[CTRL] They Thought They Were Free

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-Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from:
They Thought They Were Free
the germans 1933-45
Milton Mayer
The University of Chicago Press©1955
346 pps
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CHAPTER 20

"Peoria uber Alles"

Take Germany as a city cut off from the outside world by flood or fire
advancing from every direction. The mayor proclaims martial law, suspending
council debate. He mobilizes the populace, assigning each section its tasks.
Half the citizens are at once engaged directly in the public business. Every
private act—a telephone call, the use of an electric light, the service of a
pbysician—becomes a public act. Every private right—to take a walk, to
attend a meeting, to operate a printing press—becomes a public Tight. Every
private institution—the hospital, the church, the club—becomes a public
institution. Here, although we never think to call it by any name but
pressure of necessity, we have the whole formula of totalitarianism.

The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without,
indeed, a second thought—and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but
his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual
needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, its preservation the
first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before
becomes an "authoritarian personality." A few recalcitrants have to be
disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of
their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in
hand—the antisocial elements, the liberty-bowlers, the agitators among the
poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens—95 per cent
or so of the population-duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at
first awkwardly but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.

The community is suddenly an organism, a single body and a single soul,
consuming its members for its own purposes, For the duration of the emergency
the city does not exist for the citizen but the citizen for the city. The
harder the city is pressed, the harder its citizens work for it and the more
productive and efficient they become in its interest. Civic pride becomes the
highest pride, for the end purpose of all one's enormous efforts is the
preservation of the city. Conscientiousness is the highest virtue now, the
common good the highest good. (Is it any wonder that the German people, whose
nation disorders the world, have established the world's best-ordered cities,
the Milwaukees of America as well as of Germany?)

What if the emergency persists, not for weeks, months, or even years, but for
generations and for centuries? Unrelieved sacrifice requires compensation in
the only specie available. Peoria—let Peoria be our beleaguered city—is
seen, little by little, to be different from Quincy, Springfield, Decatur. It
is something special to be a Peorian, something, if say so we must, heroic.
Tales of the founding of Peoria, once taken lightly, reveal that our city was
no ordinary city to begin with. Legends turn out to be true. No wonder Peoria
sticks it out, sees it through; see the stuff Peorians are made of, always
were. Peorians are superior people, superior blood and superior bone; their
survival proves it.

Their ancestors, they recall, established the city against the most fearful
odds; their descendants will deliver it against odds more fearful still.
There will be a New Peoria, a Greater Peoria, a Thousand-Year Peoria. The
world will ring with its timeless fame, kneel at its topless towers. And
Peoria will be a model to mankind; Peorian courage, Peorian endurance,
Peorian patriotism-these will be a model to a world that, because it has
never been tried like Peoria, has grown soft, decadent, plutocratic, has
fallen prey to rot and to the parasites that rot carries with it.

And whom, meanwhile, among Peorians, have we called to the helm in our hour,
our aeon, of struggle, in our place of danger?—Peorians who are tried and
true, men who have served their city and never disserved it, men who have
represented the best of Peoria to the world, who have always known its
glories and extolled them. We want the Old Guard, not the avant-garde; the
doers, not the donothings; the clear thinkers, not the skeptics; the bel
ievers in Peoria, not the complainers and the cranks. We don't want the
men who always wanted to make Peoria over and who see our trial as their
opportunity; this, of all times, is no time for divisiveness.

The things that a country honors will be cultivated there. What shall we
teach the young Peorians, who will follow us? What life shall we bold out to
them as the highest life? -Why, the life they will have to live to deliver
their city, in a Peoria oppressed and encircled. The flabby and effete must
go, and with it the dabbling, the faddism, the free thinking that squander
our people's time and their energies, divert them from the overriding need of
their city, and debase their tastes and their morals. Peorianism is, as
Daniel Webster would have said, foursquare, rock-ribbed, copper-sheathed;
red-blooded; undoubting and undivided; staunch, stern, rugged, simple, brave,
clean, and true. Every influence on our people (above all, on our young
people) will be Peorian.

We Peorians cannot live as others. We would not if we could. See them-Quincy,
Springfield, Decatur—hopelessly unprepared for a struggle such as ours, with
their niggling parliamentarism (the Lend-Lease debate; the Army-McCarthy
bearings), their democratic corruptionism (Teapot Dome; the
five-per-centers), their corrosive individualism (Tommy Manville; H. D.
Thoreau). See them fattening while Peoria hungers. See them exploiting
Peoria's prostration. Quincy, Springfield, Decatur, have always hated Peoria.
Why? The answer is suddenly obvious: because we are better than they are.

Why do the Poles, egged on by the English, or the Serbs, egged on by the
Russians, begin these world wars against Germany? The chauvinist braggadocio
of my ten Nazi friends-excluding the teacher and, to a lesser degree, the
cabinetmaker and the bank clerk-was of an order, I thought at first, that I
bad never before encountered. And then I remembered: the "new boy" in the
neighborhood at home, on the Calumet Avenue of my childhood, ringed round by
the neighborhood gang and trying to brazen it out alive. "Betcba my father
can beat your father." Betcba my fatherland can beat yours.

"The whole world has always been jealous of Germany," said my friend the
bill-collector, "and why not?—We Germans are the leaders in. everything."

