The main building of the Kolleg, a mansion among many in leafy, opulent, quiet, dignified Grunewald, stood on a sharp bend of the Wallotstrasse. On that bend, Walther Rathenau’s open car had to slow down on a fateful day in June 1922, allowing a group of right-wing extremists to shoot and kill the Jewish foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, “the Jewish sow” (die Judensau), as they called him. Another “historical site,” close to the Kolleg, was the dainty Grunewald railway station, which was no longer in use. From that station, some of the Berlin Jews had been shipped to Lodz between the fall of 1941 and mid-1943, and from Lodz to Chelmno, where they were exterminated in gas vans.
Throughout the autumn of 1985, I kept busy preparing a conference about German memory of the Holocaust, writing some short articles and afterwords for the new German and American editions of Kitsch, discovering Berlin architecture and museums, and attending several meetings of a seminar on Carl Schmitt at the Free University.
Carl Schmitt was, with Heidegger, one of the most prominent intellectuals of Nazi Germany and a party member since 1933. His influence as a political theorist was considerable under Weimar, during the Third Reich up to the beginning of the war, and no less so after the war (and to this day). He was still alive during my stay in Berlin. His fierce anti-Semitism exploded sky-high in the 1930s and one of his frequent visitors in the postwar years reported a comment (apparently known to many): “The best thing Hitler ever did was to exterminate the Jews.” I don’t know if the rabbi’s son, Jacob Taubes, was aware of Schmitt’s infamous declaration, but he couldn’t ignore the man’s virulent and open anti-Semitism during the Nazi years. Such trifles didn’t deter Taubes, nor his assistant, Werner Sombart’s son, Nikolaus. (The economic historian Werner Sombart was famous for his work on Jews and capitalism, which gave the Nazis some of their ideas in this domain.) They stoked the Schmitt enthusiasm in their highly successful seminar at the Free University.
Why did I attend a few sessions? I wasn’t particularly interested in Schmitt as such, but my steady interest in the evolution of German attitudes to the Third Reich must have given me the idea that the students’ reactions would be meaningful in that regard. That is how I explained it at the time, in a letter to Ellen Kennedy, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania: “I am very interested in the Carl Schmitt reception in Germany today. It links up, in my opinion, with many other discrete phenomena which possibly are not without significance.”
Throngs of students filled the seminar room, but their comments enlightened me less than Taubes’s and Sombart’s pontificating, a somewhat bizarre spectacle. The following year Schmitt died and Taubes wrote an eloquent necrology for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It was this mixture of contradictory traits that ultimately gave a distinct flavor to Taubes’s personality. Incidentally, my friend Uri Tal (Taubes) was a cousin of his.
Sometime during the early days of my stay, Amos Elon came by and suggested we cross to the East to see a performance of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny. We were allowed through at Checkpoint Charlie; our Israeli passports led to a very thorough search and multiple phone calls before we got the clearance. The performance was impressive; the aftermath, less so. We decided to have a bite — for the sake of experience — at some restaurant close to the theater. To this day, I remember the utterly depressing atmosphere of this “restaurant,” more like a cafeteria in Israel’s austerity days in the early fifties. I don’t think that anybody watched us, although Amos was in touch with political figures on both sides and wrote about Germany and Berlin. When we had crossed back, I felt relief.
I tried to invite some East German intellectuals to the conference I was preparing but without success, although the collapse of the regime was close. I remember in particular the exchange of letters with a writer whose books I much admired, particularly her Patterns of Childhood (Kindheitsmuster): Christa Wolf. From her answer to the invitation, I clearly understood that she would have liked to participate but was not permitted to. She conveyed this in a veiled language, but to me the meaning was clear enough. A few years later, as Wolf spent some time in Los Angeles, she confirmed it.
From the outset, Wapnewski liked the idea of a conference on the German memory of the Shoah and agreed to finance the costs and host the meeting at the Kolleg.
The conference that took place in mid-February 1986 gathered historians who were or had been fellows at the Kolleg and some others (Heinrich A. Winkler, Wolfgang Schieder, Hans Mommsen, Rudolf Vierhaus, Lutz Niethammer), a psychologist from Goettingen, and the major German philosopher and public intellectual Jürgen Habermas. My Tel Aviv and UCLA friend Amos Funkenstein, to whom I shall return, attended and so did a very remarkable historian and political scientist whom I had met shortly beforehand and who remains a friend to this day: Dan Diner. During the discussions, the hall was packed with fellows and guests.
