Dialog International

Götz Aly: German Envy Led to Holocaust

Best-selling author Götz Aly is a one-dimensional historian. He starts with a provocative premise then selectively combs through the archives for historical evidence to support his his thesis.  This makes for entertaining TV talk shows and radio interviews, but it is bad history.  In his 2005 book Hitlers Volksstaat his provocative thesis was that the Nazi regime essentially "bought" the support of the majority of Germans by redistributing the private wealth and property it appropriated from German Jews as well as the industrial and agricultural goods it plundered from occupied territories.  In Unser Kampf he turned his attention to the anti-authoritarian, anti-war student upheaval in Germany of the 1960s, finding that it was a totalitarian movement with roots in Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Götz Aly's latest reductio ad adsurdum is an essay on the origins of the Holocaust - Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?  ("Why the Germans? Why the Jews?).  Here Aly's provocative thesis is that the history of anti-Semitism in Germany which resulted in the mass murder of 6 million Jews can be distilled to one word: Neid (envy).  For Aly, Jews in 19th century Germany were quick to take advantage of the modernization of society and the economy, leaving German Christians behind in the dust.  This created feelings of inferiority, resentment and Neid.  Eventually these dimwitted Christians embraced irrational views to compensate for their backwardness and inability to compete:

"Die Verschlafenen neigen dazu, Trägheit als Nachdenklichkeit, mangelnde Schlagfertigkeit als Tiefsinn, fehlende Bildung als Innerlichkeit auszugeben"

("Those left behind have a tendency to spin inertia as thoughtfulness, lack of initiative as profundity, and lack of education as inner purity.")

Götz Aly documents Jewish success by examining the German high school Abitur results as well as tax receipts from the period. 

This deep feeling of resentment also found its expression in a longing for egalitarianism, which the Nazis exploited with the utopia of the Volksgemeinschaft where everyone was racially - if not economically - equal.  But equally culpable - for the historian Aly - were the Social Democrats, or any group that demanded social justice or a more equitable distribution of wealth in German society:

Im Rückblick betrachtet, leisteten reformerisch-friedliche Gleichheitsbewegungen wie die Sozialdemokratie, die Gewerkschaften oder die Begründer der katholischen Soziallehre der Gewalt ungewollt Vorschub ...«

("In hindsight all of the peaceful equal rights reform movements like social democracy, trade unions, or the Catholic social teachings contributed to the violence...")

Certainly there was an enormous amount of resentment among the German population which the NSDAP cleverly exploited.  But I have a number of problems with Aly's central thesis that Neid was the prime factor behind the Holocaust.

First, there were plenty of Jewish factory workers, shopkeepers, nurses, etc.  who did not belong to the prosperous bourgeoisie who were the object of "Christian" resentment and envy.  Yet these lower-class Jews were subjected to the worst persecution under the Nazi terror.  They were detained and transported to the death camps not because they were successful, but because of their non-Aryan racial status. 

Secondly, it is historically misleading to talk about "German Christians".  The anti-Semitic Deutsche Christen movement was comprised largely of lower-class Protestants.  German Catholics were far less likely to join the NSDAP and even in the "crisis elections" of 1928 and 1932 remained loyal the Zentrum (Center Party). (This not to ignore the doctrine of "Jewish deicide" which was a central tenet of Vatican teachings until the Second Vatican Council).

Finally, it is absurd to blame the Social Democrats - the party of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg - for the virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis.  No doubt there were plenty of SPD party members who harbored anti-Semitic views, but the official party platform attacked the crude racial theories of the extreme Right.  The party's goal of getting better working conditions and higher wages for all German working men and women was not based on resentment and envy of Jews, as Götz Aly claims in his essay. That is the worst disparagement of the memory of the thousands of social democrats and anti-Nazis who perished in the concentration camps.  I can see where it is useful for conservative political forces to have Götz Aly available whenever someone in the opposition questions policies that enrich the wealthy, hurt the poor, and exacerbate social inequality.  The Hof-Historiker can run to his NS-era archive and find echoes of anti-Semitism and "totalitarianism". 

