The German Question

CHAPTER II THE GERMAN RESPONSIBILITY

GENERAL AND GROUP RESPONSIBILITY

SO far we have been at pains to practise the difficult virtue of justice, and to prove the untenability of the theory that at bottom Nazism is nothing else than the hated Germany, of which it is impossible to be too suspicious. We have shown that Nazism was essentially of the general type of totalitarianism, though in one of its worst forms; but it was not Teutonism. We have represented to the world outside Germany its great share of responsibility, and have uttered a warning against any pharisaical condescension toward the German people, not least in order to prevent the outer world from falling victim to the same poison of national arrogance, collective hatred, and summary collective justice, and to remind it, with the example of Germany before its eyes, of the external truth of the Bible saying (Prov. xiv, 34), “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” We have given reason to conclude that the difference between the average German and the men of other nations is in truth not so great, and that Nazism corresponded at least as much to the general spirit of our day as to the special German conditions. We have emphatically urged that the Germans must be regarded at least as much as victims deserving of commiseration or persons seduced against their will as creators of the nameless evil that in their name and with their aid was spread over the world. Thus we have made our own the apt formula of a Frenchman, Les Boches ont vaincu les Allemands.

But because we are concerned for justice, we have kept clear of any attempt, which in this case would be specially repulsive, at special pleading, and have spoken of deep guilt that demands expiation where no other term would have been in place. The time has now come to lay full emphasis on this German guilt and to discuss it in itself and in its context. We shall have further to show emphatically that we owe it not least to the Germans themselves to do this, since their only remaining hope lies in the recognition of their guilt, in repentance, and in rebirth.

Important as it is to recall that the Nazis came into power neither through an irresistible popular movement nor through a free majority vote but by the backstairs method of the coup d’état, it is, on the other hand, an unfortunate fact that even before they came into power a large part of the German people had ranged themselves in support of the Nazis, while the rest of the nation had been gravely weakened in its power of moral and intellectual resistance. Anyone who witnessed the final triumph of the Nazis in Germany will never forget how it all began.

Here again I find it necessary to speak of a personal experience. At the end of the summer vacation in August, 1930,I was in my native village, on the Lüneburg Heath. The Nazis had been feverishly at their subversive work for the impending Reichstag elections. One day my mother—whom I was never to see again after 1933—came to my study and told me with great emotion that even among our sensible peasants of Lower Saxony the Nazi activities were having really alarming success. There were very few people left with whom it was still possible to talk rationally. My mother made it clear to me that my standing as a University professor required of me that I should speak a word of warning. I was profoundly alarmed, and agreed with my mother. Accordingly, I had a leaflet printed, in which I spoke to our peasants as one of themselves, appealing to their common sense and their consciences and showing how appallingly they were being deceived. I made it perfectly clear to them what must ultimately happen if these hordes were to come into power. By now they will have realized that my darkest prophecies have been outdone. But at the time I was laughed at and abused. With that unforgettable Reichstag election, in which the Nazis became at a bound one of the strongest parties and were able, together with the Communists, who had also triumphed, to exert at once a crippling influence on Germany’s political and economic life, the tragedy began.

It was indeed a sort of terrible mass epidemic, rapidly spreading and every day making fresh victims, even in quarters one had always supposed to be immune. And against this Nazi plague nothing seemed to avail, neither the appeal to common sense nor the moral appeal, while on the other hand it was furthered by every possible circumstance and chance happening, in a way that made one feel that this was indeed the march of destiny. All classes were dosed with the poison in the most effective quantity and strength in each case, and everywhere every class was brought down, clerks and mechanics with their employers, peasants and aristocrats, professors, officers, industrialists, bankers, civil servants. The friend of yesterday turned overnight into one possessed, with whom it was no longer possible to argue, and the more the movement succeeded the more the nervous, the cynical, and the ambitious joined the genuinely convinced fanatics, the crazy, and the moral perverts, and the more the willpower of those responsible for the administration of the State was crippled. As for the later behaviour of the Germans, after the triumph of totalitarianism, we have already said all that is necessary.

All this is the responsibility of the German people as a whole, from which only a minority can with a good conscience claim to be free—a minority to which is due from us the deeper respect, the more comfortably we were installed in some safe haven abroad. Let those who have to share this general guilt never forget that it involves complicity in the most bestial atrocities that men could devise and commit, complicity in the torture and death of millions, in the devilish crimes of Oradour-sur-Glane, Vercors, Lidice, Auschwitz, Maidanek, and countless villages and towns of almost all the countries occupied by the Germans, complicity in the massacres of Warsaw, in the vandal destruction of irreplaceable libraries, and in thousands of other enormities which the pen can scarcely put down. And let no German drive the exasperation of the world to the pitch of frenzy by attempting to deny happenings of which there is documentary evidence, and of which he knows in his heart that the accounts are true, since they are entirely in consonance with the character, which he knows only too well, of Nazism.1

But much greater still is the special guilt of a few important groups, who made the decisive contribution to the triumph of Nazism, and this guilt is still graver since these were persons prominent in German life who have no claim to the benefit of extenuating circumstances that is due at all events to the masses. Among these people are especially the following groups:

(1)  Those who took part in the decisive intrigue of January 30th, 1933—von Papen and his accomplices, the Prussian junkers threatened by the “Osthilfe” scandal, the Generals involved in the plot, and captains of industry, such as Fritz Thyssen;

(2)  the military circles that gave their support through thick and thin to Hitler as a man who was being successful and was meeting their professional wishes, so that they let slip the opportunity for a coup d’état;

(3)  the financiers who, like Schacht, placed their very ordinary talents at the service of the regime out of cynicism, ambition, or infatuation;

(4)  the members of the Reichstag who in March, 1933, passed the decree conferring absolute powers on the Government;

(5)  the civil servants and diplomats who, like Popitz, Schwerin-Krosigk, Neurath, and most of the German representatives in foreign countries, placed themselves in the service of the new masters; and

(6)  the great group of intellectuals—professors, journalists, artists, and authors. With this last group we shall have to deal at length, as its responsibility is probably the worst and the most unpardonable.

THE INTELLECTUALS

Once a movement breaks out, may God protect us from the journalists and the professors.

ADALBERT STIFTER in a letter to Gustav Heckenast (1849)

THERE is scarcely another class in Germany that failed so fatally as that of the intellectuals in general, with the exception of a large part of the clergy of both confessions. This failure was so fatal because it resulted in a crippling of the conscience of the German nation. At a later stage we shall go thoroughly into the deeper historical roots of the betrayal of their mission by the German intellectual leaders. It was, in point of fact, a long process of degeneration and perversion of which we have here to describe the final steps.

We must begin with the remark that Nazism was unthinkable without an intellectual labour of subversion that had been carried on by whole generations of decadent writers. Nietzsche and his disciples must be named among these, and Spengler with his Decline of the West, and all those lesser spirits—Wilhelm Stapel, Hans Blüher, Franz Haiser, Steding, or Ernst Jünger (who, to make matters worse, was also a writer of talent)—men whose names are almost entirely unknown outside Germany, but who must not be overlooked by anyone who wants to understand how their country could plunge into the abyss of Nazism and commit not only spiritual but physical suicide.

We may ignore here the actual illiterates of the Nazi party, but we must point out the particularly great influence of groups of rather higher mental quality who, for the very reason that they spread essentially Nazi ideas in a disguised form, made an important contribution toward preparing the German middle class and the students for the Third Reich. The pattern for this sort of perfumed Nazism was supplied by a circle of hysterical literati who distributed every fortnight in the review Die Tat (“Action”) an eagerly swallowed concoction in which ideas of Nietzsche, Spengler, Sombart, and others of that ilk were mixed together in the style of the youth movement.2

This so-called “Tatkreis” (“Action” group) presented in an unbearable style an extremism for which even Bolshevist Russia and Fascist Italy were too liberal. It pressed for further enslavement of personality and a further spread of authoritarian tutelage. Its strident nationalism led in economic policy to the pure insanity of autarky. In its wild irrationalism it rejected the economic and social order of the West and its whole civilization. It preached homage to the myths of the nation, the State, the masses, and power, and contempt for economic prosperity and for the principles that assure it—and all this in the tone of social prophecy, with unctuous talk of destiny and history, and with an arrogance only exceeded by its ignorance. “Long live barbarism,” was its cry at one moment. Such was the mire in which it loved to wallow. These Edelnazis (“gentlemen Nazis”) had at all events sense enough to know that their babbling could not face rational discussion, and accordingly, in the true Nazi style, they elevated unreason to the dignity of a supreme principle, and declared the weapon of argument to be a “liberal” toy—liberal” clearly implying for them the depth of depravity. From this dreaded weapon of argument they took refuge in physical force. The illiberal person, wrote Die Tat on one occasion, “either depends confidently and resolutely, but passively, on himself, or, where he has to fight actively and combatively, takes the sword. The sword is the only argument that does not fit in with the liberalist system of reason and discussion. The sword and the fist.” In other words, the only reply they had left was the cudgel or the pistol. Those who did not think as these strange representatives of the intellect did must, they considered, have their mouths shut. Later, when in the Third Reich persons yet more brutal applied this principle to the Tat or “Action” group itself, the group recognized that mouth-shutting cannot be elevated to a principle unless one is quite sure who plays the active and who the passive part in that pastime.

