The utterance is by no means anti-Semitic, but “Jewish businessmen” is nevertheless associated with “malignant” and “disgusting,” and their identity construed as something they choose according to whatever is most advantageous, and this, that Jews are businessmen ready to abandon almost anything for personal gain, even their identity as Jews, is a standard trope of anti-Semitism, and even though Kafka does not state that it is a property of all Jews, but only these particular Jewish businessmen, his utterance might certainly have been used as evidence to that effect if it had been presented as something the likes of Jünger or Hamsun had written. If it had occurred in a book by Jünger or Hamsun, we would have deemed it inappropriate but, if we held those authors in sufficiently high esteem, perhaps explained it as being a mere expression of political naïvety in confusing times, whereas if we had not held them in esteem we would have taken it to be another indication that they were bad and immoral individuals, yet coming from Kafka’s pen we construe it quite differently. This suggests that the morality of an utterance is not absolute, but is determined also by its style and its signature, and may change as its framework of interpretation, which is to say culture, changes. Mein Kampf did not mean the same in 1924 as it did in 1934, and it did not mean the same in 1934 as it does today. Both Kafka’s and Jünger’s utterances were fully acceptable in their day, they were by no means outrageous, whereas Hitler’s utterances in Mein Kampf were definitely so. They were not forbidden, and were not even controversial, in the sense of causing scandal, they were merely vulgar, simple, tasteless, and malicious.
* * *
The story of Mein Kampf is the story of how, from being something to disassociate oneself from in 1925, it becomes transformed into something to espouse in real life in 1933. Hitler himself did not change, he held the same opinions in 1925 as he did in 1933 and 1943, but the people around him changed, and that change is perhaps the most significant thing of all about the Nazi movement in Germany, that what was previously wrong with the movement became right, what was previously immoral became moral, and that this did not occur by any change in legislation or any other instrument at the disposal of the formal institutions of society, but by a change in the very community, which is to say in the social world, the societal we, whose expression in the individual is called conscience.
If Hitler’s I is lacking the singular you, both in life and in literature, this does not mean that he lives or writes in a vacuum, only that what he does, thinks, says, and writes is unconstrained by obligation to anyone else but himself and what he believes to be right. He does so within a system where “the other” exists only as “the others,” either in the great we, the community of nation, the Germans, or in the great they, the enemies of the nation, the Jews. Inside this system, ideas and notions circulate, lifted from various aspects of life in society, put together in totally idiosyncratic, often idiotic ways, which is one thing that can happen when an individual is unamenable to correction, another being that moments of genius may occur, and what emerges from all this, in a text that pays no attention to what ought or ought not to be said, to what is decent and what is offensive, is the blind side of society, that part of it we try to avoid and which the power structures of style and taste keep hidden away in the dark. In 1910 it would have been unthinkable that a man who had written a book such as Mein Kampf could become a head of state.
Heads of state were either monarchs, as in Britain or Germany, the ministers they appointed coming from the upper reaches of society, from the finest families and the finest schools, cultivated individuals held in the highest esteem for this very reason, or else they were presidents, elected from the same elevated and culturally and economically affluent circles. This system was suppressive, keeping the lower classes in their place, but suppression is not unambiguously an ill as we are taught to think, the exercise of power is not the same as the abuse of power, which is to say that abuse of power can have other functions besides maintaining the privileges of a certain class. It excludes what is undesirable, and the undesirable is of course that which undermines the privileges of the ruling class, but also that which is destructive of the values and stability of the society the ruling class is entrusted with governing. Revolution overturns the structure of society, destroying the values on which it is built, and doing so by violence. Revolutionary violence may be construed as a reaction to the structural violence inherent within a societal system – the need, poverty, and gross injustice it generates – but is nonetheless unlawful, for revolutionary violence is also violence among like kind, which no society can tolerate, and the first thing that happens when revolutionaries seize power is that they set up new laws quite as inviolable as the old, with the same purpose, to control that violence within and ensure order and stability in society. This was what happened in France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, and in Germany in 1933, the difference being that the revolution in Germany was not simply a class revolution from below, but involved the lower, middle, and upper classes at once, though primarily the lower middle class, and set the law aside largely without bloodshed. This was possible because societal structures had already broken down or were in the process of breaking down. The state apparatus belonged to the old monarchy, parliamentary democracy was weak, and when inflation and unemployment rocketed with the Depression in a context of humiliation following the debacle of the war, democracy became a paradox, voting for its own dissolution, which is to say handing power to Hitler and the National Socialists, who were antidemocratic. What had existed only as a miscellany of phenomena and shifting currents at the bottom of society only ten years before was suddenly the ideology of a supreme governing party, no longer base and contemptible, but elevated and noble.