Anyone who is genuinely interested in the origins of anti-Semitism in Germany is advised to steer clear of Götz Aly and instead read the late Amos Elon's The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 - 1933 (deutsche Version: Zu einer anderen Zeit: Porträt der jüdisch-deutschen Epoche 1743 - 1933). 

Libya is now free - no thanks to Germany

Angela Merkel expressed her satisfaction concerning the apparent end of the Khaddafy regime:

Merkel said she was pleased with the news about the downfall of the regime in Tripoli at the hands of the forces of the revolution.
Germany is ready to offer help for the Libyans for the establishment of democracy and re-construction of their country.

That's nice. But when lives were on the line in Benghazi, Germany turned its back on its allies and sided with Russia.  Colonel Khaddafy was effusive in his praise of Chancellor Merkel.  Now that the Colonel is nearly gone and Tripoli is liberated, Germany's abandonment of its allies looks like an even greater blunder.  Sarkozy is the man of the hour, with David Cameron and Barack Obama in supporting roles.

Roland Nolles writes about the fallout of the Westerwelle Doctrine in Der Spiegel: 

Die Glaubwürdigkeit Deutschlands als Streiter für Menschenrechte und Demokratie ist beschädigt, ebenso das Ansehen als verlässlicher Partner im westlichen Bündnis. Neues Vertrauen, neue Stärke im Kreis der Nato-Partner wird erst eine neue Regierung wiederherstellen können.

Zugleich zeigt der Ausgang dieses Konflikts, wer in Europa das Sagen hat - es ist nicht Deutschland, sondern Frankreich. Sarkozy hat mit seinem frühzeitigen und energischen Engagement einen sicheren Instinkt für die richtige Entscheidung bewiesen. Er hat die Richtung angezeigt; die deutsche Regierung zauderte, zögerte, wollte sich nicht entscheiden.

(Germany's has lost all credibility as a champion of human rights and democracy., and has lost its reputation as a reliable partner in the Western alliance.  Only a new government in Berlin can restore a renewed strength in the circle of Nato partners.

At the same time, the outcome of the Libyan struggle shows who's in charge in Europe - not Germany, but France.  Sarkozy has demonstrated a sure instinct for making the correct decision at the right time with his early and energenic commitment. He showed the way, but the German government hesitated, delayed, and couldn't come to a decision.)

It is depressing to read the reader comments to Nolles' piece. While some expressed joy and solidarity with the historic victory of the rebels and Nato's crucial support, the majority seem to be rooting for the Libyan revolution to fail  and hoping for vindication of German defeatism. 

Lyonel Feininger at the Whitney

If you plan on being in New York City between now and October 16 you'll want to see the Lionel Feininger Exhibit at the Whitney on Madison Avenue (Lionel Feininger:At the Edge of the World).  The Whitney is the premier museum for American art, and it is fitting that they put on this major exhibition of Feininger.  Lionel Feininger was born in New York but did most of his important work in Germany until Hitler forced him to return to New York in 1937.  The Nazis confiscated 400 of his works, and he was included in the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) Exhibit that same year. 

The Whitney Exhibit covers Feininger's entire career and puts his versatility as an artist on display. He was a first and foremost a painter, but was also a brilliant photographer, architect, illustrator (he drew cartoons for the Chicago Sunday Tribune), printmaker, woodcarver, and even composer - his 17 fugues will be performed this fall in New York. 

His early paintings in Germany fall squarely in the Expressionist mold, depicting city scenes - often carnivals - teeming with people as buildings appear to lean in over them. Some of the recurring images of colorful musicians seem to anticipate Marc Chagall.

WIth Cubism, and then later with his relationship with Walter Gropius and the formation of the Bauhaus School, Feininger found his style that would secure his place in modernist painting. He had the sensibility of an architect and could distill a landscape or seascape into discreet building blocks of light and shadow. The crowded scenes of humanity of his Expressionist days gave way to paintings with one or several miniature, abstract angular figures intersecting with large translucent panes of color, reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's tiny human forms beholding the vast expanse of nature's glory.  And just as for Friedrich, painting for Feininger was primarily a spiritual endeavor, “a path to the intangibility of the divine.”  In an earlier era Feininger would have been a builder of cathedrals, and, indeed some of his greatest paintings such as Barfüsserkirche II are of the interior of churches. 