These few reminiscences of that dismal time may give some idea of the atmosphere then prevalent in the leading intellectual quarters in Germany. Such were the forces that tirelessly sapped the foundations of German civilization and prepared the chaos that followed. These were the men whom we had to denounce as guilty of spiritual arson. But before the foreigner bursts out in all too righteous indignation, let us remind him that abroad there were the same groups as in Germany ready to lap up the same sort of propaganda. One of the best-known works of the Tat group—Ferdinand Fried’s muddled book Das Ende des Kapitalismus—found eager and sympathizing readers in a French translation, and many were the writers in the Western countries who played the same tune. What is still more serious is that in Great Britain and elsewhere today such a book as Carr’s Conditions of Peace should have had a remarkable reception, although it corresponds in many respects to the German pattern of the Tat group. Indeed, it even seems as if this book is only a particularly striking symptom of a much broader current that has been noted today in Britain by attentive observers.3

Professor Carr belongs to an English University. In Germany also, and, indeed, here in Switzerland, where the university professor has always had exceptional standing, even more than elsewhere, it was from the Universities that most of the other intellectuals drew the disintegrating poison which they then distributed, duly packed and processed, to the mass of the people. This is not the place for drawing the portrait of the German professor who became generations ago in so many Faculties the caricature of any intellectual leader of integrity—a specialist with no political sense but any amount of self-confidence and usually a bad temper. As a rule the professor of this type was a splendid worker and often a master in his special field, but he became a pretentious idiot the moment he blundered into vital questions of the State and society. That type of professor was always ready to hold a stirrup for the Government, whether by expounding the economic basis of Bismarck’s protectionism, or by supporting a sabre-rattling policy in foreign affairs or furthering the propaganda of the German Navy League, or by defending the unrestricted U-boat warfare, or finally by burning incense at the altar of Nazism. Here again we are concerned only with indicating the last stages of this betrayal of the mind and placing our finger on the almost inexpiable guilt of many German University professors in preparing people’s minds for the Nazi hordes and later, when Nazism put their courage as intellectual leaders to the test, proving ready, in good faith or bad, to palliate its assaults on culture and law and morality and to swallow its absurdest theories and even sing their praises. This is a harsh accusation, but it comes in this book from one of those very professors, who in his long years in German Universities had the best of opportunities of studying the work of this type of professorial politicaster and noting its appalling influence on academic youth. The writer knows, too, from his own experience, the difficulty the others, the honourable type, had in holding their own in this stuffy atmosphere. The academic freedom which progressive governments were at pains to respect had indeed become here more and more a charter for irresponsibles.

It is particularly disgraceful for the German Universities that it was there that the method of the base appeal to the mob first made its way in the form of anti-Semitism, and with ever-growing success. At the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Mommsen, in his public controversy with the anti-Semitic Treitschke, had made a strong effort, to his great credit, to stave off the beginning of the movement, speaking for an earlier and nobler Germany; but later there was no opposition of equal weight. No observer with any but a myopic vision could deny the existence of a very grave Jewish question, and in Germany it had become more and more critical in the last generation in particular; but this is no excuse for the coarse anti-Semitism that became more and more dominant in the German Universities. I had experience myself of the length to which anti-Semitism had been carried, when I tried once to point out to my colleagues, at a general meeting of professors, the great services done by Jewry for the German language and culture in eastern and southern Europe—with the result that I found my position as Professor at Marburg University most seriously affected. Now that this anti-Semitism has worked immeasurable harm to Germany, it is to be hoped that most of the German professors will have realized where that course has landed them.

In order to give as vivid an impression as possible of the atmosphere prevalent in the German Universities in those years of the germination of National Socialism, I will speak once more of a personal experience; for it is indeed necessary to have lived in Germany at that time to be able fully to understand the origin of the Third Reich. My story goes back to the days of the so-called Kapp Putsch of 1920, the first uprising of pan-Germanism after the war: at that time the Weimar Government was still in a position to deal with the business quickly and thoroughly. I was then a student at Marburg University. In those critical days there had been formed at the University a committee of Democratic, Socialist, and Catholic students, together with leading professors of theology (Martin Rade, Rudolf Otto, Heinrich Hermelinck), to grapple with the menace arising from the reactionary students’ associations, which had been secretly armed. The railwaymen, who had struck in answer to the putsch, assembled a special train for us, which took us to Kassel to see the General Officer commanding the Reichswehr. When we had represented to him how threatening the situation was in Marburg, the General gave us a reply that was typical of the attitude of army circles at the moment—that the situation had entirely changed, since a Communist rising had broken out in Thuringia, against which the Marburg students ought to be sent in a solid body. “Red hordes are marching through the country, murdering and setting fire to everything.” That was the new story. On this we students who were loyal to the Government demanded that we, too, should be armed as an independent formation—the “Volkskompagnie Marburg”—and conveyed to Thuringia. There we were witnesses of a dreadful tragedy that gave us for all time a conception of what we had to expect from those of the students who then and later set the tone. On occupying the small industrial town of Ruhla we had found the “Communists” perfectly orderly; but we learned that on the previous day the reactionary corps of students, under an ex-naval officer who belonged to a Prussian junker family, had kidnapped fifteen workmen from a neighbouring village and murdered them while under transport—“shot while attempting to escape,” as the cynical formula already ran. And only a few days earlier I had been in charge of the guard in the Wartburg, where with the captain of the Burg, von Cranach (a descendant of Lucas Cranach, the great German painter of the time of the Reformation), I had given myself up until late at night to the magic of a great German past.

We accumulated evidence of the facts from all around, aroused German public opinion, and succeeded in getting those responsible brought before the courts. Not only, however, did the authors of the crime remain unpunished, but it was on us, and on the professors of theology I have named, that the hatred and anger of the dominant groups of professors and students in the University fell. Thereafter, anyone who had been on our side in this affair was a marked man—and not the students who had committed an abominable crime. This state of things remained unchanged down to the start of the Third Reich, and nothing better illustrates the growth of savagery out of which that Satanic regime proceeded. If today in Germany there are professors who declare that they never did anything to help criminals into power, let them recall among other things that “tragedy of Mechterstädt.” We have not forgotten it.

It was here, too, at the German Universities, that in the lecture rooms, among the associations, and at every opportunity that offered, there were cultivated a brutal nationalism, a stupid national pride, an unreasoning hatred of the victor Powers, and an inhuman contempt for international law. It was here that a war of revenge was most energetically preached, and the way thus prepared for the triumph of Nazism. Here the young students were systematically fed on lies and trained in unreason. It was the University of Berlin that at that time placed on its war memorial the inscription Invictis victi victuri—“to the unconquered the conquered who will conquer”—and it was a professor of theology (Seeberg) who invented this.

Naturally the Faculties of social science provided a special opportunity for practising intellectual treachery and preparing the way for Nazism. Thus it is mainly the names of jurists and philosophers that could here be given. In Germany there were, indeed, few Faculties of law that were not filled with the spirit of obdurate anti-liberalism, anti-democratism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism, and it was this spirit that was thus carried into the life of the country by those who later became judges, administrative officials, and lawyers. It was in these Faculties that the saps were pushed forward that undermined the edifice of the Weimar Republic, weak as it was in any case. In these Faculties was forged in every possible variant the theory of the anti-liberal total State—by a Berlin professor named Smend, who invented for it the name of “sociological State,” by the Bonn professor Carl Schmitt, who later played so sinister a part, by the Viennese professor Othmar Spann, and by many of less note. All these teachings fell on a soil that had been most efficiently prepared by such “muck spreaders” as Spengler’s brilliant but perverse Decline of the West.

It can be said to the honour of the German economists that the part they played up to the start of the Third Reich was far less pernicious than that of the jurists. It may even be claimed that the great majority of them remained loyal to the spirit of social understanding and of comprehensive assessment in which that science, when it is pursued with a genuine regard for economic and social facts, gives special training. In addition to this the younger generation of German economists were seeking at that time with energy and understanding and impartiality a return to the tradition of the strict economic doctrine which had suffered eclipse under the dominance of the historical school. If there was any Faculty in which a breath of the liberal spirit was to be found, it was the Faculty of Economics, and this accounted for the emphasis with which this group of professors fought against the economic doctrines of Nazism, and especially against the insane system of autarky. There were exceptions, some of them of the worst sort, such as Othmar Spann, already mentioned, and Werner Sombart, who had much in common with him in character and mentality. Sombart had already given evidence of his quality during the first world war in his unspeakable pamphlet Händler und Helden (“Traders and Heroes”); and later, in his book Deutscher Sozialismus (1934), he supplied a model collection of pet theories of Nazism. These writers were seconded by a bevy of lesser spirits, whose names may be permitted to fall into oblivion.