* * *
Hitler expressed what the average German thought but declined to say, and he did so compellingly and with such conviction as to make it legitimate, and the more people who followed him in that direction, realizing that what one thought in one’s own mind yet was perhaps wary of expressing could indeed be expressed, the more legitimate it became. The opinions Hitler expressed were clear and unambiguous, he concealed nothing, and they could easily have been repudiated, he and his party having no power on their own, such power being granted by those who listened to them and who in doing so heard themselves, their own voice of reason, the voice that said this is the lay of the land. That nothing suppressed that voice, those hitherto quiet thoughts, and that the structures to reject such baseness had ceased to operate became Germany’s tragedy.
This is the lay of the land, said Hitler, this is the lay of the land, said the people and cheered Hitler, and in doing so they cheered themselves and their own. Hitler gave self-righteousness a voice, we could say, but only if we are above that voice, only if our taste is superior, our judgment superior, only then is it the voice of self-righteousness. If one is a part of it, it is righteous. And who is to say where the boundary lies between righteous and self-righteous? Who is the arbiter of a society’s morals, who decides what is acceptable and what is not? Not the one, but the all. Morality does not exist outside society, outside its institutions, in the form of something absolute that we humans may invoke at any time, no, it is a part of us at this very moment and moreover was different in the time of our parents, as it will be different in the time of our children, though perhaps not by much, for the most desirable thing for a society is for its moral structures to remain the same and to appear for as long as possible to be absolute and extrasocietal. This, however, is not feasible, as events in Germany after World War I made abundantly clear. The philosopher Hannah Arendt writes of this issue in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem:
And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody “Thou shalt not kill,” even though man’s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody “Thou shalt kill,” although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is a
gainst the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned to resist temptation.
Conscience is morality as it appears in the individual. For an individual such as Hitler, who was bullied and beaten by his father and lost his siblings and his mother, who grew up to adulthood in a society whose enormous transformation dislodged forces that were to exert such tremendous pressure on its structures as to gradually cause them to cave in and collapse, and who lived through the mass slaughter of World War I and all its subsequent turbulence, who was surrounded by violence on all sides – for such a person conscience did not speak in the same way as it speaks to those of us who have experienced none of the above. But it did speak to others of his generation, for none of the things Hitler experienced were unique to him, and nothing of what he wrote in Mein Kampf was unprecedented, which is to say that everything that exists in Mein Kampf also existed elsewhere in society at that time. One of Hitler’s most important sources of inspiration in writing Mein Kampf was Henry Ford’s book The International Jew. Ford, the American industrialist and car manufacturer, was famous throughout the world, and his book caused a stir when it was published in Germany. According to Ryback, the New York Times could report in 1922 that Hitler had a framed photograph of Ford on the wall next to his desk, and paid tribute to him in speeches at the time. Ryback cites Baldur von Schirach, a teenager when Ford’s book came out, who claimed that he became an anti-Semite on reading it. “In those days this book made such a deep impression on myself and my friends because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy.” Other books Hitler read prior to writing Mein Kampf included Hans F. K. Günther’s notorious Racial Typology of the German People, while Otto Strasser, a member of Hitler’s staff, according to Ryback identified the main concepts of Mein Kampf as stemming from conversations Hitler conducted with Feder, Rosenberg, and Streicher and, most significantly, with Eckart, conversations in which books by authors such as Chamberlain and Lagarde were a staple topic.
None of this is mentioned in Mein Kampf, whose anti-Semitism and attendant theorizing is presented as something Hitler arrived at himself, long before he entered politics. He construes his anti-Semitism as something near a revelation, as if some crucial piece of a jigsaw had fallen into place, allowing him at last to grasp the great scheme of things. In Mein Kampf he ties this revelatory experience to his first autumn in Vienna, but since there is no evidence of any anti-Semitism in his life at that time, this can hardly be correct. However, the actual structure of his epiphany, the way it occurs, may still be an accurate account of the way he later experienced it. This is how he describes it:
Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say when the word “Jew” first gave me ground for special thoughts. At home I do not remember having heard the word during my father’s lifetime. I believe that the old gentleman would have regarded any special emphasis on this term as cultural backwardness. In the course of his life he had arrived at more or less cosmopolitan views which, despite his pronounced national sentiments, not only remained intact, but also affected me to some extent.