Feininger's seascapes and church interiors follow the same schema: harmonic planes of blue- or red-hued light punctuated with patches of shadow draw the eye upward to the vaulted sky-ceiling. 

As the Whitney show presents, this schema would prevail for the two decades of Feininger's most productive period until he was forced to flee Germany.

Only after he returns to New York do we see some subtle changes in Feininger's painting. The artist focuses on two subjects: the skyline of Manhattan that surrounds him, and the Baltic Sea of his memory's eye.  The blue paint of his Blauer Reiter days seems to dominate (blue being the color of spirituality -Kandinsky), but the paintings seem enveloped in shroud of mist with the edges of the light-panes bleeding into the deep sea.  There is definitely a natural progression from Feininger's late paintings to the Abstract Expressionism that dominated the New York art scene at mid-century.

Feininger finally achieved recognition in the US in 1944 with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where, appropriately, he was paired with the modernist painter from Maine -  Marsden Hartley.  Like Feininger, Hartley had discovered his artistic path with Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich before the Great War. 

Herbert Marcuse - Bogeyman of the Radical Right

One of the more remarkable developments of the Radical Right in the US and Europe is the persistent demonizing of the so-called Frankfurt School and the proponents of Critical Theory.  Few Americans have even heard of these German émigré thinkers, whose most important works were published over 60 years ago.  Yet these largely forgotten social philosophers are - in the eyes of the Right - responsible for the end of Western civilization. 

Over a year ago I wrote about the right-wing criticism of Theodor W. Adorno.  But the most vehement attacks are reserved for Herbert Marcuse, who is reviled for being both a militant Stalinist and at the same time (!) patron saint of the Hippies.  Right-wing Ueberblogger Andrew Breitbart lays into Marcuse in his new book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World:

Marcuse's mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and "multiculturalism" as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all "victim groups" in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse's theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer's critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement--Gender Studies, LGBT/"Queer" Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these "Blank Studies" brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies--except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are "exploitative" and "bad."

Breitbart is heavily influenced by the right-wing theorist William S. Lind, who sees the Frankfurt School as the wellspring of "Cultural Marxism".  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lind addressed a Holocaust Denial conference and denounced Marcuse and his colleagues as a "tiny group of German Jews" who were determined to destroy America. In his famous speech "The Origins of Political Correctness" Lind singles out Herbert Marcuse as perhaps the most dangerous Cultural Marxist.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of “polymorphous perversity,” that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s.

The British blogger Robin Phillips puts an explicitly Christian spin on Lind's criticism of Marcuse and his secular Jewish colleagues.  For Phillips, Marcuse set out to "Liquidate Western Civilization" and Christianity with a moral relativism that permeates every institution in the West today:

"But above all, the arm of Frankfurt is seen in the antipathy to Christian values which permeates so much of our public discourse."

Once again it is Herbert Marcuse who is singled out as the single greatest proponent of Cultural Marxism:

By getting these groups to think of themselves as victims of Western oppression, the Frankfurt school sought to harness their energy in the fight against Christian values. {...}During the 1960’s Herbert Marcuse popularized these ideas and disseminated them to college radicals. By mobilizing the anti-war movement, the quiet revolution of Gramsci began to increase in volume. The counter-culture adopted Marcuse as their intellectual guru, and he in turn provided the youth with a steady stream of propaganda to sanctify their movement. (It was Marcuse who originally invented the catchphrase “Make Love, Not War.”)

But William Lind's most diligent student is the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.  Shortly before embarking on his murderous rampage Breivik released his (pdf warnings!) Christo-Fascist manifesto, which draws heavily on - and even plagiarizes - Lind's analysis of Marcuse

(Marcuse) has often been described as a Marxist philosopher, but he was in fact a full-blooded social revolutionary who contemplated the disintegration of Western European and American society just as Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs contemplated the disintegration of German society: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended. These ideas are oldfashioned…What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”

(Marcuse's) revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.

