Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
Page 86
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45 N. Berdyaev, op. cit., p. 29.
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46 K. S. Aksakov in Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 97.
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47 See for instance Schoenerer’s complaint that the Austrian “Verfassungspartei” still subordinated national interests to state interests (Pichl, op. cit., I, 151). See also the characteristic passages in the Pan-German Graf E. Reventlow’s Judas Kampf und Niederlage in Deutschland, 1937, pp. 39 if. Reventlow saw National Socialism as the realization of Pan-Germanism because of its refusal to “idolize” the state which is only one of the functions of folk life.
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48 Ernst Hasse, Deutsche Weltpolitik, 1897, in Alldeutsche Flugschriften, No. 5, and Deutsche Politik, 1. Heft: Das deutsche Reich als Nationalstaat, 1905, p. 50.
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49 Wertheimer, op. cit., p. 209.
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50 Rozanov, op. cit., pp. 56–57.
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51 Oscar Karbach, op. cit.
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52 Louis Levine, Pan-Slavism and European Politics, New York, 1914, describes this change from the older Slavophile generation to the new Pan-Slav movement.
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53 Oscar Karbach, op. cit.
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54 The Linz Program, which remained the Pan-Germans’ program in Austria, was originally phrased without its Jew paragraph; there were even three Jews on the drafting committee in 1882. The Jew paragraph was added in 1885. See Oscar Kaebach, op. cit.
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55 Otto Bonhard, op. cit., p. 45.
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56 So by the certainly not antisemitic Socialist Otto Bauer, op. cit., p. 373.
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57 Very instructive for Jewish self-interpretation is A. S. Steinberg’s essay “Die weltanschaulichen Voraussetzungen der jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung,” in Dubnov Festschrift, 1930: “If one ...is convinced of the concept of life as expressed in Jewish history ...then the state question loses its importance, no matter how one may answer it.”
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58 The closeness of these concepts to each other may be seen in the following coincidence to which many other examples could be added: Steinberg, op. cit., says of the Jews: their history takes place outside all usual historical laws; Chaadayev calls the Russians an exception people. Berdyayev stated bluntly (op. cit., p. 135): “Russian Messianism is akin to Jewish Messianism.”
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59 See the antisemite E. Reventlow, op. cit., but also the philosemite Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, Judaism and the Christian Question (1884): Between the two religious nations, the Russians and the Poles, history has introduced a third religious people, the Jews. See Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 314 if. See also Cleinow, op. cit., pp. 44 ff.
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60 See John S. Curtiss, The Protocols of Zion, New York, 1942.
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61 See Berdyaev, op. cit., p. 5: “Religion and nationality in the Muscovite kingdom grew up together, as they did also in the consciousness of the ancient Hebrew people. And in the same way as Messianic consciousness was an attribute of Judaism, it was an attribute of Russian Orthodoxy also.”
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62 A fantastic example of the madness in the whole business is the following passage in Léon Bloy—which fortunately is not characteristic of French nationalism: “France is so much the first of the nations that all others, no matter who they are, must be honored if they are permitted to eat the bread of her dogs. If only France is happy, then the rest of the world can be satisfied even though they have to pay for France’s happiness with slavery or destruction. But if France suffers, then God Himself suffers, the terrible God.... This is as absolute and as inevitable as the secret of predestination.” Quoted from R. Nadolny, Germanisierung oder Slavisierutig?, 1928, p. 55.
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62a See M. Larcher, Traité Elémentaire de Législation Algérienne, 1903, Vol. II, pp. 150–152: “The régime des decrets is the government of all French colonies.”
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63 See especially the magnificent story in The Castle (1930) of the Barnabases, which reads like a weird travesty of a piece of Russian literature. The family is living under a curse, treated as lepers till they feel themselves such, merely because one of their pretty daughters once dared to reject the indecent advances of an important official. The plain villagers, controlled to the last detail by a bureaucracy, and slaves even in their thoughts to the whims of their all-powerful officials, had long since come to realize that to be in the right or to be in the wrong was for them a matter of pure “fate” which they could not alter. It is not, as K. naively assumes, the sender of an obscene letter who is exposed, but the recipient who becomes branded and tainted. This is what the villagers mean when they speak of their “fate.” In K.’s view, “it’s unjust and monstrous, but [he is] the only one in the village of that opinion.”
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64 Deification of accidents serves of course as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny. See for instance Steinberg, op. cit.: “For it is Accident that has become decisive for the structure of Jewish history. And Accident..., in the language of religion is called Providence” (p. 34).
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65 A Russian writer once said that Pan-Slavism “engenders an implacable hatred of the West, a morbid cult of everything Russian;...the salvation of the universe is still possible, but it can come about only through Russia.... The Pan-Slavists, seeing enemies of their idea everywhere, persecute everybody who does not agree with them...” (Victor Bérard, L’Empire russe et le tsarisme, 1905.) See also N. V. Bubnoff, Kultur und Geschichte im russischen Denken der Gegenwart, 1927, in Osteuropa: Quellen und Studien. Heft 2. Chapter v.
