Many variants of Goerdeler’s constitutional plans have survived, indicating both his openness to new ideas and the influence of changing advisers. But the core of his plan, which eventually took shape after a rather nebulous start, was always a strong government in which various “corporatist bodies” played a leading role while the parliament was limited to a more or less supervisory function. This basic thrust found expression in a considerable expansion of self-government at even the lowest levels of society; not only municipalities but universities, student bodies, churches, and professional organizations would be involved. To the end of his life, Goerdeler clung to the belief that this was the genuine “German way” in politics, which had proved itself even amid the confusion of the Weimar years and despite “extreme democratization” and “extensive corrosion by political parties.” The various states within Germany he reduced to little more than large administrative units, seeing them as an intermediate level of government that was not really close to everyday life and yet too far removed from the focus of real power.
In the same spirit, Goerdeler attempted to limit the influence of the general public, especially through political parties, and to turn the decision-making process over to indirectly elected bodies whenever possible. One of the clear contradictions between Goerdeler’s theory and his practice was that, despite his belief in the power of reason, he never entirely freed himself from the fear he had acquired in the Weimar years of what ordinary people might do. Notions such as “the power of parties,” “splinter parties,” and “self-interested parties” continued to haunt his own constitutional thinking as well as that of the entire group.
The election process was therefore calculated to bring forth strong, experienced “personalities with roots in real life” by means of a complicated modified majority-rule system. It is noteworthy that all the opposition groups agreed on this, despite their strong differences on other questions. The socialist Carlo Mierendorff said “never again shall the German people lose their way amid the squabbling of political parties,” and his fellow socialist Julius Leber called for an end “to the old forms of party rule.” It was he who summarized as follows the argument against proportional representation, which he blamed most of all for creating political fragmentation: “It fails totally to carry out its real functions, namely, selecting suitable men and maintaining the trust between the people and the leadership. Instead, it simply imposes on politics the determined dullards who eventually rise to the top of party hierarchies.”16 Goerdeler even contemplated a drastic limitation on majority rule by restricting seats in the parliament to the three strongest parties.
Another suggestion for the new order would have conferred a double role on fathers with at least three children. Other plans for reform reflected the strong corporatist tradition in German society. Goerdeler, for instance, wanted to see a Reichsständehaus, an upper house consisting of fifty respected appointees as well as representatives of the churches, universities, artists’ guilds, and, most important, labor unions, for whom he had particularly high expectations, certainly far higher than he did for political parties. He had learned in his years as mayor of Leipzig that involvement in everyday life soon dispels the doctrinaire theories that in his view were badly damaging political life or even destroying it.
Goerdeler also advanced some suggestions about how the economy should operate: he advocated moderate liberalism, limits on the role of industry (a stricture that clearly reflected the influence of the Freiburg school), participation of workers in corporate management, and a sense of social responsibility on the part of the propertied classes. There were many thoroughly antimodern aspects to Goerdeler’s proposals, which were as passionately opposed to the egalitarian tendencies of contemporary industrial societies as they were to pluralistic social and political interests. Goerdeler wanted to bring all these contending interests together within an idyllic, community-based order that served the general interest. Thus there was a definite Utopian cast to national-conservative thought, an inclination to idealize the “good old days” even though, as everyone knows, they were never all that good. Nevertheless, these efforts cannot be dismissed as mere attempts to restore the lost societies of the past. Goerdeler’s close working relationship and even friendship with trade union leaders such as Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser points to the contrary. Indeed, the first people to accuse Goerdeler of being “reactionary” were, in a remarkable twist, the most conservative members of the group-Hassell, Jessen, and Popitz-who denounced Goerdeler’s proposals for going too far toward restoring democratic “Weimar” conditions.17
These proposals, of course, were fragmentary. Many of them were inevitably driven by tactical considerations, and in any case, there is always a great divide in politics between theory and practice. It is impossible to say whether Goerdeler’s proposals would have been adopted if a coup had succeeded. Thus they are primarily of interest for what they reveal about the two primary goals of Goerdeler’s group, namely the far-reaching depoliticization of government and the overcoming of political fragmentation by forging a new sense of community. The Weimar Republic cast as long a shadow over these objectives as it did over the Hitler years. An underlying feeling of helplessness pervades these proposals. When Goerdeler remarked that he wanted to pursue the “German way” in drafting his constitution and would not allow himself to be “led astray” by Western models, he inadvertently disclosed an intellectual detachment and isolation that the entire German resistance never overcame. In the end, however, Goerdeler was not motivated by the desire for social and constitutional change embodied in these proposals, nor did he justify himself by them. They were produced under great pressure and emotional stress and were often not fully developed. To understand Goerdeler we have to look to more compelling forces.18
* * *
Quite different from the Beck-Goerdeler-Popitz group, and yet in some ways strangely similar, was the other important group of civilian opponents of the Nazi regime. It was founded and held together by Helmuth von Moltke, a great-grandnephew of the celebrated army commander of the Franco-Prussian War, who worked in the Wehrmacht high command as an expert in international law. His group was later dubbed the Kreisau Circle after the estate owned by the Moltke family in Silesia, although it met there only two or three times. Its intense discussions, conducted in working groups, took place more frequently in various locations in Berlin; beginning in early 1943 most were held on Hortensienstrasse in Lichterfelde, at the home of Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, another bearer of a famous name in Prussian history. Related to both Moltke and Stauffenberg, he was a lawyer and officer who had been assigned to the eastern department of the Defense Economy Office. While Moltke has been described as the “engine” of the group, Yorck von Wartenburg was its “heart.”19
Around Moltke and Yorck gathered what at first glance appeared to be a motley array of strong-willed individuals with markedly different origins, temperaments, and convictions. Among them was Adam von Trott zu Solz, a descendant, on his mother’s side, of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States. Trott had been a Rhodes scholar and had many friends in England, including the so-called Cliveden set around David Astor. Like Hans-Bernd von Haeften, another member of the circle, Trott was employed in the Foreign Office. Striving to include experts from as many areas of political and social life as possible, the Kreisau Circle recruited Horst von Einsiedel, a Harvard graduate and an expert in economics. Carl Dietrich von Trotha, on the other hand, was a cousin of Moltke’s, born in Kreisau, and had been, like some other members of the group, a student of the philosopher and sociologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.