There were many grave lapses among the representatives of medicine and of the natural sciences (with the creditable exception of a few individuals and branches), and the general atmosphere of the medical Faculties often exceeded that of the legal Faculties in unintelligence. The philologists and the historians maintained the good tradition for the longest time, though here, too, there was no lack of professors whose honest work in their own field did not prevent them from making most unfortunate excursions into politics. It is true that the average historians did not renounce their devotion to the neo-Prussian tradition, and certainly in this field there were plenty of preachers of the baldest nationalism, who felt themselves to be epigoni of Treitschke. German historical science was no less indisputably influenced by the tendency to a certain naturalism that began with Ranke; we shall have more to say about this tendency, which contributed immensely to creating the general mental atmosphere in which Nazism first became possible. Finally, there was scarcely a single German historian who was able to judge with the impartiality of the universal historical outlook the development of Greater Prussia since 1866, still less the origin and course of the first world war. But it is difficult to discover any prominent historian who so directly prepared the way for Nazism as did professors of constitutional law or of political science.4 As for the philologists, many of them, particularly the specialists in the Romance and Anglo-Saxon languages, can only be referred to in terms of deep respect. To mention only one example, it must not be forgotten that Ernst Robert Curtius, in his book Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (“German Spirit in Danger”), published in 1932, courageously and energetically set himself against the fatal process already far advanced; while no one familiar with the subject need be reminded of the importance of Karl Vossler’s work. Even in Germanic philology the strict scientific discipline which, of course, philology especially inculcates kept most of its students clear of nationalist cultural charlatanry. Here again a single name may stand for many, that of the Berlin Germanic scholar Konrad Burdach, who had the courage to tell the Germans plainly that in the Middle Ages they had had no truly national culture, and that Middle High German epic poetry was mainly an art of translation from the French.5

In spite of all bright spots, the general picture we have had to draw of the influence of the German professors down to the Third Reich remains dark enough, and we hope their best representatives will agree with us when we conclude that a great load of responsibility had here been incurred. But the responsibility grows to infinite dimensions when we examine the behaviour of the German professors after 1933.

The Nazis knew only too well that the German Universities were among the strongholds it was most important for them to capture if they were to gain the indispensable dominance over the German soul—a stronghold scarcely less important than the Churches. Accordingly they left no stone unturned to gain this end, and where they had no success with intimidation or brutality they tried persuasion or transparent indulgence. Here again I can speak from my own experience. In the spring of 1933 I was deprived of my post as professor at Marburg University. I was thus declared an “enemy of the people,” and was also treated as one by not a few of my colleagues. To the obvious astonishment of the Nazis, I did not take the slightest step to get back into their good graces and gain re-admission to the company of Volksgenossen, or “national comrades.” Instead of showing the obviously expected penitence, I took every opportunity of challenging the Nazis in every way I could. It was obviously as a result of this attitude that one day two S.S. men—of thorough “bruiser” type—came to see me in order to explain politely to me that after all my proper place was really with them. I could not resist the temptation in replying to them to give vent to my scorn and indignation; but the moment they had gone away crestfallen I realized that I must now get across the frontier at once. But even at my first place of exile, with friends in Holland, a Nazi emissary came to see me in order to give me a flattering invitation to return home in honour.

In Italy many University professors refused to take the oath to Fascism and bravely held their ground. In Germany the number of professors who lost their posts after 1933 through being true to their convictions was exceedingly small. Most of the professors then dismissed under a so-called “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (which, of course, in reality undermined it) were victims of the racial legislation. It is impossible to say what they would otherwise have done; but to judge from the attitude of those Jewish professors who at first imagined themselves to be safe on account of their special standing, and who often looked down contemptuously on their dismissed colleagues, Jew or Gentile, there seems ground for a good deal of scepticism.6

In view of all this it is not to be wondered at that after the Nazis had tricked their way into power the representatives of learning in general behaved with what can only be described as either cowardice or cynical opportunism or mental and moral perversion. Even in those branches of knowledge which had shown themselves capable of resistance so far, there now came a collapse that for years made an end of any usefulness of the Universities as a mental and moral counterweight to the official barbarism, and it seemed as if, now that there was no longer any need for self-restraint, they were going over to the lowbrow camp with flags flying. It was a scene of prostitution that has stained the honourable history of German learning, and represents one of the worst and most fateful examples of group responsibility.

Here again justice certainly demands that we should set certain limits to our condemnation; once more we must be careful not to be too summary in our verdict. On the one hand there were cases of brave resistance, standing out all the more brightly from the poor record of the majority, cases that ended—if nothing worse happened—with the silent disappearance of not a few scholars of high repute, while those who now set the tone were brought so much the more into the foreground. On the other hand, the general picture was falsified, by no means to the benefit of traditional learning, by the fact that everywhere worthless fanatics, careerists, incapable private lecturers, or purely partisan “intellectuals,” men who had never caught a breath of the true spirit of science, occupied the professorial chairs so ardently aspired to, gained control of the journals, wrote new approved textbooks, carried on the learned societies, and represented the German Universities in relation to the outer world. In a sense there was repeated on a small scale in the Universities what had happened to the German nation as a whole: they were driven into active or passive complicity, but they must not be judged on the same basis as those who had done the driving.

The general picture, however, was most depressing. This applies especially to the cases, unfortunately by no means few, in which former Socialists, Democrats, or Liberals not only capitulated miserably, but even gave active service in the former enemy ranks, trying to bury their past in oblivion by means of an undignified display of zeal. We cannot refrain here from mentioning these unfortunate lapses; on the other hand, the utmost respect is due to the courage of many former Democrats. Equal esteem is due to the old Alfred Weber, professor of sociology at Heidelberg (and brother of the late Max Weber), who in 1933 had the courage to haul down the swastika flag single-handed from the University building, and who remained adamant to the end. The Berlin philosopher Eduard Spranger also deserves mention here, though it has to be said that he showed weakness at the beginning of the Third Reich. According to the report of a Swiss national who was present, he had the spirit to begin a lecture on “Socrates and Plato” in the ruins of Berlin with the following words: “In the midst of this great world conflagration let our thoughts rest on those figures of old who have been shining examples down to our own time. They laid the foundations of Western culture, for the retention or rejection of which nations are struggling with one another today.” He is an example of those professors who in the end made up for their complicity at the beginning of the Third Reich by courageous testimony to the insight they had gained.

In accordance with the totalitarian character of the new regime, there was scarcely a single branch of learning on which Nazism did not try to set its stamp—there was even a “German” mathematics and a “German” physics—but, naturally, certain fields were specially imperilled. These included, above all, jurisprudence, economics, history, and certain branches of medicine. They were made instruments of the State and its ideology to such an extent that very few professors had the courage, the strength of character, and the high intellectual capacity not merely for keeping silent but actually for assuring the undeviating progress of their honest scientific labour. Among these mention should be made of the economists Walter Eucken (Freiburg), Constantin von Dietze (Freiburg), and Wilhelm Gerloff (Frankfurt). As for history, it provided striking confirmation of the dictum of Edgar Quinet: “Dans la servitude rien ne se corrompt si vite que l’histoire”7—nothing, if it loses its independence, is so quickly corrupted as history. It was only through a spiritual corruption of this sort that it was largely historians, archaeologists, and art critics who everywhere in the occupied countries of Europe, to the utter disgrace of learning, became mental myrmidons of the Nazis and looted archives and museums.8

We have described at this length the pernicious part played by the German Universities because it shows us the process of mental and moral degeneration in the quarter from which, after the Churches, the strongest resistance ought to have come. Corruptio optimi pessima—the German Universities not only failed to stand firm but actually were among the worst centres of infection. What, then, could be expected of the other intellectuals, especially the judges and the secondary school masters? Like academic freedom, the independence of the judges was meticulously respected by the Republican Governments, though many judges grossly abused it, especially those who had to deal with criminal or civil cases of a political character. Scarcely one of the offences that revealed the spirit of the later Nazism was adequately punished (the tragedy of Mechterstädt was only one of countless examples), and the jurisdiction in issues of a political character was to an appalling degree plain and open flouting of the German State, which tried desperately to defend itself against this spate of Nihilism. Have the German judges, too, learnt the fearful lesson, after making their contribution to the triumph of Nazism? Have they realised that the independence of the judiciary is a constitutional asset that brooks no abuse?

The subversive work of the judges was largely carried on in the full glare of publicity. Not so the work of the schoolmasters. It is very difficult to estimate the quantity of poison administered day by day to the growing generation in the German schools. The masters’ classical education had not trained them in humanity. Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence that here, too, an evil seed was sown, despite the praiseworthy efforts of a minority of exemplary teachers.

On top of this condemnation of the German professors, judges, and schoolmasters, must we adduce the shameful examples of the apostasy of artists? The task is all the more repugnant since it would be difficult to discover any prominent German poets, painters, sculptors, actors, or musicians who showed themselves entirely inaccessible to the courtship of the regime. Why could not Gerhart Hauptmann keep silent and Furtwängler lay down his baton?