"We Germans," said my friend the tailor, the only one of the ten who deserved
to be called an ignoramus, and a lazy ignoramus to boot, "are the most
intelligent people in the world, and the hardest working. Is it any wonder
that they bate us? Have you ever seen a Jew or an Englishman work when be
didn't have to?"

"Twice we have had to fight the whole world, all alone," said the baker.
"What good are the Italians or the Japanese?"

But I could always count on the tailor to go the whole hog: "We won both
wars, and both times we were betrayed."

==

CHAPTER 21

New Boy in the Neighborhood

Germany is the "new boy" in the neighborhood of the Western world. The one
durable consequence of the first World War was the unification of a Germany
some of whose states, up until then, had their own kings and courts, their
own armies, ambassadors, and postal systems. And even the war did not
complete the unification; Bavaria and Prussia, which bated one another, both
defied the Weimar Republic with impunity, the one from the right, the other
from the left.

Nationhood was nominally forced upon the dozens of "Sovereign German States"
in 1871 by Prussia, of which the King of Wurttemberg bad said, a half-century
earlier, "Prussia belongs as little to Germany as does Alsace." The
nonexistent Germany of 1870 was composed entirely of foreigners, ethnically
and historically so hodgepodged that an East Prussian or a Bavarian was just
as likely to be taken for a Pole or an Austrian as for a German. Only by his
language could a German be distinguished, and not always then; Low and High
German are as mutually unintelligible as German and Dutch.

The language itself—a Mischmasch, Leibniz called itreflected the German
miscegenation, the "disgrace" which the elite passed on to the populace. "I
have never read a German book," the greatest of all German heroes boasted at
the end of the eighteenth century; and his friend Voltaire wrote home from
the Prussian court, "We all talk French. German is left for soldiers and
horses." Pre-Nazi nationalism tried to drive "loan" words out of the
language—even universal European terms like Telefon—and Nazi nationalism
intensified the campaign. But in vain; German remained a Mischmasch.

German nationalism was, and still is, the effort to create a German nation.
The independence of the old German States had its merits, in spite of the
ridiculous fragmentation it perpetuated and the dozens of ossified nobilities
and their clumsy Ruritania courts in imitation of a Versailles long gone.
Culture flourished (to be sure, at the whim of whimsical princes), but it was
under such princes, and with their self-serving patronage, that German
culture was great. It would be very nice, said Goethe to Eckerman, to cross
the thirty-six States without having one's trunk examined thirty-six times,
"but if one imagines the unity of Germany with a single large capital for the
whole nation, and that this great capital would encourage the development of
genius or contribute to the welfare of the people, be is wrong."

The nationalization of Germany, although it came too late to perform the
historic function it performed everywhere else, was not to be stopped. When
the liberal philosopher Feuerbach wrote his friend Friedrich Kapp' "I would
not give a row of pins for unity unless it rests on liberty," Kapp, a
"Forty-eighter," who had left his Fatherland to find liberty, wrote back from
America: "To be sure, it is disagreeable that Bismarck, and not the
democrats, achieved this magnificent consolidation, that the reactionary
Junkers and bureaucrats of old Prussia rule. But are not the results
achieved, and does it matter who is responsible for such a great achievement?"

Germany was a nation, but in 1871 it was prematurely a nation; in 1914 and in
1918 still prematurely. Like all parvenus, the German nation had, and still
has, a compulsion to display its wealth, its nationhood, and a desperate
terror of losing it, not of being broken apart from without, but, more
terribly, of falling apart within. Englishmen and Frenchmen know that they
are Englishmen and Frenchmen; when I asked a Danish Communist whether, in his
heart, be was a Dane or a Communist, be said, "What a silly question; every
Dane is a Dane." But the German has to be reassured that he is a German. The
German pressure cooker required, and still requires, the fierce, fusing fire
of fanaticism under it.

Russia and the United States of America have both, until recently, at least,
been spared this peculiar experience of German nationalism, partly because of
their longer national history, partly because of their isolation. Like the
other two "Pans," Pan-Slavism and Pan-Americanism, expansionist Pan-Germanism
is the none-too-paradoxical consequence of the dread of decomposition. As
long as the self-consciously fragile German nation is threatened, internally
no less than externally, it will threaten the world, and foreign statesmen
who divide the Germans into our friends and their friends would do well to be
mindful that those Germans who are neither, or who are one today and the
other tomorrow, are thinking of Germany, not of Democracy or Communism.

Just as German nationalism was the effort to create a nation, so German
racism was the effort to create a race out of a geographical group none of
whose stocks, according to all the available pre-Nazi measurements, was
Nordic.

Ethnical heterogeneity is greater among the Germans (taking the Austrians as
Germans) than it is among any other of the world's peoples except the
Russians and the Americans.

True, my ten friends, not one of whom met or even approached the Nordic
standard, rejected their own "Aryanism." But they did accept a kind of racist
"Germanism," a biologized mystique which, I was surprised to discover, they
were not alone in accepting. A university graduate of the pre-Nazi era, an
anti-Nazi intellectual, when I asked her bow many Jews there were still in
Kronenberg, said, "Almost none-but, then, you would have to take biological
as well as historical and religious data to find out exactly."