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66 Ehrenberg, op. cit., stresses this in his epilogue: The ideas of a Kirejewski, Chomjakow, Leontjew “may have died out in Russia after the Revolution. But now they have spread all over Europe and live today in Sofia, Constantinople, Berlin, Paris, London. Russians, and precisely the disciples of these authors,...publish books and edit magazines that are read in all European countries; through them, these ideas—the ideas of their spiritual fathers—are represented. The Russian spirit has become European” (p. 334).
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67 For the bureaucratization of party machines, Robert Michels, Political Parties; a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy (English translation Clencoe, 1949, from the German edition of 1911), is still the standard work.
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68 K. Staehlin, “Die Entstehung des Panslawismus,” in Germano-Slavica, 1936, Heft 4.
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69 M. N. Katkov: “All power has its derivation from God; the Russian Czar, however, was granted a special significance distinguishing him from the rest of the world’s rulers....He is a successor of the Caesars of the Eastern Empire,...the founders of the very creed of the Faith of Christ.... Herein lies the mystery of the deep distinction between Russia and all the nations of the world.” Quoted from Sato W. Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion, 1947.
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70 Pobyedonostzev in his Reflections of a Russian Statesman, London, 1898: “Power exists not for itself alone but for the love of God. It is a service to which men are dedicated. Thence comes the limitless, terrible strength of power and its limitless and terrible burden” (p. 254). Or: “The law becomes a snare not only to the people,
but ...to the very authorities engaged in its administration ...if at every step the executor of the law finds in the law itself restrictive prescriptions ...then all authority is lost in doubt, weakened by the law ...and crushed by the fear of responsibility” (p. 88).
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71 According to Katkov “government in Russia means a thing totally different from what is understood by this term in other countries....In Russia the government in the highest sense of the word, is the Supreme Power in action....” Moissaye J. Olgin, The Soul of the Russian Revolution, New York, 1917, p. 57.—In a more rationalized form, we find the theory that “legal guarantees were needed in states founded upon conquest and threatened by the conflict of classes and races; they were superfluous in a Russia with harmony of classes and friendship of races” (Hans Kohn, op. cit.).
Although idolization of power played a less articulate role in Pan-Germanism, there was always a certain antilegal tendency which for instance comes out clearly in Frymann, op. cit., who as early as 1912 proposed the introduction of that “protective custody” (Sicherheitsliaft), that is, arrest without any legal reason, which the Nazis then used to fill concentration camps.
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72 There is of course a patent similarity between the French mob organization during the Dreyfus Affair (see p. 111) and Russian pogrom groups such as the “Black Hundreds” in which the “wildest and the least cultivated dregs of old Russia [were gathered and which] kept contact with the majority of the Orthodox episcopate” (Fedotow, op. cit.)—or the “League of the Russian People” with its secret Fighting Squadrons recruited from the lower agents of the police, paid by the government, and led by intellectuals. See E. Cherikover, “New Materials on the Pogroms in Russia at the Beginning of the Eighties” in Historishe Shriftn (Vilna), II, 463; and N. M. Gelber, “The Russian Pogroms in the Early Eighties in the Light of the Austrian Diplomatic Correspondence,” ibid.
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73 Delos, op. cit.
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74 As the President of the German Kolonialverein put it in 1884. See Mary E. Townsend, Origin of Modern German Colonialism: 1871–1885, New York, 1921. The Pan-German League always insisted on its being “above the parties; this was and is a vital condition for the League” (Otto Bonhard, op. cit.). The first real party that claimed to be more than a party, namely an “imperial party,” was the National-Liberal Party in Germany under the leadership of Ernst Bassermann (Frymann, op. cit.).
In Russia, the Pan-Slavs needed only to pretend to be nothing more than popular support for the government, in order to be removed from all competition with parties; for the government as “the Supreme Power in action ...cannot be understood as related to parties.” Thus M. N. Katkov, close journalistic collaborator of Pobyedonostzev. See Olgin, op. cit., p. 57.
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75 This clearly was still the purpose of the early “beyond party” groups among which up to 1918 the Pan-German League must still be counted. “Standing outside of all organized political parties, we may go our purely national way. We do not ask: Are you conservative? Are you liberal?...The German nation is the meeting point upon which all parties can make common cause.” Lehr, Zwecke und Ziele des alldeutschen Verbandes. Flugschriften, No. 14. Translation quoted from Wertheimer, op. cit., p. 110.
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76 Carl Schmitt, Staat. Bewegung, Volk (1934), speaks of the “monopoly of politics which the state had acquired during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
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77 Wertheimer, op. cit., depicts the situation quite correctly when she says: “That there was any vital connection before the war between the Pan-German League and the imperial government is entirely preposterous.” On the other hand, it was perfectly true that German policy during the first World War was decisively influenced by Pan-Germans because the higher officer corps had become Pan-German. See Hans Delbrück, Ludendorffs Selbstportrait, Berlin, 1922. Compare also his earlier article on the subject, “Die Alldeutschen,” in Preussische Jahrbücher, 154, December, 1913.
