The Work I Did

by Brunhilde Pomsel

  Albrecht von Lucke writes that: ‘Societies are divided into an open liberal metropolitan elite and an increasingly déclassélower class, whose fears of decline radiate upwards more and more powerfully.’31 This leads to a feeling of panic, which has now reached the middle class and made racism socially acceptable. Because of the economic decline of whole population groups in the United States and Europe, as in the 1930s, faith in democracy to intervene with regulations has been weakened. More than that, by spreading conspiracy theories, right-wing forces create the suspicion that ‘the ones at the top’ want to halt the social decline of large sections of the population.

  While in Europe, as in the United States, the economic losses were quietly modified by low interest rates and by redirecting tax income to failing banks, the achievements of a social market economy and democracy based on balance and social peace were sacrificed to the neo-liberal market ideology. But contemporary neo-liberalism did not appear overnight, and it exploited people’s faith that globalisation would mean an expansion of the social market economy. The opposite occurred, and globalisation became the project of the elite and the super-rich.

  In the 1930s too, when Brunhilde Pomsel began her career, the same spiral of national isolationism had been set in motion that Donald Trump announced before his election to the US presidency. Then too, out of concern about European economic migrants, first of all only selected foreigners were allowed into the country. In a similar way Europe’s borders are being closed, asylum laws intensified, and the British are about to leave the European Union. In everyday life the misery of masses of people, as described by Brunhilde Pomsel, is ignored both by the state and by the affluent bourgeoisie. The stock market crash of 1929 was followed by a rightward shift almost everywhere in Europe – just as support for nationalists of all colours has been growing constantly since the financial crisis. This is not happening at random; the leaders of the democratic elites are contributing to the loss of their credibility every day.

  Revelations about the secret offshore businesses of dozens of heads of state and other wealthy people are regularly published in the media. When the super-rich and large companies take their money to tax havens, without paying taxes like everyone else, the inevitable impression is that globalisation can no longer be controlled for the benefit of the general population. On the contrary, in fact. These hidden fortunes, in the billions, grant a small elite of the super-rich an incredible amount of power, in the face of which all government looks powerless, as the journalist Harald Schumann has observed: ‘The entire political class in Europe – including the Greens and even part of the left – has essentially capitulated. They know it is the companies, the banks and the super-rich who decide on the fortunes of their states, regions and municipalities.’32 The political parties of the Weimar Republic received a similar judgement.

  The crisis of democracy is the result, developed over a long period of time, of helpless-looking politicians who saw no alternative to the rescue of the banks after the financial crisis, which was seen as capitulation by both the left and right wings. Many in these groups reject globalisation while the political elite capitulates to the greed of the financial industry, and right-wing populists exploit the fury and despair of the population for their own purposes. In the West, a fragmented society no longer forms a unified community. The sovereignty of the European democratic elites and parties is now vanishing, since they have shown themselves – or at least given the impression – as being incapable of serving the common good.

  As in the 1930s the appeal of the populists lies in the promise of supposedly simple solutions. But simple solutions are extremely dangerous, because it is much more difficult to change them than it is to let them come into being. Terrorism, debt crises, climate change, refugees – these problems can no longer be solved at a national level, and yet more and more people are following this reflex of simplification. The moderate middle class of the bourgeoisie seems now, as then, primarily preoccupied with itself.

  Personal challenges are now oscillating between family and career, in a flexible labour market. The model follows that of the American dream, which since the financial crisis has been revealed as a nightmare: everyone is responsible for himself, the social network becomes ever more fragmented, and the overriding emotion is not freedom but insecurity. What still seemed certain to the generation of ‘baby boomers’, that they could work their way up through their own efforts, is no longer valid, either in the United States or in Europe. The advantages of Western capitalism have become so fragile that many people are questioning the purpose of a democracy in which companies and the wealthy are so much better off than individual citizens. Here populists on both left and right find many ways of breaking down social cohesion. What has long been heralded is now becoming reality: the people promising salvation have reappeared. As Brunhilde Pomsel remembers the period immediately after Hitler’s rise to power:

  But immediately after Hitler’s accession, the mood was simply one of new hope. It was still a huge surprise that Hitler had done it. I think they were surprised themselves.

  Are Western societies today, out of egoism on the one hand and ignorance and indifference towards the populists on the other, stumbling blindly into a new nightmare?