Finally, as regards the tragedy of the German press, we could only do it justice in a lengthy special account. Naturally the Nazi Government, like every other totalitarian system, had to bring the whole press under its control as quickly and as completely as possible, in order to assure itself of one of the principal instruments for dominating and misleading public opinion, and naturally no opposition could prevent it from following the example of Italian Fascism and appropriating the whole newspaper system by force or fraud and placing compliant editors in charge. Thus in the twinkling of an eye all the German newspapers were turned into organs of Nazism, playing the same tune shrilly or softly on their various instruments. Individual nuances were still to be observed in the first years, but these reflected the unresolved problems of control within the regime, where they were not simply intended to throw sand into the eyes of foreign observers. It was due to these conditions that, above all, the old-established and respected Frankfurter Zeitung was able to maintain a special character that at least was more or less civilized, and so was able to remain fairly readable to a great extent even when its opposite numbers in Berlin were already competing with the Völkischer Beobachter. It was depressing to see how even the Frankfurter Zeitung, which at first had honourably tried not to be entirely untrue to its famous tradition, and which smuggled into its columns many a forceful sentence against Nazism, was slowly but steadily throttled. One would have been glad to see it come to a glorious end in 1933. But for reasons which it will only later become possible fully to disclose, it was condemned to be slowly corrupted until at last, when it no longer seemed to be of any use even in this form, it was put out of its misery. Worst of all was the fact that even in this case, the best in the German newspaper world, the editorial staff themselves took part in the corruption of their paper. It is, indeed, true that the staffs of many other newspapers did much worse. Here again, the record in Nazi Germany was probably worse than in Fascist Italy.

INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE

All these reproaches affect the leaders of intellectual life in Germany in two ways. Against the very worst they are a charge of having paved the way for barbarism, long before its eruption in 1933, and a different charge against those who showed cowardice and stupidity after the trick that set barbarism in the saddle. We have already stated the extenuating circumstances which in justice have to be admitted. It would also be thoroughly pharisaical if the world were no longer willing to bear in mind that lack of character, the conforming spirit, and opportunism seem unfortunately to be a general characteristic of our epoch, and it was precisely the class of University professors that failed, and not only in Germany, when the need came for a courageous defence of the ultimate values and convictions of our civilization.9 It should also not be forgotten how quickly the intellectuals outside Germany showed themselves ready to take the keenest interest in Nazism, and how many of them were easily won over by the Nazis as paid or unpaid helpers. We have not even been spared the repulsive spectacle of some of these members of the “intellectual Foreign Legion” of Nazism turning later into thoroughly unfair denouncers of Germany.

These same demands of justice compel us further to insist on the fact that after those first fateful years of the Third Reich there came an undoubted change among the German intellectuals, which indicated a continuing process of courageous reflection and self-assertion after the catastrophe had come for which generations of decadent and irresponsible writers had prepared the way. Just as the epidemic was preceded by a long period of intellectual incubation, it may very well have been precisely the German intellectuals who first came to their senses, who were the first to be filled with acute horror of the reality which some of them had foreseen in desolate dreams, and who realized the path that of necessity, when a certain philosophy was carried to the last extreme, led to Oradour-sur-Glane, to Maidanek, and to the devastation of the cities of Europe. True as it is that these intellectuals were infected for a period, shorter or longer, with Nazism, or may have sailed with the wind through lack of character, it would be wrong to suppose that they were permanently converted to Nazism and had sunk to the level of party functionaries. It may, indeed, fairly be said that, if the great majority of them ever really succumbed to the poisonous influence of Nazism, they had since for a considerable time been actively trying to get rid of it.

This was the more noteworthy since the war into which Nazism had driven Germany had naturally, as everywhere else, and as at all times, a strong integrating effect, of which we have already spoken, and placed every intellectual under the temptation to identify himself, at least “for the duration,” with the regime. This was all the more to be expected since, in a tragically vicious circle, the Allied Powers in their exasperation seemed to envisage for the Germans a fate that would make them suffer for the deeds of the regime. Thus the German intellectuals must have travelled very far when many of them, in spite of their divided feelings, preferred to see their country’s fall rather than the continuance of the regime. I know a German professor who, when he learned of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland, brought one of his last bottles of Rhine wine from his cellar, to celebrate an event that seemed to him to portend the end of the war. If anyone does not see at once what that implies, let him try to imagine a German professor doing the same thing if the German Crown Prince had flown to England in 1917. Everybody will agree that the idea is unthinkable, and this throws a strong light on the fundamental contrast between then and now. It makes, of course, no difference that my professor had mistaken the true character of Hess’s escapade. And what are we to think of another good Conservative intellectual, who had the courage to write to me during the war that there was nothing to be seen in the streets any longer but the “horrible uniforms”? Would he have written that in 1918?

All this does not in the least alter the fact that many German intellectuals have loaded themselves with an enormous responsibility. The thing that matters, however, is that probably some of them would actually contradict us if we had any idea of trying to find excuses for them. It is this that shows the moral revolution of which we shall have later to speak particularly.

Even in the worst years after Nazism sneaked into power, there was no doubt that many German intellectuals were succeeding in combining a temporary weakness towards Nazism with an astonishing general culture. They saved that general culture during the inferno, and preserved it as a precious stock that is among the few assets that remain to Germany after the war, a stock with which a new start could be made. Anyone who has watched the new publications in the German book market since 1933—apart, of course, from party literature—and the more intellectually discriminating periodicals, would have had to be blind to fail to recognize their high level. There have been real masterpieces of genuine scholarship and fine book-making among them, fat volumes like the Handbuch der Weltliteratur (Handbook of world literature), a masterly work of its sort, by Hans W. Eppelsheimer, who was not allowed to know anything about Thomas Mann, but did justice to Heine; or Egon von Eickstedt’s comprehensive and thoroughly scientific Rassengeschichte der Menschheit (History of the races of mankind), published in 1937 and now in a second edition; books such as F. Schnabel’s Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert (German history in the nineteenth century), of which three volumes have been issued since 1934, a book everyone will read with pleasure and profit; and finally the excellent collections of masterpieces of world literature (Kröners Taschenausgaben, Dietrichsche Sammlung, Inselbücherei, etc.). Admirable editions in Greek and German of the pre-Socratic philosophers were published, and though, indeed, none of the party officials read them and no S.S. man ever heard of them, they were eagerly bought by a wide educated public and gave evidence of a very comforting continuity of German culture. The interest in the cultivation and spread of the cultural tradition of the ancient classics was almost greater than ever.

French literature was placed in various ways before the educated German public, with gratifying objectivity and in an unmistakable effort to present thereby all that is common to the European peoples; and the same applies to English literature. Meanwhile the cultivation of the German classics was not neglected, and it is significant that Adalbert Stifter himself, a writer as remote as could be from the spirit of the day, was published in carefully prepared editions. Even Stifter’s Lesebuch zur Förderung humaner Bildung, published in 1854, appeared in a facsimile of the first edition, and this was not mere respect for tradition but part of a rebel programme.

To complete the picture we may mention the mass of art books, which no more betrayed the regime under which they were appearing than did the books already mentioned. Here, too, there was a clear fundamental tendency—to turn away to the heritage of the past and to pay homage to the universal scales of value. It is significant of this tendency that poets of the classic and romantic traditions continued to write, even if, like Ernst Wiechert, they had to pay for their courage with the concentration camp. That truly Christian literature continued in full course need scarcely be said. Thus the impression might be gained that under the National Socialists the German intellectuals largely remained as they had always been, with their great and, indeed, fatal weaknesses but also with their achievements and with a cultural tradition that deserves respect. It was only the very complex character of the German mind that enabled the intellectuals to preserve this tradition without openly breaking with Nazism.

In this continuity one may see at once a sort of opposition, if only passive. But it is significant and encouraging that some of the German intellectuals—the number is difficult to estimate—had for years no longer contented themselves with the mere preservation of intellectual continuity but had gone from passive to active opposition. That little is known of this, as a rule, outside Germany is due, of course, mainly to the fact that these movements of intellectual resistance could only be noiseless undercurrents, of which everyone in Germany became aware at once, but rarely anyone outside the country. It should, however, be mentioned here as of general knowledge that intellectual life in Germany, even before the ultimate wild excesses of the final phase of Nazism, had been so shackled that Fascist Italy had seemed in comparison almost a Paradise of freedom. No one who cared for life and liberty could dare in Germany to write for a single day with the freedom of Benedetto Croce in his review La Critica, Luigi Einaudi in his Rivista di Storia Economica, or certain authors in the Giornale degli Economisti.

But the thing that nevertheless was attempted in Germany until a few years ago was so astonishing that people asked themselves how it could be possible under the very nose of the Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. There is every reason for us to raise our hats with deep respect to the pluck thus evidenced. There is all the more reason for doing so since the most courageous—such men as the distinguished editor of the Deutsche Rundschau, Rudolf Pechel, and several of his staff, after they had long stood up openly for the fundamental principles of civilization and humanity, fell victims to the concentration camp, with the imminent danger of which they had had to reckon every day. To this Rundschau group belonged the ill-starred Doctor Goerdeler, who was executed, after the attempted coup d’état of July 20th, 1944, in the same brutal way as the Generals in the conspiracy. We may recall that Doctor Goerdeler lost his office as Chief Mayor of Leipzig in 1933 because he had the courage to oppose the demolition of the memorial to Mendelssohn.