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78 Sigmund Neumann, Die deutschen Parteien, 1932, p. 99.
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79 Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, 1923, pp. vii-viii, describes the situation: “When the World War ended in defeat ...we met Germans everywhere who said they were outside all parties, who talked about ‘freedom from parties,’ who tried to find a point of view ‘above parties.’...A complete lack of respect for Parliaments ...which at no time have the faintest idea of what is really going on in the country ...is very widespread among the people.”
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80 British dissatisfaction with the Front Bench system has nothing to do with this anti-Parliamentarian sentiment, the British in this instance being opposed to something that prevents Parliament from functioning properly.
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81 The British party system, the oldest of all, “began to take shape ...only when the affairs of state ceased to be exclusively the prerogative of the crown...,” that is, after 1688. “The King’s role has been historically to represent the nation as a unity as against the factional strife of parties.” See article “Political Parties” 3, “Great Britain” by W. A. Rudlin in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.
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82 In what seems to be the earliest history of the “party,” George W. Cooke, The History of Party, London, 1836, in the preface defines the subject as a system by which “two classes of statesmen ...alternately govern a mighty empire.”
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83 The best account of the essence of the Continental party system is given by the Swiss jurist Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Charakter und Geist der politischen Parteien, 1869. He states: “It is true that a party is only part of a greater whole, never this whole itself....It must never identify itself with the whole, the people or the state...; therefore a party may fight against other parties, but it must never ignore them and usually must not want to destroy them. No party can exist all by itself” (p. 3). The same idea is expressed by Karl Rosenkranz, a German Hegelian philosopher, whose book on political parties appeared before parties existed in Germany: Ueber den Begriff der politischen Partei (1843): “Party is conscious partiality” (p. 9).
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84 See John Gilbert Heinberg, Comparative Major European Governments, New York, 1937, chapters vii and viii. “In England one political party usually has a majority in the House of Commons, and the leaders of the party are members of the Cabinet....In France, no political party in practice ever has a majority of the members of the Chamber of Deputies, and, consequently, the Council of Ministers is composed of the leaders of a number of party groups” (p. 158).
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85 See Demokratie und Partei, ed. by Peter R. Rohden, Vienna, 1932, Introduction: “The distinguishing characteristic of German parties is ...that all parliamentary groups are resigned not to represent the volonté générale.... That is why the parties were so embarrassed when the November Revolution brought them to power. Each of them was so organized that it could only make a relative claim, i.e., it always reckoned with the existence of other parties representing other partial interests and thus naurally limited its own ambitions” (pp. 13–14).
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86 The Continental party system is of very recent date. With the exception of the French parties which date back to the French Revolution, no European country knew party representation prior to 1848. Parties came into being through formation of factions in Parliament. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party was the first party (in 1889) with a fully formulated program (Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, loc. cit.). For Germany, see Ludwig Bergstraesser, Geschichte der politischen P
arteien, 1921. All parties were frankly based upon protection of interests; the German Conservative Party for instance developed from the “Association to protect the interests of big landed property” founded in 1848. Interests were not necessarily economic, however. The Dutch parties, for instance, were formed “over the two questions that so largely dominate Dutch politics—the broadening of the franchise and the subsidizing of private [mainly denominational] education” (Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, loc. cit.).
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87 Edmund Burke’s definition of party: “Party is a body of men united for promoting, by their joint endeavor, the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed” (Upon Party, 2nd edition, London, 1850).
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88 Arthur N. Holcombe (Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, loc. cit.) rightly stressed that in the double party system the principles of the two parties “have tended to be the same. If they had not been substantially the same, submission to the victor would have been intolerable to the vanquished.”
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89 Burke, op. cit.: “They believed that no men could act with effect, who did not act in concert; that no men could act in concert, who did not act with confidence; that no men could act with confidence, who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common interests.”
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90 For the Central European concept of citizen (the Staatsbürger) as opposed to party member, see Bluntschli, op. cit.: “Parties are not state institutions, ...not members of the state organism, but free social associtions whose formations depend upon a changing membership united for common political action by a definite conviction.” The difference between state and party interest is stressed time and again: “The party must never put itself above the state, must never put its party interest above the state interest” (pp. 9 and 10).
Burke, on the contrary, argues against the concept according to which party interests or party membership make a man a worse citizen. “Commonwealths are made of families, free commonwealths of parties also; and we may as well affirm that our natural regards and ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad citizens, as that the bonds of our party weaken those by which we are held to our country” (op. cit.). Lord John Russell, On Party (1850), even goes one step further when he asserts that the chief of the good effects of parties is “that it gives a substance to the shadowy opinions of politicians, and attaches them to steady and lasting principles.”