  One other mobilising factor is the indifference, even mockery, from the liberal-democratic elites towards the groups voting for right-wing parties, which hardly contributes to a solution. Elisabeth Raether explains in a remarkable essay in Die Zeit that with their arrogance the liberal elites have themselves become part of the crisis, while the so-called ‘left-behind’ voting classes want to take their revenge on ‘the ones at the top’.33 Those groups of the population with college degrees and a more or less secure job despise those without these advantages for not being so tolerant towards immigrants and other minorities. But on the other hand, graduate jobs are not potentially threatened by immigrants, and employed graduates are not afraid of competition for social services. The potential losers in globalisation are standing outside our labour exchanges, just as the refugees stand outside our borders. The refugees and right-wing populists should remind us that our efforts to achieve a better world are failing before our eyes.

  Part of the task of democratic parties is to take the fury of the voters and uncomfortable truths seriously when they are delivered, for example in the form of survey results that reflect the mood in the population. When researchers at the University of Leipzig established in 2016, for example, that half of all Germans sometimes feel like foreigners in their own country because of the many Muslims living there, and 41 per cent think Muslims should be banned from coming to Germany from the outset, this refers to a part of the population much larger as a percentage than those who have so far voted for the right-wing AfD. To deny or repress this insecurity and discontent in the population is much more dangerous than to conduct a public debate about a general limitation on immigration. If such opinions become deeply rooted and in the end half of the population refuses further migration, one cannot simply dismiss them out of hand. If bourgeois forces do not face the fear and potential radicalisation of a population, and if governments do not invest in combating the reasons for refugees fleeing to other countries in the first place, then they should be honest and get to the heart of the price of isolationism: infringement of human rights, international law and militarised border facilities.

  A study by the British opinion poll institute Ipsos MORI shows that the Germans, like almost all other citizens in Europe and the United States, are completely wrong in their assessment of the supposed flood of Muslim migrants. One in five people living in Germany, or 21 per cent of the country’s population, is of Muslim faith, the respondents estimated. In fact it is only one in twenty, or 5 per cent of the population as a whole – and that is after the big wave of refugees in 2015. Even today it is not clear how many people will return to Syria after the end of the civil war, which would further reduce the proportion of Muslims in the population. This misapprehensio
n is even clearer in the United States, where the proportion is 1 per cent as against an estimated 17 per cent.34

  A society can overcome the brutalisation of the modern age only if it has a reliable framework for order outside of nationalist and isolationist policy, and unmasks the populists and their completely unrealistic promises as well as their lies. Only if all democratic forces manage to engage objectively with the facts rather than being guided by emotions can the increase in numbers moving to the right-wing populists be halted. For this to happen, the social problems and dislocations of neo-liberal capitalism, the financial and economic crisis, the parallels with the 1930s set out here, must first be taken seriously.

  There could be a good side to the rise of the right-wing populists, because hitherto socio-political issues were not on the agenda of the elites. At the last meeting of the G20 states in September 2016 the governments of the twenty largest industrial nations declared that the advantages of globalisation must be more widely distributed. Perhaps this plan even went into action because the elites feared a return to the 1930s, and if this is the case then there is a chance of reform in globalisation.

  Moreover, it is not clear that the moderate bourgeoisie will be content to simply watch the rise of the right-wing populists from afar. There is a chance that the election of Trump, the close election result in Austria, the dismantling of democracy in Poland and Hungary, Brexit and the situation in Turkey and Syria as well as the general brutalisation of Western democracies were a final warning for the elections in France, the Netherlands and Germany. The emphasis is on ‘chance’, because the enemies of democracy are still storming the parliaments.

  Equally, out of sheer fear and ignorance, we are obviously standing under the ‘bell jar’ described by Brunhilde Pomsel, in which a general obsession with personal advantage, along with opportunism and denial of the current social situation, continue to aid the rise the right-wing populists. Perhaps those who lived through the Nazi regime could plead a lack of knowledge – but we know the course of history, and should know better. It will be a long and difficult battle to repel the right-wing populists and above all to win back their voters for a democratic constitutional state, and for European unity, which will involve engaging with the demands of those groups of voters who are turning away from democracy.

  More liberal demands for tolerance and the protection of minorities will not succeed alone; it will also require measures that, after the terrorist attacks in Europe in 2015 and 2016, will create a feeling of security. That refugees must officially register and the state must be in a position to filter out dangerous individuals and other criminals is obvious from a constitutional point of view. But this must be done in spite of the shrill demands for expulsion, isolationism and other repressive measures on the part of the right-wing populists, without endangering the human rights of refugees fleeing civil wars, and migrants in general. We citizens must show moral courage in defending these rights, even in everyday life.