When I think of all these men, and when I look through the old numbers of the Deutsche Rundschau, I really do not know where at any time in this war greater gallantry was shown than here, the gallantry of the individual who had not fame and honour to expect but certain destruction, and who was surrounded by no warm Comradeship but only by a silent group of unknown though grateful readers. That review, of which I am here making special mention, was well known to all the intellectual leaders in Germany and felt by them to be a refreshing oasis in the desert around them—until in the end the Rundschau, too, was brutally silenced. It was the pattern for publications that could be read with pleasure and profit by any educated person in any country, representing the best heritage not only of German but of Western culture, and again and again astonishing us all by its extreme boldness and its expertness in the art of the subtle implication. Whoever read it could not but gain the conviction that there was an intellectual élite of deep seriousness in Germany, rejecting with loathing all tyranny and cruelty and lawlessness, regarding war as a frightful catastrophe, searching all civilization for the eternal treasures of the mind, clinging to every German name of the past and the present that could fill it with comfort and with pride and could still be openly mentioned, drawing refreshment alike from Horace and from George Washington or Montesquieu, and fighting with profound Christian conviction against nihilism, fatalism, and the cult of force.

Such publications had developed a mastery of the art which the gunner describes as “indirect fire,” selecting for their purpose entirely remote events, or perhaps Louis XIV or Napoleon. Under this remarkable type of camouflage it had been possible to publish not only protests against the persecutions of the Jews but even a very positive appreciation of Mr. Churchill—in Germany in the very midst of the Nazi war. The men of this group were true to the principle laid down by Wilhelm Raabe during the period of Prussian sabre-rattling after 1871—“It has always been a privilege of decent people in disturbed times to keep to themselves, rather than prudently shout with the crowd as rogues among rogues.”

The size and importance of this group must not, of course, be overestimated. But does it really mean so little that thousands of professors, judges, schoolmasters, writers, industrialists, or landowners belonged to that group? And can it really have been so small a group if certain books rapidly went through edition after edition, and when in the end they became unobtainable were actually copied out by hand? I may mention as a random example the collection first published in 1935 of the letters of Jacob Burckhardt, which are, indeed, among the most refreshing in recent German literature, and which must have been read if one is to realize what it means for the book to have had a big sale. I may also mention Alfred von Martin’s Nietzsche und Burckhardt, a book that takes a clear stand against Nietzsche and for Burckhardt, and seems to have been a comfort to countless readers—or Walter Eucken’s Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie. The same may be said of the publications in belles lettres, which kept aloof from the prostituted propaganda literature and in contrast to it were distinguished by a high average level.

The main tendencies of the thought of this intellectual élite may be summarized as follows:

(1) Rejection of totalitarianism and its various characteristics (unfreedom, lawlessness, imperialism, dependence on the masses, collectivization, and dishonesty). This, of course, could not be given direct expression, but it could be revealed by the unambiguous attitude to historically or geographically remote examples and by the emphasized preference for writers who defended Christian, Liberal, democratic, individualistic, and humanist principles against the new barbarism. Plain conclusions could also be drawn from the publication of books describing the terrorist regime of the French Revolution. A high point was reached by the article already mentioned on the South American dictator Lopez. In the same issue of the Deutsche Rundschau (April, 1941) an idealized picture was painted of the old Germanic democracy, of which this was said: “The leader (Führer) had to bring conviction in argument and counter-argument, as the free expression of opinion was an unquestioned right of every free man . . . The king of the Germanic peoples was no god upon earth; he was subject to the freest criticism. This was in contrast to the rulers of eastern peoples, who were deified by flatterers.” All these tendencies were illustrated by the fact that sympathetic attention was paid to the defeated opponents of the great despots of world history. Characteristic, for instance, was Werner Jaeger’s book Demosthenes (1939), and similarly the rediscovery of Cato, Talleyrand, Constantin Frantz, and Madame de Staël. There were printed with grim satisfaction the Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat concerning Napoleon, from which Jacob Burckhardt had drawn, and it was not forgotten to invite attention to this passage of close interest to every German: “Thus it was a long time before we realized that every conquest merely added a new link to the chain that shackled our liberties. When we had become aware of the mania this orgy had produced, it was too late to offer resistance: the army had become the accomplice of the tyranny, and would have seen in the cry for liberation nothing but sedition.” This was precisely the situation in which a German found himself.

It would be impossible fully to understand how the German intellectuals were able to venture on this course, so long as they were able to use their pens at all, if we did not bear in mind that since the beginning of the war against Russia the German people had had to surfer such terrible sacrifices that their mental attitude to war and death had completely changed. Clemenceau once made the profound remark that the German has a most peculiar attitude to death, almost amorous, but this is certainly only true of a theory adopted by the German in a fundamental romanticism and mysticism until now ineradicable. This is certainly bad enough, and is one of the main reasons why the average modern German has thought of war and battle with so much more disturbing lightheartedness than other peoples with a healthier outlook. Yet, must not any human beings abandon this theory in face of the ghastly reality of modern massacre and bombing, exchanging it for a normal human fear of death and the normal human horror of mass murder? To that feeling Matthias Claudius gave eloquent expression in his war poem10—which has characteristically been banned in the German schools since Bismarck’s day. The change had already been observable during the first world war. In 1914 the German students’ regiments had gone singing to their death at Langemarck, and young men had volunteered in masses for the frischfröhlicher Krieg, the “brisk and merry” war; but very soon all that was changed. The volunteer became a strange figure no longer understood by the other soldiers: he was supposed to have “wanted war”—and the “brisk and merry” soldier of 1914 turned into the deeply serious, grimly determined “trench pig” who did his duty and regarded the Heimatschuss, the wound just bad enough to get him home, as the height of good fortune. It is scarcely too much to say that the German army in the West in 1918 consisted entirely of men who at bottom were pacifists or at all events could have been turned into pacifists in a moment. It seems as if now, at all events among the older men, a similar change had taken place in recent years—in proportion as the Third Reich consisted more and more of the dead and their relatives. The soldiers were saying in November, 1918, that the defeat had really been a bit of luck, “as otherwise we should soon have had to stand to attention in front of every letter box,” and it has been stated that in recent years this sort of grim humour had become popular again in Germany, so far as it had not been overborne by anxiety about the peace plans of the Allies.

(2) This anxiety about the inevitable catastrophe, in which the just and the unjust would have to surfer alike, found expression in recent years not only in private conversation but again and again in print in more or less veiled form. It was plainly visible in the passage about the dictator of Paraguay already quoted. The same astonishing Deutsche Rundschau wrote in its issue of August, 1941: “It is a harsh law of history that every nation has to surfer for its regime, even when it was compelled to put up with it by inhuman sufferings and inconceivable terrorism.” Such allusions were to be met with again and again, perhaps with reference to Louis XIV or to Napoleon, and even a philological analysis of the Persians of Aeschylus provided the opportunity for them. We may assume that the fear of what was to come was bound up not only with a sense of guilt but also with some slight hope that this time the catastrophe might involve the rulers and the people in differing measure.

(3) The economic and social views of this group of intellectual leaders were difficult to grasp because, as everywhere, they were probably still very confused. We may say definitely, however, that not a few of them took less and less delight in economic planning. Socialism, and collectivism, and began to rediscover the inestimable value of the Liberal economic outlook. No thoughtful person, even among those associated with the regime, could escape the impressive object-lesson of a collectivist economic system, and even among the working-class it was reported that the question was being asked what was the actual difference between such a system and the Communist system. The masters of propaganda and of mass psychology enthroned in Moscow knew only too well why they permitted the “free committee” of Germans there to place “a free economic system” on their programme, bizarre as this must seem to anyone with knowledge of the facts. In this connexion mention should also be made of the great interest aroused by the courageous defence of a competitive economic system by Walter Eucken and his group, and the echo produced by my own writings—especially Die Lehre der Wirtschaft and Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart—in spite of the extraordinary difficulties of getting hold of them in Germany.

(4) With a certain renascence of economic liberalism was associated a tendency sharply opposed to the collectivist aims of Nazism. There was constant evidence of disgust with the colossal, with mass organization and dragooning, and a longing for a “simpler existence” (Ernst Wiechert), for decentralization, for the small groups within range of a man’s vision, for security far away from mammoth concerns, great cities, and the Moloch of the State, for release from the unendurable collective existence of the termite State, for gardens, for houses instead of flats, for peace and privacy—among the workers as among other classes. All this means that the cult of the colossal began to lose popularity in the very country that had carried it, like everything else, to excess, and people who had been driven by immoderation sought to return to the golden mean. In addition to this, it became clear to every thoughtful person how mendacious and how contrary to the true nature of the peasantry the Nazi cult of the peasant had been; for the one thing of which such a totalitarian, collectivist State can least of all make use is naturally an independent peasantry rooted in the land. And perhaps nothing was more significant or more hopeful than the fact that in the midst of the inferno of the Third Reich leading intellectuals discovered, apparently for the first time, how dubious a figure is the so-called “Faustian man,” of whom so much had been made, whose praises had but recently been sung by Spengler, and for whom in Germany, as also in Fascist Italy, the name of “dynamic” man had been invented. It was now suddenly found how empty and senseless is action for the mere sake of action, and Goethe’s tragedy, which had lent its name to this type of man, was at last given its right interpretation: It is Satan himself with whose help, Faust, at the end of his restless life, trampled down the simple human happiness of Philemon and Baucis in order to enjoy “the blessedness of command” and to erect his colossal buildings.

