History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Some Jews tried hard to counter the unpatriotic, Bolshevist image thrust upon them. Jewish children were trained to be artisans and farmers.114 In the early 1920s, a Berlin lawyer, Dr Max Naumann, a former army captain, formed the League of German Nationalist Jews. There was also the right-wing Jewish youth organization, Kameraden, and the National League of Jewish Frontline Veterans. But Naumann made the mistake of trying to minimize Hitler’s hatred of the Jews by praising him as a political genius who could restore German prosperity, and all of them shared the illusion that they could do deals with the Nazis.115 There is no evidence that anything they did made Jews more popular.

  The insuperable difficulty any patriotic German Jew had to contend with was the Weimar Republic itself. It was born of defeat, indissolubly linked with defeat, and, in the minds of most Germans, associated with Jews, the Judenrepublik. From beginning to end it was a millstone round the Jewish neck. Yet the Jews played little part in Weimar politics, except at the very beginning. Rathenau and Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Minister in 1923 and 1928, were the first and last Jewish Weimar politicians of any consequence. It is true that Jews were instrumental in creating the German Communist Party. But with the rise of Stalinism they were soon pushed out of its higher ranks, exactly as in Russia. In 1932, when the party ran 500 candidates and got 100 elected, not one was a Jew.116 The Social Democrat Party was run by gentile working-class trade unionists most of whom actively disliked Jewish left-wingers, whom they saw as undesirable middle-class intellectuals. The actual constitution of Weimar, with its system of proportional representation, strongly favoured extremist parties like the Nazis, who could never have come to power legally under, say, the British first-past-the-post system. And Jewish satirists like Tucholsky went for Weimar as fiercely as the Nazis themselves.

  Yet the identification was there, and its roots were cultural. Enemies of the Jews accused them of kidnapping German culture, of transforming it into a new, alien thing, which they termed Kulturbolschewismus. The notion of cultural theft was powerful and exceedingly dangerous. Some Jewish writers had warned against it. Jewish use of the German language, as Kafka put it, was ‘usurpation of an alien property, which had not been acquired but stolen, (relatively) quickly picked up and which remains someone else’s property even if not a single verbal mistake can be pointed out’. Even before the war, Moritz Goldstein had warned in a Kunstwart article, ‘The German-Jewish Parnassus’, that Jews were, in effect, beginning to take charge of the culture of a people which denied them the right to do so.117 With the creation of Weimar, Jews became more prominent in German cultural life, chiefly for the reason that the advanced ideas with which they had been associated were now beginning to achieve acceptance. Thus in 1920 the Impressionist Max Liebermann was elected the first Jewish president in the history of the Prussian Academy.

  Yet the notion that Weimar witnessed a Jewish takeover of German culture is false. The fact is that, during the 1920s, Germany was richer in talent than at any time before or since. It had always been outstanding in music and strong in literature but now it took the lead in the visual arts too. For a time Berlin became the cultural capital of the world. Berlin was much hated by the anti-Semites. Wolfgang Kapp, a proto-Hitler who led a failed putsch there in 1920, had as his slogan: ‘What has become of Berlin? A playground for the Jews.’118 Jews were important in Weimar culture. The phenomenon could not have occurred without them. But they were not dominant. In some areas, especially painting and architecture, their contribution was relatively small. There were many Jewish novelists, such as Alfred Doeblin, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig, Vicki Baum, Leon Feuchtwanger, Alfred Neuman and Bruno Frank, but the leading figures like Thomas Mann were not Jews. The Jews undoubtedly made a huge contribution to the musical scene, both international and German. There were spectacular prodigy-performers like Jascha Heifetz and Vladimir Horowitz, as well as established masters like Artur Schnabel and Artur Rubinstein. Two of Berlin’s leading conductors, Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, were Jews. Kurt Weill wrote the music for Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928), which was performed over 4,000 times throughout Europe in its first year. There was Arnold Schönberg and his school, though his two most famous pupils, Berg and Webern, were non-Jews. But German music was so rich at this time that Jewish musicians, despite their numbers and talent, were only one of its elements. The 1929 Berlin Festival featured Richard Strauss, Toscanini, Casals, George Szell, Cortot, Thibaud, Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Klemperer and Gigli. What did that prove? Only that music was international and Berliners were lucky.

  Jews were certainly a principal reason for the enormous success of the German cinemas in the 1920s. During the war, British, French and later American imports were banned. To fill the 2,000 German and 1,000 Austrian cinemas, German production companies jumped from thirty in 1913 to 250 six years later, and after the war German cinema became dominant in Europe. In 1921 it produced 246 feature films, about the same as America; in 1925 its production (228) was twice as many as Britain and France put together.119 Jews took a leading role in supplying both the quantity and quality of German films. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was scripted by Hans Janowitz and Carl Meyer, and produced by Erich Pommer. Metropolis was directed by Fritz Lang. These were only two of the most influential films. Directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Max Ophuls and Alexander Korda, and actors like Peter Lorre, Elizabeth Bergner, Pola Negri and Conrad Veidt, were part of a galaxy of Jewish talent which created the golden age of German cinema and then, after the rise of Hitler, led a diaspora to Hollywood, London and Paris. There was undeniably a strong Jewish element in the German cinema, and both Lang and G. W. Pabst were fascinated by the concept of the golem.120 But on the whole the German cinema of the 1920s was brilliant and adventurous rather than politically and culturally committed and its contribution to German cultural paranoia about the Jews is hard to discern now.