The most striking characteristic of this group, apart from its strong religious leanings, was its earnest and quite successful attempt to attract a number of devoted but undogmatic socialists. Among them was the educator Adolf Reichwein, who came from the Romanticist youth movement of the 1920s and had met Einsiedel and Moltke in one of the reform-minded volunteer
work camps. Through Reichwein, Theodor Haubach also joined the group. A former student of Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber, Haubach was nicknamed The General by his friends because of his expertise in military policy. He also had a deep interest in philosophy and the arts and had served as chief press officer of the Prussian government for several years.
Haubach, in turn, recruited the man who was possibly the most colorful, emotional, and powerful figure in the circle, Carlo Mierendorff, a close friend since their school days in Darmstadt. Like Haubach, Mierendorff had a background in literature; before finally devoting himself entirely to politics, he had dabbled in the expressionist movement and edited a magazine. According to another acquaintance, the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, he was a “born leader.” Within the Social Democratic Party he was one of the young rebels who look on the complacent party hierarchy and its outdated programs and slogans. Mierendorff was arrested shortly after Hitler took power and spent five years in concentration camps, where at one point he was delivered by camp authorities into the hands of Communist fellow prisoners, who beat him nearly to death. During this time Haubach sought constantly to obtain the release of his friend, succeeding even in reaching Adolf Eichmann. (Never, he later said of Eichmann, had he seen “such glassy green eyes.”20)
A number of figures from the Christian resistance also joined the Kreisau Circle, including the Jesuits Alfred Delp and Augustin Rösch, as well as prominent Protestants like the theologian Eugen Gerstenmaier and the prison chaplain Harald Poelchau. Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg and Julius Leber were also loosely affiliated with this group. They were older and more experienced than the others, with too much of the politician in them to be interested in sharing the circle’s passion for theoretical debates. “What comes later will take care of itself,” Leber was fond of saying. True to type, he struck up an immediate friendship with Stauffenberg-who was always pressing for more action-when the two met in late 1943.
What brought the Kreisau group together was not principally a determination to overthrow the Nazi regime but rather the common project of planning, through their preparatory discussions, what a modern, post-Hitler Germany would look like. In this way “they kept themselves alive,” according to a close observer.21 There was a strong utopian streak in their thought and planning, which was infused with Christian and socialist ideals, as well as remnants from the youth movement of a romantic belief in the dawning of a new era. They basically believed that all social and political systems were reaching a dead end and that capitalism and Communism, no less than Nazism, were symptomatic of the crisis deep and all-encompassing in modern mass society.
This lofty radicalism, often quite remote from the real world, was the main source of discord between the Kreisau and Goerdeler groups. The former accused the “old-timers” of being stuck in outmoded patterns of thought. Instead of seeking a genuinely new beginning, the Goerdeler group wanted merely to avoid the missteps that had been revealed by the failure of the Weimar Republic. The birth of a “new age,” on the other hand, required an entirely fresh approach. Moltke spoke contemptuously of “that Goerdeler mess” and, like Delp, cautioned opponents of the regime who were looking for like-minded contacts against any involvement with what he called “their reactionary Excellencies.”22
The two groups had more in common, however, than they ever imagined. They were both deeply enamored of the curious German tradition of grand, sweeping critiques of entire civilizations. The main difference lay in the fact that the Goerdeler group translated its ideas into more or less practical programs for action (which were by no means free of inconsistencies), while the Kreisau group moved in more theoretical and idealistic spheres, launching ideas that only occasionally led to concrete solutions. Both groups considered mass society the great scourge of the time, and both sought to replace it with a “community” of some kind-markedly more Christian in the case of the Kreisauers, although still not without an authoritarian streak. Both groups were eager to recover the lost “organic” communities of the past, which in their view still retained something of the Garden of Eden, and both were appalled by the egalitarian tendencies of the time.