In harmony with this profound revulsion of thought was the effort to return to the old and tried sources of wisdom and humanity, above all to Christianity and the classics. This explains why the ancient Greek and Roman literature seemed to be enjoying a popularity unknown before in Germany. It is well known that since the beginning of the nineteenth century classical philology has had very great achievements to its credit in Germany and has for a long time virtually held the lead; but it had always been no more than a humanism of learned circles, with less influence on general culture in Germany than, for instance, in Britain or France. Thus there had been no attempt to make the classics accessible to a wider public in bilingual editions such as the Loeb Classical Library or the Collection Budé. It is striking that a few years ago a change came in this respect actually under Nazism. Various publishers, particularly Heimeran in Munich, had issued a number of parallel texts of the classics, and just at the beginning of the war a start had been made with a comprehensive collection of bi-lingual texts on the British and French model. But it was not only Christian and ancient literature that profited by this renaissance: Chinese philosophers, Dante, Thomas of Aquinas, and the German classics were drawn upon to satisfy the intellectual hunger of readers who had suddenly found themselves, thanks to the regime and its war, faced with the ultimate problems of mankind in the most urgent way. Not without reason was there talk of a “revivifying current” in German literature and art. The very gratifying fight against the barbarization of the German language—which had been proceeding at an appalling pace under the Nazi regime of the semi-educated masses—was also, perhaps, connected with these tendencies.

Every clear-sighted person will agree that these were very welcome undercurrents, permitting the hope that the German problem, which is at bottom a spiritual one, need not be insoluble. Now, the reader will scarcely need to be warned that account must be taken of the many reservations needed in offering this picture. He will in any case be inclined to say that what has been said here is too good to be true. The danger that he may read too much into it will thus not be so great as the danger that he will attach too little importance to it, or will simply disbelieve it. But perhaps I shall seem more entitled to belief when I myself insist that these are, of course, only tendencies, whose true importance is difficult to assess.

We must return with still more caution to a final point, the most important of all. This is the question that has occupied us again and again, whether signs are already discoverable of the disappearance of the fatal “Prussian” complex among Germany’s intellectual leaders—so far as we can speak of them at all as a definite group. Are they beginning to see that the Realpolitik to which they were so addicted was not only bad morals but bad policy? That the Bismarckian Reich was a disastrous mistake and that “blood and iron” produced an appalling harvest? That Bismarck’s greatness lay, after all, if we look closely into it, merely in his being of sufficient calibre to master for a time the chaos he had himself created in home and foreign policy? That he founded a tradition that has ruined Germany at home and abroad? That the Reich he contrived was an artificial construction that could only be held together by intense and unceasing effort? That his annexation of Alsace-Lorraine began the era of armed peace in Europe? That an immoral policy cannot be exculpated by the favourite phrase of Dämonie der Gewalt, “the daemonism of force”? That after the frightful collapse of Bismarck’s work the Reich must cut its coat anew?

These are some of the principal questions the German élite must ask itself today—or so much of the élite as still exists—and only if it answers Yes shall we be able to note its radical conversion. It cannot yet be confidently stated that that has happened. But one needs only to understand the language that had become necessary under the Nazi regime in Germany—like the man in the fairy tale who understood the language of the birds—to detect evidence that among the German intellectuals serious thought had been given even to this particularly delicate point. It was plain that here, too, the seed had begun to sprout beneath the soil.

Even the cult of regional art, which the Nazis had incautiously fostered at the outset, was bound to work centrifugally and to reinforce the regional consciousness at the expense of the overworked cult of unity. Even the effort, observable in recent literature, to hold up a more or less idealized Prussianism as a model for the ruined generation of today was not to be despised. Moltke or Schlieffen, for instance, was presented to the German reader in such a way as to suggest the question: Where are upright and unpretentious men like that to be found today? Interesting in this connexion was a book by the Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter, Machtstaat oder Utopie? (1940), in which Machiavelli and Sir Thomas More were contrasted in a discussion of the relation between ethics and politics.11 The book is essentially a shamefaced whitewashing of Machiavellianism and of Realpolitik, but it is evident that the author is no longer comfortable about the matter. He makes play accordingly with the convenient excuse that there is indeed a Dämonie der Macht of which it would be hypocritical to deny the existence, and he brings this charge of hypocrisy against More, against Gladstone, and against British policy in general. A psychological analysis of this book creates the impression that the author is fundamentally troubled by deep scruples. As, however, he has not yet battled through to a real change of outlook, he tries to soothe himself and those who think with him by demonstrating that the others are no better, indeed are worse, since they are not as honest as the German Machiavellians. This sense of guilt—though still suppressed—is at least a welcome advance. It is still more gratifying to see that the Deutsche Rundschau in its review of the book defends More against the German writer.

All this was a very timid and as yet half-hearted beginning. But there were better things. Thus we noted with glad surprise that even in Conservative circles there was a sign of something that had very rarely been visible in the past—a readiness for national self-criticism. Thus we found, again in the Deutsche Rundschau (April, 1941), “Megalomania is one of the most dangerous diseases of a nation.’’ The “subservience of the middle class” was mercilessly denounced, and the hard statement was made that “Every German carries a lackey’s livery in his knapsack.” The vices of the Germanic heroes were ruthlessly exposed, and they were not treated by any means in the style of patriotic school primers. Further, it is not without importance that the memory was revived of eminent non-Prussian statesmen of the past, whose line of thought was entirely opposed to the Prussian tradition—such statesmen, for instance, as the Württemberger Johann Moser, who in the eighteenth century won fame by his systematization of international law, or the Hanoverian Justus Möser, whose political wisdom was highly appreciated by Goethe. All these were discreet hints that there are other German countries besides Prussia, each with its own history and tradition, which gained new lustre now that the Prussian tradition was so heavily compromised. The result of them was that Nazi propaganda had to give more and more attention to combating the reawakening of regional consciousness. From these hints it was but a step to cast doubt on the desirability of great States in general and to rediscover the advantages of the small State. This again could, of course, only be done with the utmost discretion, as, for instance, in Bernhard Knauss’s book, Staat und Mensch in Hellas (1940), which aroused great interest, or in Werner Jaeger’s Demosthenes, already mentioned.12 Knauss defended the particularism of the Greek city State in a way that could be applied elsewhere as well as in Greece.

These were some of the seedlings that had come into view before complete darkness fell over the Third Reich. They were only recognizable by a trained eye, and even then it was not always possible to be sure that it was not a case of optical illusion or of the sprouting of some mere weed. Moreover, there had been plenty of later events that could not fail to influence these movements of intellectual resistance. Those who a few years earlier had still been capable of strong reaction were bound since to have largely given way to hopelessness and inner collapse, of which it was difficult for the outsider to have a correct idea. When the present book was in the press in Switzerland (May, 1945), it could only be expected that the intellectual leaders, the very men on whom the last hopes for the future of Germany must rest, would under the continually increasing strain on mind and nerves and body, after twelve years of such a regime, have lost much of their resilience. In addition to this, the uncertainty as to the Allied policy with regard to Germany was bound to reduce to deep perplexity the very classes in Germany on whom the world must now depend if it does not propose simply to place this great central country of Europe for an indefinite period under alien rule, or to transfer it to some other nihilistic mass regime. Many of Germany’s intellectual leaders had already fallen victim to the latest persecutions, and one after another the voices here singled out for mention were silenced, some of them for ever. Concentration camps and Gestapo dungeons were filled with University professors, clergy of all denominations, writers, and members of the independent professions, and nobody can say how many of them have lived to see the day of liberation. The very frightfulness experienced in France, Belgium, Holland, and everywhere else, and the concentration camps that fell into the hands of the Allies, have given everyone abroad a clear view of the machinery of violence to which the Germans themselves were the longest and most thoroughly subjected. Thus the reality is more fearful than any description could paint. So much the more necessary is it—in Europe’s highest interest—to protect, to help, and to encourage the spiritual forces still surviving in Germany.

 

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13There will certainly appear shortly in all the principal languages of the world a compilation recording all the verified crimes committed during the war in Germany’s name and by Germans. This will be a fearful brand on the German name and will remain so until the Germans voluntarily and as a body make good all that can be made good. As one of many volumes of evidence, mention may be made of Le livre noir du Vercors (Neuenburg, 1944), the work of Swiss eye-witnesses who belong to the best of their country and with some of whom the author is personally acquainted. For the rest, people have seen from Switzerland with their own eyes German torturers at work in the French frontier village of St. Gingolph as in a frightful documentary film.