  The area where Jewish influence was strongest was the theatre, especially in Berlin. Playwrights like Carl Sternheim, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Toller, Erwin Piscator, Walter Hasenclever, Ferenc Molnar and Carl Zuckmayer, and influential producers like Max Reinhardt, appeared at times to dominate the stage, which tended to be modishly left-wing, pro-republican, experimental and sexually daring. But it was certainly not revolutionary, and it was cosmopolitan rather than Jewish.

  The only Weimar manifestation which to some extent fitted the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish Kulturbolschewismus was the Frankfurt Institution for Social Research (1923). Its theorists, led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Franz Neuman, preached a humanist version of Marxism in which culture assumed greater importance than practical politics. Jewish attitudes and concepts undoubtedly played a role in their work. They were fascinated by Marx’s theory of alienation. They were acutely conscious of the importance of psychoanalysis, and in various ways sought to Freudianize Marxism. They also tried, by using Marxist methods, to demonstrate how socio-economic assumptions determined what most people thought of as cultural absolutes. This was highly subversive, and from the 1950s onwards was to prove influential too. But at the time few Germans had heard of the Frankfurt school. This applied particularly to its most famous alumnus, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), who found it difficult to formulate his thoughts in publishable shape, and printed comparatively little in his lifetime beyond a few articles and his essays, his doctoral thesis, a book of aphorisms and some annotated letters on the rise of German culture. His lifework was essentially put together and published by Adorno in 1955.

  Benjamin was among the most Jewish of modern German thinkers, though he had no religion as such. But, as his great friend Gershom Scholem, the historian, pointed out, his thinking revolved around two basic Jewish concepts: Revelation—truth revealed through sacred texts—and Redemption.121 Benjamin was always looking for a Messiah-force. Before 1914 it was youth: he was a leader in the largely Jewish radical youth movement created by Gustav Wyneken. But when Wyneken turned patriotic in 1914 Benjamin
denounced him, and after the war he turned to literature as the Messiah. Certain outstanding texts, he argued, like the Torah, had to be scrutinized in an exegetical quest for the key to moral redemption. He applied to literature one of the central principles of kabbalah: words are sacred in the same way that the words of the Torah are physically linked to God. As a result of the relationship between divine and human language, man has been charged with the process of completing creation, which he does mainly through words (name-calling) and formulating ideas. He coined the phrase ‘the creative omnipotence of language’ and he showed that texts had to be explored to detect not merely their surface meaning but their underlying message and structure.122 Hence Benjamin belonged to the irrational and gnostic Jewish tradition, like Marx himself and Freud, detecting deep, secret and life-explaining meanings beneath the veneer of existence. What he first began to apply to literature, and later to history, was to become in time a more general technique, used for instance by Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Noam Chomsky in linguistics. Gnosticism is the most insidious form of irrationalism, especially to intellectuals, and the particular variety of gnosticism developed tentatively by Benjamin, expanded into Structuralism, proved a major force among the intelligentsia from the 1950s onwards.

  Benjamin was particularly influential in his efforts to show that a ruling class manipulated history to perpetuate its own needs, illusions and deceits. As the scene darkened in the 1930s, he turned to his own version of Marxism as his third Messiah. What he called ‘Marxist Time’, or the Marxist millennium, was his alternative to the long, unsatisfactory, historical process of reform. It was important, he argued, to ‘blast out’ (a favourite expression) from the continuum of history ‘the past charged with now-time’, and for the aims of the enlightenment and social democracy to substitute the revolution: time comes to a stop, the Stillstand, when the revolutionary event, alias the messianic happening, occurs. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin argued that politics was not merely a fierce physical struggle to control the present, and so the future, but an intellectual battle to control the record of the past. In a striking phrase, he insisted that ‘even the dead will not be safe from the [fascist] enemy as he wins’.123 Most forms of knowledge were relativistic, bourgeois creations, and had to be recast to ensure proletarian or classless truth. The irony of these brilliant but destructive insights was that, whereas Benjamin saw them as scientific historical materialism, they were really a product of Judaic irrationality—his was the old tale of how intensely spiritual people, who can no longer believe in God, find ingenious substitutes for religious dogmas.

  Moreover, in Benjamin’s case, the rejection of religion was by no means complete. His work is full of curious notions of time and fate, even of evil and demons. Without a religious framework, he was lost, and he felt lost. With the rise of Hitler he fled to Paris. There, at the Café des Deux Magots, he drew what he called a diagram of his life, a hopeless labyrinth; and, characteristically, he lost that too.124 At the end of 1939 he tried to get into Spain, but got stuck on the Franco-Spanish border. One of his best friends had already committed suicide, as had Tucholsky and many other Jewish intellectuals, and in his final phase Benjamin seems to have seen suicide as a form of Redemption-through-death, the Christ-Messiah. At all events, he killed himself and was buried in the cemetery at Port-Bou, overlooking the sea. But no one was present at the actual interment, and when Hannah Arendt came to find his grave, later in 1940, it had disappeared and has never since been identified—a final, unconscious gesture of alienation and confusion, a symbolic reminder that the Jewish intellectuals of the new age (as we have noted already) were as forlorn and adrift in it as anyone else. But though Benjamin was in the long run the most influential of all the Weimar cultural innovators, few people in Germany had then heard of him.