Likewise at school I found no occasion which could have led me to change this inherited picture.
At the Realschule, to be sure, I did meet one Jewish boy who was treated by all of us with caution, but only because various experiences had led us to doubt his discretion and we did not particularly trust him; but neither I nor the others had any thoughts on the matter.
Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word “Jew,” with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions. This filled me with a mild distaste, and I could not rid myself of an unpleasant feeling that always came over me whenever religious quarrels occurred in my presence.
At that time I did not think anything else of the question.
There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in fact, I even took them for Germans. The absurdity of this idea did not dawn on me because I saw no distinguishing feature but the strange religion. The fact that they had, as I believed, been persecuted on this account sometimes almost turned my distaste at unfavorable remarks about them into horror.
Thus far I did not so much as suspect the existence of an organized opposition to the Jews.
Then I came to Vienna.
Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions in the architectural field, oppressed by the hardship of my own lot, I gained at first no insight into the inner stratification of the people in this gigantic city. Notwithstanding that Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand Jews among its two million inhabitants, I did not see them. In the first few weeks my eyes and my senses were not equal to the flood of values and ideas. Not until calm gradually returned and the agitated picture began to clear did I look around me more carefully in my new world, and then among other things I encountered the Jewish question.
I cannot maintain that the way in which I became acquainted with them struck me as particularly pleasant. For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation. I was oppressed by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle Ages, which I should not have liked to see repeated. Since the newspapers in question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation (the reason for this, at that time, I myself did not precisely know), I regarded them more as the products of anger and envy than the results of a principled, though perhaps mistaken, point of view.
I was reinforced in this opinion by what seemed to me the far more dignified form in which the really big papers answered all these attacks, or, what seemed to me even more praiseworthy, failed to mention them; in other words, simply killed them with silence.
I zealously read the so-called world press (Neue Freie Presse, Wiener Tagblatt, etc.) and was amazed at the scope of what they offered their readers and the objectivity of individual articles. I respected the exalted tone, though the flamboyance of the style sometimes caused me inner dissatisfaction, or even struck me unpleasantly. Yet this may have been due to the rhythm of life in the whole metropolis.
These newspapers, however, frequently disgust him in the way they grovel to the Court, presenting themselves in glorified colors and reminding him of “the mating cry of a mountain cock.” He finds them “a blemish on liberal democracy.” Moreover, they wage war against the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, whom they criticize “with supposed concern, yet, as it seemed to me, ill-concealed malice.” The fact that the same press “made the most obsequious bows to every rickety horse in the Court” simultaneously airing doubts about the Kaiser and “poking its finger around in the wound” as if it were a scientific experiment, soon made him lose faith in them, whereas he found the Deutsches Volksblatt more decent in such matters. Another issue he had with the big newspapers was the way they cultivated admiration for France, which he found repugnant, writing:
A man couldn’t help feeling ashamed to be a German when he saw these saccharine hymns of praise to the “great cultural nation.” This wretched licking of France’s boots more than once made me throw down one of these “world newspapers.” And on such occasions I sometimes picked up the Volksblatt, which, to be sure, seemed to me much smaller, but in these matters somewhat more appetizing. I w
as not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought.
When he first arrived in Vienna, he writes, he had felt opposed to the city’s mayor, Dr. Karl Lueger, and to his Christian Socialist Party, finding both the man and the movement “reactionary.” However, he came to change his opinion as he became more familiar with their politics, judging him more fairly, his attitude eventually growing into admiration. Lueger and his party were anti-Semites, and this, along with his lack of faith in the press, was what swayed him.
My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
It cost me the greatest inner soul struggles, and only after months of battle between my reason and my sentiments did my reason begin to emerge victorious. Two years later, my sentiment had followed my reason, and from then on became its most loyal guardian and sentinel.
At the time of this bitter struggle between spiritual education and cold reason, the visual instruction of the Vienna streets had performed invaluable services. There came a time when I no longer, as in the first days, wandered blindly through the mighty city; now with open eyes I saw not only the buildings but also the people.
Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.
For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form:
Is this a German?
As always in such cases, I now began to try to relieve my doubts by books. For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlet of my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain degree. Besides, the tone for the most part was such that doubts again arose in me, due in part to the dull and amazingly unscientific arguments favoring the thesis.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 88