I guess it's ironic that Marcuse's colleagues, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, anticipated Breivik's pathology in the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality. 

 

 

 

George Will: JFK Built Berlin Wall

 
 

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, so to mark the occasion one of our illustrious right-wing pundits, George Will of the Washington Post, engages in historical revisionism.  Will has always been one of the more reliable apologists for George W. Bush's torture policies and never misses an opportunity to attack Democratic presidents past and present.  Today he accuses John F. Kennedy of erecting the Berlin Wall.  JFK, according to George WIll, was simply a "callow" spoiled brat who was no match for Nikita Krushchev:

On May 25, six weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit Earth, Kennedy said that “extraordinary times” demanded a second State of the Union address. In it he proclaimed “the whole southern half of the globe” a “great battleground,” especially emphasizing a place on few Americans’ minds: Vietnam. Then he flew to Vienna to meet Khrushchev — “Little Boy Blue meets Al Capone,” a U.S. diplomat said.

Khrushchev treated Kennedy with brutal disdain. In excruciating pain from his ailing back and pumped full of perhaps disorienting drugs by his disreputable doctor (who would lose his medical license in 1975), Kennedy said that it was the “worst thing in my life. He savaged me.” British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said, “For the first time in his life, Kennedy met a man who was impervious to his charm.” Kempe writes, “From that point forward Khrushchev would act more aggressively in the conviction that there would be little price to pay.” Kempe says that when Robert Kennedy met with his brother back in Washington, “Tears were running down the president’s cheeks.”

In a terrible act of appeasement to communist tyranny and a betrayal of the German people, JFK - according to this right-wing narrative - gave his tacit approval to the Berlin Wall:

The Cold War ended 27 years later, when the Iron Curtain suddenly became porous and the Wall crumbled. Tens of millions of East Europeans might have been spared those years of tyranny, and the West might have been spared considerable dangers and costs, if Kennedy had not been complicit in preventing the unraveling of East Germany.

But the lessons of history tell a different tale.  By 1961 the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States.  Krushchev threatened not just to destroy all of Germany, but obliterate all of Europe if the US and its allies attempted to reunite Germany with military force.  The GDR was facing an existential threat as tens of thousands of its most productive citizens fled across the border: Ulbricht begged  the Kremlin to act.  JFK was prepared to go to war to protect West Berlin from further encroachment and dispatched Lyndon Johnson to Berlin to deliver the message.  LBJ was greeted by over a million cheering Berliners. 

George WIll apparently blames JFK for not launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union for sealing the East Berlin border - for what other option did the US president have at that moment?  Kennedy was not prepared to see hundreds of thousands - or, more likely, millions - of casualties of war.  "Better a wall than a war," was Kennedy's assessment.  Unlike George WIll and his Republican pals in Washington, JFK had actually experienced the horrors of war and was not eager to put Europe and US through another. 

When John F. Kennedy appeared in Berlin in June of 1963 to announce to the world "Ich bin ein Berliner!" he was greeted by Berliners as a champion of freedom, not a traitor.  Every German I know who saw Kennedy or listened to the speech on the radio recalls it as a moment of great inspiration and hope.  Today JFK is remembered in Germany as one of our greatest presidents, and no attempts by right-wing revisionists can diminish his memory. 

Friedrich: End Internet Anonymity

I've written about this before.  Right-wing hate blogs are filled with violent content authored by anonymous contributors. We don't know for sure who owns and operates Politically Incorrect, Germany's most popular and notorious hate blog and the hundreds of commenters who spew out hate on the site day and night are all anonymous.  Nor do we know the names of the individuals behind the Holocaust denial site kreuz.net - they are too cowardly to reveal their real identities.  Anonymous hate has always been a feature of the Internet, but the issue has taken on a new urgency with the recent events in Norway, where a crazed right-wing fanatic gunned down scores of young people after years of following (in part) anonymous hate sites on the Web. 

Now Germany's Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich has lashed out against anonymous hate on the Internet: 

The fundamentals of law and order "must also apply to the Internet," the minister told the German news magazine Spiegel. Friedrich claimed that it would be useful if individuals were forced to make their arguments publicly, rather than anonymously.