My friend Simon, he of the secret Talmud, when be told me that, yes, the Jew
Springer was a decent man, and I asked him how there could be a decent Jew
when the "Jewish spirit" was a matter of blood, replied: "Of course it's a
matter of blood. It might skip a generation"be had certainly not read
Mendel—"but it would show up in the next. Only when the proportion of Jewish
blood is small enough will it no longer be a danger to Deutschtum." "How
small," I said, "would it have to be?" "The scientists have that worked out,"
he said.

Herr Simon was not alone in his preoccupation with "pollution." The tailor's
son, Schwenke, spoke frequently of the "race injury," the relations between
"Aryans" and "non-Aryans" of opposite sexes, the special province of the Nazi
SS. He and Simon both told me, in some genuine terror, mixed, I felt, with
some of the titillation always involved in discussing sexual relations, that
Jewish householders invariably hired "German" housemaids (this much was true,
since housemaids came largely from the peasant or unskilled working classes),
for the express purpose of "ruining" them. Neither Schwenke nor Simon, of
course, had any evidence.

Once-as far as I could learn, only once—a Jew was seen walking through the
streets of Kronenberg wearing a sandwich-board sign reading, Ich habe ein
aryanisches Madchen beschandct, "I have ruined an Aryan maiden."

"No one looked at him," said Policeman Hofmeister.

"Why?"

"Everyone felt sorry for him."

"Why?"

"Because it was such-such nonsense."

"Nonsense?"

"Yes. Here's a Jewish boy. He has a German"—non-Jewish, the policeman
meant—"girl friend. They quarrel. That can happen. They call each other
names, then threaten each other. Now they hate each other, although maybe
they are still in love; you know, that can happen, Herr Professor. She
threatens to denounce him. He dares her to, and she does. And then this-this
nonsense."

Policeman Hofmeister was less remorseful about the gypsies, whose treatment
was, if anything, more horrible than that of the Jews and who had no voice
anywhere in all the world to cry out for them. The gypsies, said Policeman
Hofmeister, who would not have said this about the Jews, were Menschen z
weiten Grades, second-class humans, submen. "The idea," he said, "was
to preserve the pure gypsies," the biologically pure, that is, "to preserve
them intact, if possible, although, of course, outside the framework of
German rights. But the gypsy Mischlinge, the mongrels, the half-breeds, were
a great danger to the race, through intermingling. Gypsy blood"—I thought of
the waltz—"was bad. Still"—here was a good man speaking, whothought he
believed in "blood" and not in social determinants—"one felt sorry for them,
for the conditions in which they bad to live, without homes or towns or
decent provisions for their children. How could they help themselves?"

"You will have to admit, Herr Professor," said Baker Wedekind, "that Hitler
got rid of the beggars and the gypsies. That was a good thing. The gypsies
bad lots of children, charming children, too, whom they taught to cheat and
steal. In the village, in my childhood, we locked our doors when gypsies were
there; otherwise, never. They were an alien race, alien blood." He, too,
would not have said that I should have to admit that Hitler bad done a good
thing in getting rid of the Jews.

I think that what worried Policeman Hofmeister and Baker Wedekind was their
own common knowledge. The achievements of Jews in every field in which the
"Germans" excelled gave rise to an essentially schizoid condition in my
friends. The inferior race, the Jews, was also, like the Germans themselves,
superior. The gypsies would have made a better Devil for German racism, if
only the Devil were not, by definition, superhuman as well as inferior. The
gypsies were adequately inferior, but they were not, in German terms,
superhuman. They were, quite literally, such poor Devils. The Jew would have
to do-if be could be distinguished from the German,

==

CHAPTER 22

Two New Boys in the Neighborhood

In other countries governments have been willing to foment and exploit-but
always deplore-anti-Semitism. In Germany, and in Germany alone, was it made
the cornerstone of public policy. Why? The peculiar ferocity of civil war,
the war of brother against brother, comes to mind as hypothesis. The
hypothesis is not original; Rauschning says that Hitler once told him that
the Germans and the Jews could not live together because they were too much
alike.

The Germans and the Jews are wonderfully alike. There are, of course, great
and obvious differences between them, because the Jews are few, scattered,
anciently civilized, and southern in origin, while the Germans are many,
concentrated, primitive, and northern. That the Jew is tasteful and
epicurean, more so than the German' is the mere consequence of his
geographical origin and his cultural age. That he is subtle, much more so
than the German, is the mere consequence in part of his geographical origin,
in part of his defenselessness. That his passion for individual independence
is exalted, as the German's is not, is the mere consequence of the world's
pariahism; and his interest in righteousness, which is not nearly so
prominent among the Germans, the mere consequence of the unrighteousness of
that pariahism.

There is (or, until very recently, was) no Jewish nation to suffer pressure
and put consequent pressure on both its members and the outside world. It is
the individual Jew who is both object and subject of the pressures which, in
Germany's case, are sustained and exerted by the nation. Germany's internal
Diaspora, the first Thirty Years' War, set the stage for German romanticism
and German aggressiveness. The history of the combative, incurably restless
German nation begins with the reduction of Germany to the depths. The history
of the individual Jew is parallel. But what the German nation could seek by
weight-its restoration, its "place"—the Jewish individual had to seek by
speed.