14 At the time the present writer contributed, under the pseudonym Ulrich Unfried, a series of articles to the Frankfurter Zeitung (September 6th, 11th, and 13th, 1931) entitled “Die Intellektuellen und der ‘Kapitalismus’,” in which he duly stigmatized the irresponsible activities of the Tat group. As chance would have it, the first of these articles was immediately preceded by a paragraph reporting the dismissal of the whole of the subordinate teaching staff of the Prussian secondary schools! Without this state of physical distress of the intellectual proletariat it is scarcely possible to understand the poisonous effect of such propaganda as that of the Tat group. All the graver was its responsibility.

15Cf. again Hayek’s book already mentioned.

16A good idea of the high average integrity of German historians down to 1933 is given by the Propyläen-Weltgeschichte. This “World History” had to be promptly rewritten in the Third Reich.

17Konrad Burdach, Deutsche Renaissance, 1920.

18As for the German émigrés who feel themselves to be divided from Nazism only by its anti-Semitism, see the bitter remarks in Hayek, op. cit., p. 137, footnote.

19 E. Quinet, L’esprit nouveau, 3rd edition, Paris, 1875, p. 187. Quinet adds on the next page: “Les esprits, même philosophiques, ont de peine à se soustraire aux enseignements de la force criminelle, dès qu’elle parle avec arrogance”—“Even those with the philosophic mind escape with difficulty from the teachings of criminal force, so soon as it speaks with arrogance.”

20 One of the worst cases is reported in the official document The Nazi Kultur in Poland, published by the Stationery Office in 1945 for the Polish Ministry of Information.

21 Cf. W. Röpke, Civitas humana, Erlenbach-Zurich, 1944, pp. 191 sqq. (English translation shortly to be published by W. Hodge & Co., London.)

22This poem by Matthias Claudius, of Hamburg (1740-1815), begins:

’s ist Krieg! ’s ist Krieg! O Gottes Engel wehre,
Und rede du darein!
’s ist leider Krieg—und ich begehre
Nicht schuld daran zu sein!

and ends:

Was hülf mir Kron und Land und Gold und Ehre?
Die könnten mich nicht freun!
’s ist leider Krieg—und ich begehre
Nicht schuld daran zu sein!

(’Tis war! ‘Tis war! O angel of God, defend us,
And do thou intervene!
‘Tis war, alas—and mine
Be not the guilt for it!

Crown, country, gold, and honour—would they help?
They could bring me no joy!
’Tis war, alas—and mine
Be not the guilt for it!)

23 Cf. also the sharp criticism in K. Thieme, Das Schicksal der Deutschen, Basle, 1945, pp. 114 sqq.

24 In contrast to the Prussian historical tradition, represented especially by Droysen and Beloch, which had glorified the forcible “unification” of Greece by the Macedonians, with an obvious side-glance at Bismarck and Prussia, Jaeger and Knauss roundly declared that what had happened was the subjugation of Greece. This was naturally bound up with a rehabilitation of Demosthenes, on whom so much contempt had been poured in the past in Greater Prussia. In Knauss we find even this sentence, inconceivable at an earlier time, when it would have seemed to border on high treason: “Even the national State is nothing more than one political form among others.”