  Was the German nationalist accusation that Jews ran Weimar’s culture entirely conspiracy theory then? Not quite. Jews ran important newspapers and publishing houses. While it is true that the bulk of German publishing, and the biggest circulation papers in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and other major towns, were in non-Jewish hands, such Jewish liberal papers as the Berliner Tageblatt, the Vossische Zeitung and the Frankfurter Zeitung had the most brilliant critics and the widest cultural influence. Jewish publishing houses like Kurt Wolff, Carriers and S. Fischer were the most highly regarded. A large percentage of dramatic, music, art and book critics were Jews; and Jews ran important art galleries and other centres of cultural trade. They appeared to be in charge, to set the trends and make the reputations. Their power, such as it was, was confused with the power of the left-intelligentsia as a whole, which aroused envy, frustration and fury. The accusation of Jewish cultural dictatorship was an important weapon in Hitler’s campaign to create a real one.

  All the same, the Nazis would never have been able to acquire power without the Great Depression, which hit Germany harder than any other country except the United States. In both countries the trough of the crisis came in the summer of 1932, but in both the first glimmer of the upturn was not visible until well into 1933. In both the blame for the phenomenally high level of unemployment was placed by the electors on the political establishment: the Republican Party in America, the Weimar Republic in Germany. The two countries went to the polls within two days of each other in November 1932 and in each the results led, in effect, to a change of regime. There was an element of blind, cruel chance in what happened. On the 6th, the German electorate gave 33.1 per cent of its votes to the Nazis (a drop in their percentage from the previous July). Two days later F. D. Roosevelt won by a landslide in America, an election in which the Jewish vote switched from its traditional Republican (and socialist) allegiance and went 85-90 per cent to the democrats. The same angry desire for change, which in America gave power to a man whom Hitler quickly identified with the Jews, led in Germany to an electoral deadlock which was resolved, on 30 January 1933, by Hitler becoming chancellor.

  There was, then, nothing inevitable about the capture of power in Germany by an anti-Semitic regime. But once Hitler had consolidated his personal and party dictatorship, which took a mere eight weeks in February-March 1933, a systematic attack on the Jews was certain. In particular, Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals knew he would go for them, and most of them left the country quickly. As a result Hitler actually killed fewer Jewish members of the intelligentsia than Stalin did in Russia. Strictly speaking, however, the Nazi policy for the Jews went no further than a reversion to conventional state anti-Semitism. The 1920 party policy provided for Jews to be stripped of German citizenship, including the right to hold office and vote; Jews would become ‘guests’, and those who had entered since 1914 would be expelled; there was also a vague threat to expropriate Jewish property.125 But in many of his speeches, as well as in Mein Kampf, Hitler had threatened and promised violence against Jews. In a private talk with Major Josef Hell in 1922 he went further. If he won power, he said, ‘the annihilation of the Jews will be my first and foremost task…. Once the hatred and the battle against the Jews are really stirred up, their resistance will inevitably break down in short order. They cannot protect themselves and no one will stand forth as their defenders.’ He explained to Major Hell his belief that all revolutions, like his, needed a focus of hostility, to express ‘the feelings of hatred of the broad masses’. He had chosen the Jew not merely out of personal conviction but also out of rational political calculation: ‘the battle against the Jews will be as popular as it will be successful’. The conversation with Hell is particularly illuminating because it illustrates the dualism of Hitler’s anti-Semitic drive, its mixture of emotional loathing and cool reasoning. He treated Hell not only to his rationale but also to his fury:

  I shall have gallows erected, in Munich for example in the Marienplatz, as many as traffic permits. Then the Jews will be hanged, one after another, and they will stay hanging until they stink…. As soon as one is untied, the next will take his place, and that will
go on until the last Jew in Munich is obliterated. Exactly the same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of its last Jew.126

  Hitler’s dualism expressed itself in two forms of violence to be used against the Jew: the spontaneous, highly emotional, uncontrolled violence of the pogrom, and the cool, systematic, legal and regulated violence of the state, expressed through law and police power. As Hitler moved closer to office, and became more adept at the tactics needed to secure it, he pushed the emotional element into the background, and stressed the legal. One of the chief complaints against Weimar was the political lawlessness on the streets. One of Hitler’s chief attractions, to many Germans, was his promise to end it. But Hitler, long before he came to power, had mobilized instruments to express both aspects of his anti-Semitic personality. On the one hand there were the party street-bullies, and in particular the Brownshirts (SA), over 500,000 strong by the end of 1932, who habitually beat up Jews in the streets and even murdered them from time to time. On the other hand there was the elite SS, to run the police power and the camps, to administer the elaborate apparatus of state violence against the Jews.