The dispersed and scattered Jews-who were once much more fiercely tribal than
the Germans—were compelled by their situation to become cosmopolitans. This
forced cosmopolitanism of the isolated Jew has two polar consequences.
Oppressed by each nation, the Jew must be the reformer of the nation, as
Germany, isolated and oppressed by the world, must be the reformer of the
world. At the same time the Jew must be the most adjustable of men. Except
for his religion—which, in the modem West, is weak-he has no continuing mold
to contain and shape him. He has nothing to bold to, to fall back upon, to
bide behind when war, revolution, famine, tyranny, and persecution sweep over
him. He has nothing to turn to but God.

The German has Germany. The German individual, living his changeless
generations in his own land, among his own people, and on his own soil , has
bad no need for adjustability and has never developed it. What for the Jew is
the central problem of life does not—I must say did not, for times are
changing-exist for the German.

>From the Castle bill in Kronenberg one can still see the country German in
the second half of the twentieth century—the thousand-skirted costumes (the
Protestant and Catholic aprons tied differently), the oxen (and often the
women and the children) pulling a perforated cheese cask on wheels through
the fields for irrigation. The first World War shook the little valleys; on
the walls of a village church one counts a hundred memorial wreaths from the
first World War, in a village of a thousand population. The peasant youth
began to move to the towns. The second World War blew the town and city
people out of their houses and packed the railroad trains and the roads.

After 1918 the immobile German, incapable of adjusting to the new conditions
inflicted upon him, turning romantically and meaninglessly toward the hope of
restoring the old, found himself bewildered and increasingly helpless, while
the Jew was in the element in which, through no fault (or virtue) of his own,
be thrives best: changing conditions, requiring rapid and radical adjustment.
Instead of saying that the Jews were the "decomposing element" in Imperial
Rome—a favorite citation of the Nazis—Mommsen should have said that the Jew
was able, because he bad to be, to adjust himself to a decomposing, as to any
other kind, of Rome.

Between 1918 and 1933 this marginal man, the Jew, this Luftmensch, this man
in the air, in a situation which put a premium on speed and a penalty on
weight, rose to such power in a decomposing Germany that his achievement
looked dangerously like that of a superman. But wasn't the German to be the
superman?—Very well, then. The order in which the Jew was usurping this role
would have to be reversed, the standards of supermanliness redefined to fit
the German. Superman, the German, would not adjust to this world; be would
adjust it. So—oder so.

The pliant German, beaten into shape by centuries of nonresistance, could not
compete with the subtle Jew. Germany, the marginal nation, had always had to
struggle to survive-but not the German. The German had only to do as he was
told, while to do as he was told would have been fatal to the Jew. The Jew
had to take chances, and so did the German nation. But the German individual,
unless he was crazy drunk, could not take chances. The Jew did not drink; be
had to be light to live. The German nation bad to drink to lighten itself,
and what do nations drink but blood?

In Germany or in England or in Russia, everywhere, indeed, except in the lost
Homeland, the Jew had to be light as a feather and fast as the wind. Like
Germany-but not like the German-be was hemmed in by hostile neighbors. He bad
to fight—honorably, if possible, dishonorably, if necessary, like the German
nation. He was driven, like the German nation, to every extreme and every
excess of good and evil, and his situation evoked in him whatever geniuses
survival required of him. Moses Mendelssobn and the Jewish pander were both
Jews, just as the Germany of Schiller and that of Streicber were both
Germany. Germany is the Jew among nations.

"They are always insisting on something," the hostess of one of the presently
decrepit but eternally fashionable resort hotels on Lago Maggiore said. She
was speaking of the Germans collectively. "One can't say just what it is that
they seem to be insisting on. But they are uncomfortable, and they must make
the management and the rest of the guests uncomfortable. just like the Jews."
"What?" I said, collectively insulted. She laughed. "Not every Jew," she
said, "and, of course, not every German-, only enough of them to make one
think, always, 'the Germans.' Perhaps I am prejudiced. I am half-German
myself."

Being beset, in fancy and in reality, has produced in the Jews and in the
German nation the compensatory assertion of superiority and messianism. Each
of them must save the world; so only, saving the world, are Germany and the
Jew to be saved. But neither is evangelistic. Conversion (which implies
humility) and love (which implies submission) have no place in either's
mission. The remaining alternative is mastery; mastery, of course, for the
sake of the mastered. In the Germans the necessary means of mastery, imposed
upon the benefactors by the intransigence of the prospective beneficiaries,
were lately seen to be genocide. But genocide was not unknown, once, to the
Jews, and, if survival requires excessive measures, the salvation of the
whole world ennobles their use.

To other, less hard-pressed, peoples, the prejudice of the Jew against
intermarriage is unintelligible. Among Westerners, only the Nazis share this
prejudice. Doctrinal restrictions are not involved, as they are among
Christians, where the prohibition against marriage is dissolved by
conversion. To the Nazi the Jew is forever a Jew; to the Jew the non-Jew is
always a non-Jew. In both cases the inference of taint is inescapable. And in
neither the Nazi (who is nothing but the German stripped of religion) nor the
Jew is there any confidence that the threatened taint might be diluted or
dissipated; in both, the overriding concern is purity. That this arrogation
of purity is an impudence other peoples than the Germans and the Jew will
agree. But other peoples live in a different world from the Jew and the
Germans. These two live in a world of their own.