• 1Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Allen & Unwin)
• 2For the source of the structure of the Swiss State, see now William E. Rappard, Cinq siècles de sécurité collective (1291-1798), Geneva and Paris, 1945.
• 3Since we have touched on the exceedingly complicated relationship between Germans and Jews, we may also recall that again and again during the first world war there were attempts in the Allied countries to account for Germany’s unattractive traits as due not only to a “Prussification,” but also to a “Judification.” Max Scheler, in his interesting book on the origin of anti-Germanism (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, Leipzig, 1917, p. 114) was also driven to deal with that charge. Cf. now Karl Thieme, Das Schicksal der Deutschen, ein Versuch seiner geschichtlichen Erklärung, Basle, 1945, p. 35. We may quote Goethe as the greatest precursor of the view expressed in the text. He remarked to Riemer that “the antipathy of peoples against the Jewish type of humanity, an antipathy in which esteem increases distaste, is really to be compared only with another—that against the Germans, whose destined role and whose inward and outward situation among peoples reveal the most astonishing kinship with those of the Jews. He did not want, he said, to enlarge on the subject, but, he said, he confessed that at times he was overcome by a breath-taking fear that one day the united world hatred against the other salt of the earth, Germandom, would be liberated in a historic uprising.”
• 4Jacob Burckhardt, Historische Fragmente, new impression, Basle, 1942, p. 144.
• 5Benjamin Constant, op. cit., p. 39 of the fourth edition (Paris, 1814).
• 6Benjamin Constant, op. cit. p. 58.
• 7We follow the account given by Ernst Samhaber in the Deutsche Rundschau of April, 1941; and we cannot omit to pay tribute to the courage shown by the writer of the article, and by the publisher of that review, with its long and distinguished record, in allowing the article to appear. If anyone asks how the German intellect made a stand against National Socialism, one answer must be to point to the Deutsche Rundschau.
• 8A comprehensive history of the ideas of totalitarianism has yet to be written. Cf., at present, Hans Barth, “Ueber den totalen Staat und seine ideologischen Voraussetzungen,” in Fluten und Dämme, der philosophische Gedanke in der Politik, Zurich, 1943, pp. 203-242. Not to be lost sight of is the important share of Socialism in the genesis of totalitarianism: Marx foreshadowed it in his “dictatorship of the proletariat.” For this intellectual line of descent see E. Halévy, L’ère des Tyrannies, Paris, 1938; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge, London, 1944.
• 9Among the important representatives of the racial doctrine is the Austrian L. Gumplowicz (Der Rassenkampf, Innsbruck, 1883), who exerted considerable influence. It is a tragic irony that he was a Jew. But all he did was to establish the existence of the racial struggle, not to promote it.
• 10Cf. also F. A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 230 sqq.
• 11In this I am able still to rely on a study I published in 1935—“Fascist Economics,” Economica, February, 1935.
• 12See, among other sources, the British White Book, No. 2 (1939), on the proved crimes committed by Nazis against Germans. Those there recorded are but a tiny sample from the vast flood of the atrocities committed in Germany since 1933. Probably the full truth will never be learnt, since too many of the witnesses have themselves become victims of the same terror machine. According to one of the pamphlets published by the German trade union secretariat in Great Britain (The Other Germany, Facts and Figures), in the first three years of Nazi rule sentences totalling some 600,000 years of imprisonment were pronounced against “enemies of the State.” The number of persons condemned to death by the end of 1938 was estimated at 12,000, and in April, 1939, according to the same source, there were 302,562 political prisoners in Germany, while the registers of the Gestapo contained the names of some two millions of political suspects. The number of persons herded together and tortured in the concentration camps is as yet beyond all possibility of estimating, and the things that happened in Germany during the war must have been one long chain of horrors. Only with the discoveries at Belsen and the rest did the veil begin to be lifted. Unfortunately, the world only too easily forgets that these Golgothas were originally set up for the martyrizing of Germans.
• 13THE dictum placed as a motto in front of this book came in 1866 from the pen of a far-seeing and unbending opponent of Bismarck. In that same fateful year of German and European history, Ludwig Bamberger, the eminent German Liberal and economist, wrote to his friend von Stauffenberg, after a fresh meeting with his old comrade of the revolution of 1848, Carl Schurz, who later became a Senator and Home Secretary of the United States: “I have greatly enjoyed meeting Schurz. That is what we could become if we were not stuck in a dog-kennel.” Almost eighty years later, Roosevelt, President of the country to which Carl Schurz, like so many others of the best Germans, had rendered inestimable service after 1848, spoke of the Germans as the “tragic nation.”
• 14What strength, what inspiration has proceeded from that central country of our continent in those thousand years! What talent, what honest and indeed desperate endeavour to gain the mastery over fate! And again and again the Germans’ effort has been fruitless—so much so that the whole history of Germany until 1866 (the year in which Germany ceased to exist, making way for a Greater Prussia) may be described as simply a history of frustration. Nowhere is it more natural than on Swiss soil to note how close together lie here the two opposite examples of a federalization that succeeded and one that failed throughout a thousand years—Switzerland and Germany, two countries bearing much the same relation to each other as two animals subjected to biological experiment, one of them receiving a particular vitamin and the other not. An obvious question, however, is whether there is not a danger that the ultimate consequences of the German fiasco might have very undesirable repercussions on the success of any tolerably sound political, economic, social, and spiritual structure in other countries. What that implies will be considered later.
• 15Let us hold on to the fact that the Germans, who today have become odium generis humani, are a people with whom fate has played a more evil game than with any other—fate and their own failure. What is worst of all is that this unique history—above all in its last and most fateful hundred years—has left deep traces in the German character that have made the Germans one of the most complex and problematic and, in the end, one of the best-hated of all nations. Thus, on top of all their other troubles, they have to bear the dislike of the rest of the world, which still further worsens their situation. In this, as in so many other things, they strikingly resemble another tragic nation of world history, the Jews; this has been noted again and again by acute observers, and is probably the final cause of the quite peculiar relation between Germans and Jews, which departs from normal to fall now into hatred and now into liking.
• 16In Nazism the complete unscrupulousness in the choice of serviceable-looking slogans and the truly reckless speculation on human stupidity reached perhaps its zenith in the invention of the gigantic farce of the propaganda for “European solidarity against Bolshevism.” After ruining Europe by their crimes and at the same time openly challenging Soviet Russia, nothing better occurred to the Nazis than to paraphrase the old Wilhelmian slogan, “Peoples of Europe, guard your holiest possessions!” This they did (1) after inciting the Japanese against the Europeans in the Far East; (2) after it had become clear that a Hitlerite Europe was simply not worth saving; (3) after all Europe had realized that it was brazen impudence for the Nazis to rage against Bolshevism; and (4) after all Europe had come to ask who would save it from the grip of Nazism. And when these barbarians talked of three thousand years of European civilization being at stake, the only possible answer was roars of laughter. “The saviour of Europe,” Jacob Burckhardt said long ago, “is preeminently the man who saves her from the danger of a political, religious, and social Procrusteanism that threatens her specific character, namely the manifold wealth of her intellect.”.
• 17“It is probable that the same disposition of the moderns that leads them to prefer peace to war would at the outset give great advantages to the people forced by its government to become an aggressor. Nations absorbed in the enjoyment of their possessions would be slow to resist: they would abandon a portion of their rights in order to preserve the rest; they would hope to save their repose by the compromise of their liberty. By a very strange combination, the more peaceful the general spirit, the more would the State that entered into war against that spirit gain easy successes at the outset.” And a few pages further on we come to a passage that might have been written in our own day:
• 18“But the nations that become the victims of its deplorable obedience would be unable to give it credit for concealed feelings which its conduct belies. They blame the instruments for the crime of the hand that directs them.”
• 19The Napoleonic wars can only be compared with Hitler’s with the utmost caution, since Napoleon’s relation to Hitler is that of a genuine dignitary of history to a disreputable gangster. But there is nothing to prevent us from taking from the history of the nineteenth century another example that reveals the part played in international life by an insane tyrant, showing very plainly that the case of Hitler is by no means unique. We refer to the abominable tyrant of Paraguay from 1862 to 1870, Francisco Solano Lopez, who like Hitler was obsessed by the insane idea of giving his continent a “New Order,” and who became involved in a war with all his neighbours; he was a precursor on a small scale of the authors of Germany’s tragedy today. This man, too, imagined that his will was all that was needed to stand the world on its head, and he, too, was completely blind to the true strength of the opposition he aroused. Relying on his armed force, he embarked on a policy that brought great initial successes, for the reasons stated by Constant, but ultimately, when his imperilled neighbours united against him, plunged his regime and his country into the abyss. “His intellectual arrogance”—so the Deutsche Rundschau boldly wrote in April, 1941—“growing more and more upon him, clouded his view of the superior moral and economic forces of the neighbour countries. He allowed himself to be elevated more and more by his entourage to the status of a demigod: flattering speeches and the incense of continual adoration intoxicated him, with his natural tendency to exaggerate his own qualities, so that he could no longer see the world as it really was. But his very successes were his undoing. They made the peril of this ‘total’ State seem so overpowering that Argentina and Brazil forgot their long-standing feud and united in a close alliance against this upstart military power.” So came, in the end, the inevitable catastrophe. “For the guilt one man had incurred in his madness, the whole nation must now surfer! Plectuntur Achivi” The article concludes:
• 20But here again it must not be forgotten that in the intellectual procreation of this monster the world outside Germany most certainly played a part. If National Socialism is essentially a particular form of totalitarianism, the story of its intellectual birth must to that extent be also that of totalitarianism. It is a specially complicated story, and this is not the place for its detailed narration. But the very circumstance that German totalitarianism was preceded by the Russian and Italian forms shows to how great an extent Nazism took over and worked out with German thoroughness ideas that were by no means of German origin. It would be wearisome to compile the names that mark the various stages passed through by the ideology of the totalitarian State. But if we merely mention the chief writers, such as the Frenchman Georges Sorel (who by their own acknowledgment strongly influenced both Lenin and Mussolini) and the Italian Pareto, and if we add how deeply the theorists and practicians alike, both of Russian Bolshevism and of Italian Fascism, influenced the German National Socialists, we have made it easy to see that the outer world worked just as ardently on the building of the intellectual foundations of the Third Reich as did Germany herself.
• 21Even the racial mania which seems to be an exclusive domain of German totalitarianism, was presented to the Germans by foreigners—particularly by the French writer Gobineau, who himself simply elaborated an idea that dates back to the eighteenth century. The racial delusion may be described as a cross between those foreign germs and the specifically German ethical romanticism which will occupy us later. While these and other precursors of the Nazi racial doctrine have nothing in common with the appalling delusionary character of that doctrine, the fact remains that that is the abyss into which we are inevitably plunged in the end, if we once pursue the mistaken path of the biologism of which Darwin and his school laid the foundations. The Nazi racial doctrine is the final putrid product of the decay of an intellectual process by which in the course of the Nineteenth Century man was degraded, with the zeal of a misunderstood science, to a subject of zoology and stud farming; but in this process all the principal countries of the West took part. The death chambers of Auschwitz and Maidanek are the final gruesome result of certain scientific ideas having ultimately found their way in the course of a century to the morally and mentally lowest levels of humanity, to a group which then, through a social catastrophe of inconceivable dimensions, became the rulers of a great people.
• 22That National Socialism is the expression of an international contemporary spirit rather than that of the spirit of a nation is, finally, also shown by the fact that similar tendencies are to be found in the contemporary literature of all countries, and, at least for a time, were not without influence. Whether we recall The Coming American Fascism, by an American, Lawrence Dennis, or The Managerial Revolution, by another American, James Burnham, or the tirades of Colonel Lindbergh and his wife about the “wave of the future” and all sorts of other things, we continually find, more or less disguised by perfumes, the miasma that has poisoned Germany. Everywhere are the “totalitarians in our midst” of whom F. A. Hayek, in his book The Road to Serfdom, has given from the English scene a ruthless analysis, not sparing representatives of totalitarianism on the Left. It is the painful duty of the honest observer to mention the names of Jewish writers who, like Emil Ludwig or Paul Einzig, have loudly praised Italian Fascism, thus laying themselves open to the suspicion that they were kept from a similar admiration of Nazism only by its anti-Semitism.
• 23If we are at least to make shift to give some answer to the difficult question what the structure of Nazism has in common with that of Fascism, in contradistinction with Bolshevism, we must emphasize various points. In both cases the totalitarian rule followed a coup d’état which was clothed as far as could be in legal forms and only gradually revealed its revolutionary aims. Both Fascism and Nazism set out to establish themselves in an extraordinarily complex society and actually with the aid of decidedly anti-revolutionary elements; consequently they found themselves compelled to proceed step by step, with a maximum of indefiniteness in their programmes, a maximum of mutually incompatible promises, and an appeal to every sentiment that seemed to influence opinion. This explains the total absence of any clear doctrine such as that of the Communists, and its replacement by a rhetorical propaganda that pulled out every stop of passion and emotion. Since neither Fascism nor Nazism wanted, like Bolshevism, to make a clean sweep of the existing social order, or could do so—both, on the contrary, were compelled at first to leave the traditional class divisions intact—there resulted a necessity for continual compromises, especially in economic policy, which were capable of disguising for a considerable time the collectivist character of the aims pursued. Many measures adopted were simply facades, behind which was either nothing at all or the precise opposite of what they represented. This applies, above all, to the treatment of private property. Just as in Russia the church was openly persecuted, but in the Third Reich it was as far as possible disintegrated from within, so in Russia private property in the means of production was openly abolished, but in the Third Reich it was reduced, by continual restrictions of the rights and functions of the owner, to an empty shell, while for propagandist purposes the shell was allowed to continue to exist. Thus in the two cases the forms of abolition of private property were different but their results were essentially the same.
• 24This sense of justice demands from us the recognition of the fact that what was done in Germany’s name was not done by the Germans as such, any more than all the crimes that were committed earlier in time of peace against the Germans themselves. How can it be forgotten in this connexion that we have to do with a totalitarian regime, and not only that but a regime at war and accordingly able to carry totalitarianism to the last extreme, a regime able to keep its people almost entirely ignorant of anything it did not want them to know, and one which, even if the people had been informed, would have ruthlessly suppressed all expression of opinion? As a rule it was Nazi special troops or agents of the Gestapo that carried out the sanguinary orders of the leaders, and often the worst of all were not strictly Germans. At the head of the German terrorist regime in the unfortunate Netherlands was an Austrian, of even more undoubted nationality than Hider, and Vlassov’s Cossacks competed with units of the S.S. and the Gestapo in mercilessness. Would anyone set down for all time as crimes of the Italian people Graziani’s massacre of Arabs in Libya, the abominable conduct of the war in Abyssinia, or the Good Friday attack on Albania?