produced from the liberal side, much of it by Jews. Satire came naturally to Jews, and in Germany Heine had forged a powerful and often vicious matrix, the inspiration for many later Jewish writers. Between 1899 and 1936 the Viennese writer Karl Kraus (1874-1936), baptized like Heine, ran a paper called
Die Fackel
(The Torch), which set new standards in aggressive satire, much of it directed against Jews, such as Herzl and Freud. ‘Psychoanalysis’, he wrote, ‘is the newest Jewish disease’ and ‘the unconscious is a ghetto for people’s thoughts’. His venomous skill in finding the tender spot was widely admired and imitated in Weimar Germany, and used in a highly provocative manner, especially by Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) and the journal
Weltbühne
. It too had only a small sale, 16,000 (1931), but it aroused enormous controversy because of its deliberate attacks on everything right-thinking Germans held dear. Tucholsky’s 1929 book,
Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles
, went for the judiciary, the churches, the police, Hindenburg, Social Democrats and trade union leaders, and contained a brilliant photomontage of German generals entitled: ‘Animals are looking at you’.
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From the start this media violence from the left played into the hands of anti-Semites. Karl Gerecke made skilful use of
Weltbühne
in his tract
Biblischer Antisemitismus
(1920), a Nazi standby. Jewish attacks on the army were particularly dangerous. The Jewish ex-servicemen’s association was able to show from official figures that the number of Jews who served in the war, and who were killed, wounded and decorated, was strictly in accordance with the Jewish proportion of the population. But there was a popular belief, shared and propagated by Hitler and the Nazis with relentless persistence, that Jews had evaded service and, indeed, stabbed the army in the back. The most violent satirist of the army-Junker class was, in fact, a non-Jew, George Grosz; but he was closely associated with Jewish artists and writers and so was said to have been ‘put up to it’. Tucholsky was Grosz’s prose version. Many of his statements were deliberately designed to fill people with rage: ‘There is no secret of the German army’, he wrote, ‘which I would not hand over readily to a foreign power.’
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But enraged people, especially if they are inarticulate and incapable of replying in kind, may retaliate physically, or vote for
those who will; and Tucholsky and his fellow satirists enraged not just professional army officers but the families of countless conscripts killed in the war. The anti-Semitic and the nationalist press ensured that Tucholsky’s more wounding attacks were given the widest circulation.

Some Jews tried hard to counter the unpatriotic, Bolshevist image thrust upon them. Jewish children were trained to be artisans and farmers.
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In the early 1920s, a Berlin lawyer, Dr Max Naumann, a former army captain, formed the League of German Nationalist Jews. There was also the right-wing Jewish youth organization, Kameraden, and the National League of Jewish Frontline Veterans. But Naumann made the mistake of trying to minimize Hitler’s hatred of the Jews by praising him as a political genius who could restore German prosperity, and all of them shared the illusion that they could do deals with the Nazis.
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There is no evidence that anything they did made Jews more popular.

The insuperable difficulty any patriotic German Jew had to contend with was the Weimar Republic itself. It was born of defeat, indissolubly linked with defeat, and, in the minds of most Germans, associated with Jews, the
Judenrepublik
. From beginning to end it was a millstone round the Jewish neck. Yet the Jews played little part in Weimar politics, except at the very beginning. Rathenau and Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Minister in 1923 and 1928, were the first and last Jewish Weimar politicians of any consequence. It is true that Jews were instrumental in creating the German Communist Party. But with the rise of Stalinism they were soon pushed out of its higher ranks, exactly as in Russia. In 1932, when the party ran 500 candidates and got 100 elected, not one was a Jew.
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The Social Democrat Party was run by gentile working-class trade unionists most of whom actively disliked Jewish left-wingers, whom they saw as undesirable middle-class intellectuals. The actual constitution of Weimar, with its system of proportional representation, strongly favoured extremist parties like the Nazis, who could never have come to power legally under, say, the British first-past-the-post system. And Jewish satirists like Tucholsky went for Weimar as fiercely as the Nazis themselves.