The German Jew was the perfect German. The Jewish Encyclopaedia has, I
suppose, fifty times as many citations of German specialists as of all the
Jews all over the rest of the world together. Was there ever a "better"
German than Bismarck's adviser, the Jew Bleichroder, or than Wilhelm II's,
the Jew Ballin? And who but the Jew Stahl laid the constitutional foundations
for what we call "Prussianism" in Germany? It is the German Jew who, in a
minority, will soon or late dominate Israel; already we hear, in Israel, of
what we think of as peculiarly German forms of extremist tendency, the same
tendency toward "Nazi" behavior observed among the Jewish prisoners in
Buchenwald by Professor Bruno Bettelheim.

And how this German Jew loved his Germany, for which be was willing to give
up his Judaism! How German he seemed to be abroad, so much so that everywhere
in the Allied countries in the first World War the Jew was suspected of being
pro-German! What happened to him from 1933 on he could not believe; be stayed
on, until 1936, until 1938, until 1942, until-. "It won't last," be told
himself. What made him think it wouldn't? Why, this was Germany, his Germany.
And now, in England and America, in France and Brazil and Mexico, there is a
new kind of Jew, the Jew who has learned, when he speaks of those who a few
years ago were his countrymen in his beloved country, to say "the Germans,"
to distinguish them, just as Hitler did, from the Jews.

The "Lorelei," the song of the witch of the Rhine who dazzles and wrecks the
boatman, is the German people's most popular song, not today, or yesterday,
but always; so popular that the Nazis did not dare eliminate it from the
songbooks. Instead, they included it with the wonderful line, Dichter
unbekannt, "Author unknown." Every German knew that the author of the most
German of all German folksongs was Heinrich Heine. It took Heine, the German
Jew, to write in exile:

Ich hatte einst ein schones Vaterland.
Der Eichenbaum wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft.
Es war ein Traum
Das kusste mich auf deutsch und sprach auf deutsch
(Man glaubt es kaum,
Wie gut es klang) das Wort, "Ich liebe dich!"
Es war ein Traum.

It is untranslatably beautiful:

Once I bad a Fatherland.
The oak grew there so great, the violet so small and sweet.
It was a dream
That kissed me in German and in German spoke
(If only you knew bow good it sounded in German!)
The words, "I love you."
It was a dream.

It took Heinrich Heine, the Jewish German, to write: "Better to die than to
live, best of all never to have lived." With the world-and
themselves?—against them both, both Germany and the Jew appear to be
indestructible. The Nazis' "final solution" of "the Jewish question" was the
destruction of the Jews, as the world's "final solution" of "the German
question," advanced by the Morgenthauites, was the destruction of Germany. We
may assume that the Morgenthauite program to reduce Germany to a primitive
peasant nation was no more final than the Nazis' program to reduce the Jews
of Germany to primitive peasant persons, "working on the land." What the
world was too civilized to do (or to attempt to do), the Nazis were not. But
the Nazis no more succeeded in reducing the status of the Jews than the world
succeeded in reducing the status of Germany. German recovery, a few years
after the lost war in 1945, was the wonder of the world. And the twenty
thousand Jews left in Germany were on their way to greater distinction, in
both the highest and lowest endeavors, than ever before.

The survival of Germany is much more easily explained, historically and
anthropologically, than the survival of the Jew, two thousand years from his
Fatherland and scattered into dozens of hostile environments. He has
survived. Perhaps he has survived so that the survival of Germany, and of the
Germany we have lately known, might bear witness to the world that there is
more in the world than meets the eye. It may be that the explanation of
survival is not exhausted by historical and anthropological analysis or by
social-psychological curve-making; it may be that Cain's answer to the Lord
is relevant, too.

As the fate of the Jews-and of Germany—approached its climax in the last
months of the second World War, the Judisches Nachrichtenblatt, published
weekly by the German Jews at the order of the Nazi Government, to communicate
"directives" to those of Nazism's victims who were left alive, shrank in size
and content and, finally, in frequency of publication. It shrank, too, in the
quality of paper allotted to it, and it is for that reason that I wish to
publish, in its original form, on paper which will outlast the March 5, 1943,
issue of the Nachrichtenblatt, a story which appeared in the lower right-hand
corner, on the reverse side of the single sheet, manuscript-paper size, which
constituted the publication:

Alles zum Guten

Immer gewohne sich der Mensch zu denken: "Was Gott schickt ist gut; es dunke m
ir gut oder bose."

Ein frommer Weiser kam vor eine Stadt, deren Tore geschlossen waren. Niemand
wollte sie ihm offnen; hungrig und durstig musste er unterm freiem Himmel
ubernachten. Er sprach: "Was Gott schickt, ist gut," und legte sich nieder.

Neben ihm stand ein Esel, zu seiner Seite eine brennende Laterne um der
Unsichcrheit willen in derselben Gegend. Aber ein Sturm entstand und loschte
sein Licht aus, cin Lowe kam und zerriss seinen Esel. Er erwachte, fand sich
allein und sprach: "Was Gott schickt ist gut." Er erwartete ruhig die
Morgenrote.

Als er ans Tor kam, fand er die Tore offen, die Stadt verwustet, beraupt und
geplundert. Ein Schar Rauber war eingefallcn und hatte eben in dieser Nacht
die Einwohner gefangen weggefuhrt oder getotet. Er war verschont. "Sagte ich
nicht," sprach er, "dass alles, was Gott schickt, gut sei? Nur sehen wir
meistens am Morgen erst, warum er uns etwas des Abends versagte."