Friedrich argued that the Internet was leading to a new breed of radicalized lone individuals about whom security authorities were becoming increasingly concerned.

"There are more and more people who isolate themselves from their social surroundings and disappear into their own world on the Internet," said Friedrich.

"Once there they change, most of them without really notice," he said.

I certainly sympathize with Herr Friedrich and would like to see an end to this scourge, but it is not feasible to force peole to disclose their real identiy on the Internet without shutting the Web down altogether.  On balance, the benefits of the open Internet outweigh the dangers.  We cannot become like China or Iran in trying to control access and suppressing the truth.  Besides, Breivik - the Norwegian terrorist - never tried to hide his identity. And, as we learned in his "manifesto", many of his heroes are well-known public figures - like Robert Spencer in the US and Henryk Broder in Germany - who actively trade off their hate.

Lights going out in America?

Last month the world watched with concern and disgust as a group of white nationalist nihilists - otherwise known as the Tea Party - threatened to destroy the financial integrity of the United States if they didn't get their agenda through the US Congress.  The bill that was passed was a disgrace; as Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote in the New York Times the debt deal "“will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.”

Picking up on the "banana republic" theme, Konrad Ege in Der Freitag sees that US policy is firmly in the hands of the "plantation owners" - millionaires like the members of the US Senate and billionaires like the Koch brothers:

Jenseits der Ringautobahn um die Hauptstadt hat „Washington“ keinen guten Ruf mehr. „Der Amerikaner“ riecht die vornehme Korruption der Elite. Das hat die Tea Party kapiert. Aktivisten mischen das Opfergefühl mit Regierungs- und Intellektuellenfeindlichkeit, mit Glauben an die Einzigartigkeit Amerikas und mit Skepsis gegenüber dem „Alien“ Barack Obama – und schon hat man eine Bewegung, die dem besagten einen Prozent bestens passt.

(Outside the Beltway "Washington" has a poor reputation.  The average American and smell the corruption of the elite class.  The Tea Party understands this well. The activists combine this feeling of victimization with attacks on "the Government"  and with anti-intellectualism, with faith in "American Exceptionalism" and suspicion of the "alien" Barack Obama.  They have built a movement which perfectly suits the interests of the top 1%.)

Democrats and progressives are paralyzed in the face of Tea Party intransigence which is amplified by the complicity of the mass media outlets like Fox News and CNN:

Das progressive Amerika erscheint wie gelähmt. Dass nach Umfragen an die drei Viertel der Amerikaner die Steuern der Reichsten erhöhen möchten, blieb in den Verhandlungen ohne Effekt. Da kann man nur noch hoffen, dass intelligente Plantagenbesitzer irgendwann einsehen, dass ihr System keine Zukunft hat, weil die Nation zerfällt und nicht mithalten kann mit der Konkurrenz weltweit.

(Progressives seem paralyzed. The fact that polls indicate that 3/4 of all Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy had zero effect on the negotiations.  So one can only hope that intelligent plantation owners realize at some point that the system has no future, for the nation is collapsing and can no longer compete with the global competition. )

Freitag's publisher, Jakob Augstein, is even more alarmist his column in Der Spiegel (English, Deutsch).  For Augstein, the United States is no longer even a Western nation:

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically -- in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

Like Konrad Ege, Jakob Augstein sees the US as an oligarchy, with Tea Party populism simply reinforcing the policies serving the wealthy elite.  America is dysfunctional. and as a nation it serves as a negative model for Europe:

Still, America's fate should serve as a warning: We must protect our political culture, our institutions and our state. The success of Thilo Sarrazin, with his anti-Muslim message, shows that even Germany isn't free of the kind of cultural coldness that can eventually ossify the vital functions of the political system. Our society has already made significant and deplorable steps on the path towards growing inequality and de-democratization.

Nevertheless, at least one good opportunity springs from America's fate: The further the United States distances itself from us, the more we will (have to) think for ourselves, as Europeans. The West? That's us.

We Americans have been here before and have managed to find our way back to our values - Western values.  I'm not throwing in the towel....yet.