Yet the identification was there, and its roots were cultural. Enemies of the Jews accused them of kidnapping German culture, of transforming it into a new, alien thing, which they termed
Kulturbolschewismus
. The notion of cultural theft was powerful and exceedingly dangerous. Some Jewish writers had warned against it. Jewish use of the German language, as Kafka put it, was ‘usurpation of an alien property, which had not been acquired but stolen, (relatively)
quickly picked up and which remains someone else’s property even if not a single verbal mistake can be pointed out’. Even before the war, Moritz Goldstein had warned in a
Kunstwart
article, ‘The German-Jewish Parnassus’, that Jews were, in effect, beginning to take charge of the culture of a people which denied them the right to do so.
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With the creation of Weimar, Jews became more prominent in German cultural life, chiefly for the reason that the advanced ideas with which they had been associated were now beginning to achieve acceptance. Thus in 1920 the Impressionist Max Liebermann was elected the first Jewish president in the history of the Prussian Academy.

Yet the notion that Weimar witnessed a Jewish takeover of German culture is false. The fact is that, during the 1920s, Germany was richer in talent than at any time before or since. It had always been outstanding in music and strong in literature but now it took the lead in the visual arts too. For a time Berlin became the cultural capital of the world. Berlin was much hated by the anti-Semites. Wolfgang Kapp, a proto-Hitler who led a failed
putsch
there in 1920, had as his slogan: ‘What has become of Berlin? A playground for the Jews.’
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Jews were important in Weimar culture. The phenomenon could not have occurred without them. But they were not dominant. In some areas, especially painting and architecture, their contribution was relatively small. There were many Jewish novelists, such as Alfred Doeblin, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig, Vicki Baum, Leon Feuchtwanger, Alfred Neuman and Bruno Frank, but the leading figures like Thomas Mann were not Jews. The Jews undoubtedly made a huge contribution to the musical scene, both international and German. There were spectacular prodigy-performers like Jascha Heifetz and Vladimir Horowitz, as well as established masters like Artur Schnabel and Artur Rubinstein. Two of Berlin’s leading conductors, Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, were Jews. Kurt Weill wrote the music for Brecht’s
Threepenny Opera
(1928), which was performed over 4,000 times throughout Europe in its first year. There was Arnold Schönberg and his school, though his two most famous pupils, Berg and Webern, were non-Jews. But German music was so rich at this time that Jewish musicians, despite their numbers and talent, were only one of its elements. The 1929 Berlin Festival featured Richard Strauss, Toscanini, Casals, George Szell, Cortot, Thibaud, Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Klemperer and Gigli. What did that prove? Only that music was international and Berliners were lucky.

Jews were certainly a principal reason for the enormous success of the German cinemas in the 1920s. During the war, British, French and later American imports were banned. To fill the 2,000 German and
1,000 Austrian cinemas, German production companies jumped from thirty in 1913 to 250 six years later, and after the war German cinema became dominant in Europe. In 1921 it produced 246 feature films, about the same as America; in 1925 its production (228) was twice as many as Britain and France put together.
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Jews took a leading role in supplying both the quantity and quality of German films.
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
was scripted by Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer, and produced by Erich Pommer.
Metropolis
was directed by Fritz Lang. These were only two of the most influential films. Directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Max Ophuls and Alexander Korda, and actors like Peter Lorre, Elizabeth Bergner, Pola Negri and Conrad Veidt, were part of a galaxy of Jewish talent which created the golden age of German cinema and then, after the rise of Hitler, led a diaspora to Hollywood, London and Paris. There was undeniably a strong Jewish element in the German cinema, and both Lang and G. W. Pabst were fascinated by the concept of the
golem
.
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But on the whole the German cinema of the 1920s was brilliant and adventurous rather than politically and culturally committed and its contribution to German cultural paranoia about the Jews is hard to discern now.