(Aus dem Talmud). In English:

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR THE BEST

We know that whatever God sends us, however good or bad it may seem to us, is
good.

A pious man came to a city whose gates were closed. No one would open them to
let him in. Hungry and thirsty, be had to spend the night outside the gates.
Still be said, "Whatever God sends us is good," and be lay down to sleep.

Beside him stood his ass, and his lantern burned to ward off the dangers of
the dark. But a storm came up and extinguisbed the lantern. Then a lion came
up and, as the pious man slept, tore the ass to pieces. Awakening, and seeing
his

plight, the pious man said, "Whatever God sends us is good," and serenely
awaited the sunrise.

Day broke. The pious man found the gates open, the city laid waste and
plundered. A band of robbers had fallen upon the city during the night and
had murdered some of the citizens and enslaved the rest. The pious man had
been saved. "Didn't I say," be said to himself, "that whatever God sends us
is good? We must wait until morning, and then we will understand the meaning
of the night."

(From the Talmud).

==

CHAPTER 23

"Like God in France"

Substances move, under pressure, to extreme positions and, when they shift
positions, shift from one extreme to the other. Men under pressure are
drained of their shadings of spirit, of their sympathy (which they can no
more give than get), of their serenity, their sweetness, their simplicity,
and their subtlety. Their reactions are structuralized; like rubber balls
(which we say have "life" in them because they react in such lively fashion
to the living impulse outside them), the harder they are bounced, the higher
they go. Such men, when they are told not to cut down a tree, won't cut down
a tree, but when they are not told not to cut down a man, they may cut down a
man.

The German who is dedicated to instant self-immolation for the sake of
Germany is the same German whose day-to-day egotism amazes the world. This
egotism, always "idealized" (that is, romanticized), is, as has often been
observed, the very heart of German philosophy; but it is also the basis of
the habitual callousness of ordinary life. It is as if there were, in the
human heart, only so much selflessness; pressure requires so much of it of
the Germans that they are left with almost none for volition.

I know that the unconcern for others displayed, say, by the American who
plays a hotel-room radio late at night, is everywhere common in an
individualistic civilization except, perhaps, among the English; but nowhere,
not even among the English, are "manners" as rigidly emphasized as they are
among the Germans, and nowhere as among these people who swarm to tribal
sacrifice have I seen men so invariably fail to offer old women their seats
in busses, streetcars, or trains. Nowhere have I seen so many old men and
women staggering through train sheds with heavy suitcases and never an offer
of assistance from the emptybanded, nowhere such uniform disinclination to
assist on the scene of an accident or to intervene between children fighting
on the street. But the service in German hotels, restaurants, and stores is
superb. One "minds one's own business" in the small affairs of the street, in
the larger affairs of the job or the family, in the great affairs of the
State.

Grimly preoccupied with themselves; deadly serious and deadly dull (only the
Germans could have been unbored by Hitler); tense, hurried, unrelaxed;
purpose-bedeviled, always driven somewhere to do something; taking the siesta
like Communion, with determined, urgent intent; sneering, and not always
genteelly, at the Frenchman sitting "doing nothing" at his cafe' (wie Gott in
Frankreich, "like God in France," is the German expression for "carefree"),
at the Italian talking his bead off over his endless dinner; incapable of
quiet without melancholy or frustrated fury; insatiably hungry for the
heights or the depths, stone sober or roaring drunk; forever insisting that
man is born to suffer -and then begrudging the suffering; unresponsive and
overreactive; stodgy and unstable; uncalm, the inventors and prime
practitioners of "stomach trouble"; tormented, exhausted, unable to remain
fully awake unless they are angry or hilarious—these, with more than a little
hyperbole, with millions of exceptions and contradictions and still more
millions of variations, are the ways and the woes of men under pressure.

Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the
other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and
supersystem are the consequence, not the cause, of the totalitarian spirit.
National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National
Socialists.

Freedom is nothing but the habit of choice. Now choice is remarkably wide in
this life. Each day begins with the choice of tying one's left or right
shoelace first, and ends with the choice of observing or ignoring the
providence of God. Pressure narrows choice forcibly. Under light pressure men
sacrifice small choices lightly. But it is only under the greatest pressure
that they sacrifice the greatest choices, because choice, and choice alone,
informs them that they are men and not machines.

The ultimate factor in choosing is common sense, and it is common sense that
men under pressure lose fastest, cut off as they are (in besieged "Peoria")
from the common condition. The harder they are pressed, the harder they
reason; the harder they must reason. But they tend to become unreasonable
men; for reasonableness is reason in the world, and "Peoria" is out of this
world.

The besieged intellect operates furiously; the general intelligence
atrophies. Theories are evolved of the grandest order and the greatest
complexity, requiring only the acceptance of the nonworlds, the Ideas, in
which they arise. The two extremist doctrines that have seized hold of our
time—Marx's, denying that there is anything in man, and Freud's, denying that
there is anything outside-are Made in Germany. If you will only accept Marx's
"human nature has no reality" or Freud's "conscience is nothing but the dread
of the community," you will find them both irresistibly scientific.