  We must not forget that one of the most important lessons from the failed refugee policy of the international community in the 1930s and 1940s concerned the rejection of Jewish refugees, since no worldwide agreement could be reached on taking them in. In 1937, when growing persecution caused a mass flight of the Jewish population, there was barely a country that allowed unlimited immigration. When the Nazi regime at last forbade all emigration in October 1941, it was almost impossible for the Jews who had stayed in the German Reich to flee annihilation. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that binding agreements were reached for the protection of refugees, in the form of a treaty that still applies today – the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. It obliges us to never send people in search of protection back to where they are threatened by persecution.

  The demand for secure borders and social justice are therefore not demands that a democratic society should leave to right-wing populists – who in any case question the international legal principle of the Geneva Convention – and certainly not when at the core of their mostly simplified analysis there may be a kernel of truth. But neither in the past nor in the present day have right-wing populists of every type even begun to prove that they were in a position to solve problems peacefully, humanely or permanently. Almost without exception, their power has been exerted at the expense of minorities, with chaos, violence, power and oppression. Populists are generally inclined to make completely unrealistic promises. But as soon as they are in power, the discrepancy between claims and reality often becomes apparent. There are plenty of examples from recent history that show that right-wing populist governments generally go in one of two directions: either the interests of the voters are turned into their opposite, or internal disputes lead to the collapse of the party.35

  Brunhilde Pomsel isn’t the only very elderly eyewitness to fascism to have asked whether people have learned from history. The doctor Ingeborg Rapoport, who died at the age of 104, experienced several times what it means to be persecuted: what united her and Brunhilde Pomsel was fear of the new rabble-rousing spirit in Germany in 2016. Ingeborg Rapoport became famous at the age of 102 when she became the oldest person in the world to gain a doctorate. She was born in 1912 in Cameroon – a German colony at the time – grew up in Hamburg and, as a Jew, fled from the Nazis with her mother to the United States. From there, having been denounced as a communist, she had to flee again during the McCarthy era to the GDR, where she later experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall. In an interview, like Brunhilde Pomsel, she describes her own apolitical attitude up to the point when she found herself confronting anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany as a young woman.36 She remembers an atmosphere of omnipresent fear. The anti-Semitism she would later encounter in the GDR was only latent, but with reunification it came back into the open. The fact that a xenophobic movement like PEGIDA should have established itself in East Germany, of all places, was a great source of concern to her. Every day she listened to the news and took a keen interest in what was happening in the country: the burning of refugee hostels, demonstrators shouting ‘Germany for the Germans’ and spreading fear – she was familiar with all this, because fear was the most important instrument of the Nazis.

  The way people talk about refugees today stirred bad memories in Ingeborg Rapoport. She saw the greatest danger as radicalisation on the one hand and political indifference on the other – ‘The apolitical are easy to influence.’ The dangerous ones are those who want simple answers to complex questions, she said. She believed in peace-loving people with a sense of solidarity, and not in the ego-driven capitalist system. The derogatory discussion of Islam and the debate around the full-face veil were used, in her view, as a way of stirring up hatred, just like the things she experienced in National Socialism.

  In the end, both biographies have one thing in common: Brunhilde Pomsel and Ingeborg Rapoport are perhaps the last warning of a generation that experienced first-hand what fascism, ignorance, passivity and opportunism have done in Germany and the world. The bourgeoisie of the 1920s and 1930s at first despised Adolf Hitler as an idiot and were silent until it was too late. Brunhilde Pomsel, by her own retrospective account, was blind in her quest for success and affluence, and indifferent towards the developments of her time. We too are clearly too lethargic these days to implement the obvious solution: to try to help the disadvantaged in our system have a greater share. Neo-liberalism in its present-day form has sacrificed social solidarity in favour of a narcissistic individuality. Everyone forges his own destiny – not by chance is that saying a symbol of the American dream, which was revealed by the financial crisis of 2008 as creating many, many losers and, in the end, President Donald Trump. Solidarity is the oil in the engine of a democratic, free and humanistic society; if we want to go on putting up with the injustice of an economic system that over the past few years has increasingly fostered disunity to maximise the profits of multinational companies, we are feeding the right-wing populists.

  A slow breakdown of solidarity is always followe
d by dehumanisation. A society in which human instincts such as empathy and solidarity are repressed is such an ugly society that it actually ceases to need democracy. Brunhilde Pomsel’s selfish and unreflecting efforts to secure her own advantage are currently taking place a million times over – in ourselves. If democracy bends so deeply to the economy that people think they no longer have any influence on institutions, and even see their interests as being betrayed, then the populists and fascists will have an easy ride over the years to come. The former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger encapsulates the historical experience in Germany in a single breath: ‘We in America must understand that you cannot continually offend the social values of the middle class without eventually being punished for it. Nobody knows this better than Germany.’37