For all these reasons, their members repeatedly expressed the need for an “elite,” which the Goerdeler group thought could be created by a stern government based on traditional values and which the Kreisau group believed would emerge from a return to “personal substance” based on Christian or socialist values. There were even similarities in their recipes for the new society. The Kreisauers, too, imagined a society constructed from the bottom up, beginning with simple units of local self-administration. They also had a deep distrust of professional politicians and aimed to replace them with individuals who had proved themselves in practical life and had strong local or regional roots.The greatest contrast between the two groups was in the field of economics, although even here the Kreisau group’s dislike for Goerdeler’s liberalism only brought them into line with Popitz and Jessen, who favored a highly interventionist economy in keeping with their authoritarian, state-driven view of society. Even corporatist ideas found eloquent advocates in the Kreisau group, especially among its Catholic members.
The Kreisauers suffered many internal differences of opinion over such issues as the nationalization of heavy industry, the division of landed estates, and the role of parochial schools. The question of redrawing the regional map of the Reich led to such bitter controversies that some of the inveterate Bavarians even left the group. Historical perspective tends to make many of the internal and external conflicts of these groups seem less serious than they in fact were. Goerdeler’s dismissal of the Kreisauers as “armchair Bolsheviks,” for example, reveals as great a misunderstanding of their basic intentions as Moltke’s and Trott’s remarks about reactionary “notables” do of Goerdeler’s circle, however accurate these characterizations may have been in individual cases.
Another difference was far more telling. While the group around Heck and Goerdeler was committed to some form of coup d’ état, violent if necessary, most members of the Kreisau Circle rejected any sort of violence. This stance largely reflected their religious convictions, of course. Almost equally strong was their belief that “demonic forces” were at work in Hitler, which neither could nor should be simply swept aside.”23 All attempts to do so were, in their eyes, merely efforts to overcome the great crisis in world history through the same arbitrary and violent means that helped cause it in the first place. Instead, the demonic forces had to be allowed to burn out. This conviction led many within the circle to reject not only an assassination attempt but even the notion of a coup, for, as Moltke wrote lo his friend Lionel Curtis, “we need a real revolution, not just a putsch.” Only a complete collapse and widespread acceptance of the inevitability of defeat and the ensuing chaos could create the necessary preconditions for the great internal revival on which the future depended. Among the Kreisauers, Eugen Gerstenmaier most vehemently attacked this belief and what he termed its un-Christian fatalism. But Moltke championed it energetically nevertheless, carrying most of the circle with him. The fervor with which he denied the possibility of a shift in Germany’s ebbing military fortunes and forecast total destruction (with far more realism than his friends) indicated that he took a certain satisfaction in the approaching inferno, which alone could give rise to a radically new beginning. “My own homeland of Silesia will go to the Czechs or the Poles,” he wrote before the battle of Stalingrad to his old friend George F. Kennan.24
The foreign policy ideas of these two groups also differed greatly. Beck and Goerdeler’s circle still thought in terms of hegemonic power and regarded it as a matter of course that Germany would continue to play a major role in Europe. The Kreisauers adopted a more radical, Utopian stance on this issue as well, their ideas focusing to varying degrees on a new brand of international relations that would do away with the “borders and soldiers” of the past. In the new age that they saw dawning, selfish nationalisms would y
ield to a pan-European unity. The germ of this idea came from Moltke and the socialist members of the circle-Haubach, Reichwein, and Mierendorff-but it was swiftly embraced by all the others. Even before the outbreak of the war, the only belief that all the members of the Kreisau Circle shared was this emphasis on the larger picture, on what Europeans had in common, the intellectual foundations of their history, traditions, and way of life, a shared desire to see neighbors no longer as foes but as family, as people who were similar to one another and yet different in interesting ways. Only in this manner, they thought, could there be a reconciliation of the nations in Europe that considered themselves hereditary enemies, and only in this manner could the problem of minorities finally be solved, an issue that seemed always to end in bloodletting, especially in the central and eastern parts of the continent.
There was much less unanimity among the Kreisauers on the consequences of their program. To be sure, they agreed that the old idea of dominant powers in Europe should be abandoned, that there should be no more territorial claims escalating into life-and-death issues, that a new understanding of national interest, the state, and national sovereignty must emerge. Once again Moltke proved to be the most radical member of the circle, advocating nothing less than the elimination of the nation-state and the reorganization of Europe into a multiplicity of regions that were historically and culturally related. In this he was returning to the idea of small self-governing units and applying it to Europe as a whole. These autonomous regions would exercise only limited powers, with the traditional jurisdiction of sovereign states transferred to a single European entity.
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