In such exquisitely fabricated towers a man may live (or even a whole
society), but he must not look over the edge or be will see that there is no
foundation. The fabrication is magnificent; the German is matchless in little
things, reckless only in big ones, in the fundamental, fateful matters which,
in his preoccupation, he has overlooked. That a Wagner should be a vulgar
anti-Semite (or stand on his bead, or wear a ring in his nose, or whatever)
is one thing; he was "only a genius." But that one of Germany's two greatest
historians, Treitschke, should be a ravening chauvinist, that the other,
Mommsen, should find in Julius Caesar "the complete and perfect man"—these
are something else. Max Weber could be "the father of sociology," but be
could not see what was sociologically unhealthy in the institution of student
dueling.

Who is this Einstein, who was "only a scientist" when he conceived the atomic
bomb and now, in his old age, sees what he has done and weeps? He is the
German specialist, who had always "minded his"—high—"business" and was no
more proof against romanticism than his tailor, who bad always minded his low
business. He is the finished product of pressure, the uneducated expert, like
the postal clerk in Kronenberg whose method of moistening stamps on the back
of his hand is infallible. The German mind, encircled and, under pressure of
encirclement, stratified, devours itself in the production of lifeless
theories of man and society, deathless methods of licking postage stamps, and
murderous machinery. For the rest—which is livingthe German has to depend
upon his ideals.

==

CHAPTER 24

But a Man Must Believe in Something

It is the Germans' ideals which are dangerous; their practices, when their
ideals do not have hold of them, are not a bit better or worse than other
men's. Where do they get their ideals? "The 'passions,' " says Santayana, "is
the old and fit name for what the Germans call ideals." This idealist slave
of his own or another man's passions was twice sundered from Rome, in A.D. 9
and in A.D. 1555. In the year 9 the Germans expelled the founders of secular
Europe; in 1555 they cut themselves loose from the Weltanschauung which the
age of the Mediterranean fused in Italy from the Greco-Hebraic break with
Syria and Egypt. This bright Weltanschauung rests upon the dogma of personal
responsibility. This dogma is the first fact of our civilization. Its repulse
left Germany peculiarly rootless.

Thought, like feeling, took root in irresponsibility, with subjectivism,
relativism, "intelligent skepticism" its flower. It was not only in physics
or in government that the Germans excelled in producing Frankenstein's monste
rs but in epistemology itself. Thought is all, but there are a thousand ways
of thinking. The thinker can attach no worth to his thinking as against
another man's because there is no reality to measure them both, only internal
consistency, "system." At the same time no other man's system is, by
definition, better than his. The superiority of the thinking
lies—somewhere—in the thinker.

"A trite, nauseatingly repulsive, ignorant charlatan without esprit, who with
unexampled impertinence scribbled together twaddle and nonsense, which his
venal adherents trumpeted forth ... the hollowest farrago of words devoid of
sense that ever satisfied dunderheads . . . repulsive . . . recalls the
ravings of madmen." This is a philosophical critique by one of Germany's
greatest philosophers, Schopenhauer, of another of Germany's greatest
philosophers, Hegel. The "pedantic arrogance" of which Goethe complained in
the Germans was the self-assuredness not of common, Western dogma but of the
antidogmatic who, needing, like all men, dogma to live by, bad none to fall
back on but his own. Each man was his own "school"; you did not go to Germany
to get an education but to get a man or, more exactly, a mind. The
characteristic German professor did not know the students or meet them (and
there were no student deans or advisers). He was a thinker, and a teacher of
thinking.

Cut from its moorings in Western dogma, German thinking shot up unencumbered
to the clouds. Balloons ascended everywhere. Which basket the fortunate few
boarded was a matter of fancy and favoritism; once they were off the ground,
they were all equally impervious to puncture by reality down below. "He
stands up there," said Willy Hofmeister, the old policeman; "I stand down
here. I can't argue with him. I'm not stupid, but be's spent his whole life
studying. He knows. I don't." He was contrasting wir Einfachen, we simple
people, with die Gebildeten, the cultivated.

Down below were wir Einfachen, the millions who were some day to be Nazis,
the "little men" who, as Balzac put it, seemed to have been sent into the
world to swell the crowd. When I was first in Germany I asked a German
theologian to help me find one such "little man," one whom National Socialism
had confronted with innerlicher Konflikt, moral struggle. The theologian
replied: "Moral struggle?—They had none. They are all little sausages,
Wfirstchen." German thought soared away from the Wurstchcn, carrying with it
the elect, for whom the educational system above the eighth grade existed,
and the stage and the philharmonic and the bookstores. For the rest-let the
greatest of the great German masters say it:

He who has Science has Art, Religion, too, has be;
Who has not Science, has not Art, Let him religious be.

For the rest, there were the churches and the songs of Heaven and Home. At
the Kronenberg Singfest, held in the auditorium of Kronenberg University at
Easter, I saw not one of my academic colleagues. But eight of my ten "little
men" were there.

To the extent that the big men influenced the little men, it was to convince
them that thought, of which they themselves were incapable, was everything.
There is, besides intelligent skepticism, unintelligent skepticism, and it
was a long time ago that Nietzsche asserted that Germans as a whole were
skeptics. The ground fell away from under the churches even while, in the
gradually emptying sanctuary, those who were still credulous were promised
the invincibility of German arms. When German arms proved vincible, the
churches lost still more of the credulous.

But people who do not have a good religion will have a bad one. They will
have a religion; they will have something to believe in. Men-not just
Germans-cannot bear the pressure of life, however light it may be elsewhere
compared with the pressure upon the Germans. Hitlerism was a mass flight to
dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the
dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far
as the tribe was important and be was a member of the tribe. My ten Nazi
friends-and a great majority of the rest of the seventy million
Germans-swarmed to it. German thought had not bothered to take them along on
its flight. It had left them on the ground. Now they are back on the ground
again, rooting around the husks of old ideals for a kernel.

The Germans were, when Hitler found them, emotionally undernourished. Life in
a besieged city, even relaxation, is unrelievedly rigid. Happiness is
dismissed as unattainable -the German word for it is derived from Gluck, lu
ck-and its pursuit then disdained as decadent. But it is duty-bearers, not
pleasure-seekers, who go berserk. The ordinary hours of the German person,
day by day, do not feed his hunger for expression. The decline of
conversation is a very modern phenomenon, and a world phenomenon wherever the
most modern means of mass communication have replaced it; but the malady of
repression is something else. Repression is not the same thing as reserve,
any more than denial (the Germans are peerless here) is the same as
self-denial.

In a stifled, lid-on atmosphere, the "German" way of thinking flourished,
exoteric, meticulous, and introverted; flourished in the starved soil of
German emotion. National Socialism fructified that soil, and it bloomed
suddenly red with fire and blood.

==

CHAPTER 25

Push-Button Panic

One Saturday afternoon in Kronenberg three house-painters, who were off at
noon, got bold of some Weinbrand at our house, and, when we returned from a
visit, we found the house torn up and the painters howling drunk. Tante
Kathe, our five-foot-tall housekeeper, was with us. She handed them mops and
brooms and said, "Clean up and get out." In instant, silent sobriety they
cleaned up and got out. They were back Monday morning for work, without a
word of apology, a blush of shame, or a man-to-man wink.

The speed of the German is the initial speed of release tinder pressure, soon
spent. Then the pressure reasserts itself, and the German re-emerges as be
is: sober, a heavy, heavy man. His personality, under pressure, is just as
excessively submissive as it is assertive. Its essence is excess. On November
9, 1938, word went through the country that the synagogues were to be burned.
A million men, released like jack-in-the-boxes, sprang to action. Pushed back
in the boxes, as they were by Goring's order the following morning, a million
men dropped their fagots; another sixty-nine million, who bad not thought
much about it the night before, reproached the million in silence; and the
work of arson, robbery, enslavement, torture, and murder proceeded in
legalized form, in Zucht und Ordnung.

Zucht und Ordnung, discipline and order. My two friends Hofmeister and
Schwenke, the policeman and the tailor, who hated one another and who
represented two incompatible moralities, agreed that "it doesn't matter
whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have
discipline and order." The sensitive cabinetmaker, Klingelhofer, and the
insensitive bill-collector, Simon, said the same thing. Neither morality nor
religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege, And the
attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one.

The gas ovens of Belsen were peculiarly German; the improvised slaughter pits
of the Ukraine were Nazi. The distinction is a large one. Nazism, like the
Lutheran Reformation and all other German upheavals, contained revolutionary
elements of improvisation. But Nazism was always at war with the Army. The
Army was German. The remarkable fact of the Putsch against Hitler of July 20,
1944, is that a handful of Army officers could be found to undertake it; that
it was planned so recklessly; that it happened at all, not that it failed or
might have succeeded. It was treated as treason. What it was was un-German.

What was truly German was what has come to be called the cold pogrom, the
systematic persecution, legal, methodical, and precisely co-ordinatcd, of the
"national enemies." When you have combined "cold" with "pogrom"—they appear
to be uncombinable—you have Nazi Germany, the organism as a whole gone wild,
its organs admirably co-ordinated. The universal witness of the people
invaded by the Germans is the nonhumanity of the conqueror, his pushbutton
transition from fury to formality, from fire to ice and back again, depending
on whether be is under orders or out from under orders. A Nazi might be moved
by a prisoner's plea that be bad a wife and children; but a German would say,
"So have I."

The German's incapacity for calm, consistent insubordination—for being first
and last a free man-is the key to his national history. Germany has often had
a counterrevolution, but never a revolution. What the Germans would call a
revolution the Americans would call a Putsch. "The German revolutionaries,"
said Lenin, "could not seize the railways because they did not have a
Bahnsteigkarte"—the ten-pfennig ticket admitting visitors to the train shed.
The Reformation and the Counter Reformation were both counterreformations.
(Luther's "peasant" uprising ended with Luther's tract Against the Murderous
and Rapacious Hordes of the Peasants.) The German War of Liberation against
Napoleon saddled Germany with peacetime conscription, and the revolutionary
unification of the Reich in 1871 was achieved by the reactionary Junker of
Prussia.

The German breakout-call it liberation, call it aggression, call it what you
will-is a kind of periodic paranoid panic. In between times, the pressure
from outside having supervened, and having been passed on from Germany to the
Germans, the next panic cooks silently, symptomlessly, in Zucht und Ordnung.
To blame Germany-still less the Germans-is to blame the thistle for its
fruit. It is fantastic to suppose that, with the pressures of destruction,
defeat, partition, foreign rule, and cold war superimposed upon those that
already existed, "it" will not happen again. It not only will happen; it
must, unless the life of seventy million Germans is altered at the very depth
and they find a way to live wie Gott in Frankreich, "like God in France."

pps. 254-285


-----
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Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End

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