An intrinsically elusive, though decisive, issue kept coming back: What did Germans know of the extermination as it was happening? Two entirely opposite answers emerged. A professor of philosophy at the Free University, Margarethe von Brentano, declared without hesitation that she, a student in Munich during the war and other students like her, knew at the time that the Jews were being exterminated. To this unambiguous statement, Wapnewski objected strenuously: “I was a soldier on the Eastern Front for three years and throughout this entire period I didn’t hear anything regarding the fate of the Jews.” He then added a troubling detail: “The only comment about the Jews came with the distribution of some greenish and quite disgusting soap that was soon called Judenseife (Jew soap). Why? I didn’t know.” Could it be that Wapnewski had never heard the widespread rumor that the fat of killed Jews was used to manufacture soap? Could it be that he never wondered or asked why the disgusting soap was given such a weird designation?
Today we know that a majority of adult Germans were aware of the extermination by mid-1943 at the latest. A flood of information came back to the Reich from the East in letters sent by thousands and thousands of soldiers, Nazi officials of all ranks, camp guards, and even journalists; what letters had not done, home leave did. Moreover, throughout 1942, Hitler alluded to the extermination in no less than five speeches; his hints were clearly interpreted by the Nazi press, while the Gestapo was attempting to squash the “rumors.” Incidentally, a widespread reaction to the Allied bombings throughout Germany, as reported in the public opinion surveys of the SS Security Service, was the best proof of common knowledge: “the bombings are a retaliation for what we did to the Jews.” Either Wapnewski had forgotten all of that or he had opted for silence.
The conference was a success and I was quite proud of it. My stay in Berlin would have ended on a high note had it ended right then, but two or three weeks remained …
2
I met Ernst Nolte during one of his frequent visits to the Kolleg. I had read his early work, The Three Faces of Fascism, a highly original, albeit controversial, book that I assigned in my Geneva courses in the 1970s, without seeing in it the extreme theses that my friend George Mosse had criticized in a sharp review.
I didn’t read Nolte’s further publications, except for an article entitled “The Third Reich Seen from the Perspective of the 1980s” that had been published at the beginning of 1985 in a collective volume edited by one H. W. Koch, in England. The article was shocking in many ways, as it peddled some of the common apologetic arguments about Nazi Germany and the extermination of the Jews. Why, notwithstanding my hypersensitivity on this issue, did I consider this piece as some kind of passing aberration, I don’t know. When Nolte invited me to give a lecture in his seminar at the Free University, I accepted.
The lecture took place in a friendly atmosphere, so that I saw no reason, somewhat later, to find an excuse for refusing another invitation, this time to a family dinner. Peter Demetz, a professor of German literature from Yale and a fellow at the Kolleg, was also invited. Alexander and Gesinne Schwan, two political scientists from the
Free University, completed the group of guests.
The evening started pleasantly and the conversation focused on the hot topic of the day: a corruption scandal in the granting of building permits that involved members of the Berlin Senate. As we sat down for dinner, I felt almost completely at ease: the article in Koch’s volume was probably an aberration indeed. Soup was served, and in the momentary silence, Nolte turned to me.
“Herr Friedländer, what is it actually to be a Jew? Is it a matter of religion or of biology?”
I sensed early signs of danger and tried to defuse them by mentioning Ben-Gurion’s decision, soon after the establishment of Israel, to ask some thirty Jewish scholars how they would define Jewishness; he received thirty different answers and decided to keep them under lock and key.
Nolte was not so easily put off and repeated his question. I then told him, still in as much of a matter-of-fact way as I could, that the Knesset had debated the issue and, in order to assuage the religious parties, members of the governing coalition, had accepted the traditional religious definition: whoever is born of a Jewish mother is a Jew.
“Then,” said Nolte, “it is ultimately a matter of biology.”
“Not really. Anybody can convert to Judaism and become a full-fledged Jew.”
The silence that had descended on the dining room did not last long.
“Herr Friedländer, you cannot deny that there is something like world Jewry [Weltjudentum].”
“How so?”
“Well, isn’t there a World Jewish Congress?”
I tried to explain why and when the World Jewish Congress had been established. It didn’t help; nor did the fact that I had been secretary to the president of the World Jewish Congress bolster my authority. The sniping continued.
“Didn’t Weizmann declare, in September 1939, that world Jewry would fight on the side of Great Britain against Germany?”
“Herr Nolte, I hoped that you wouldn’t bring up the weird arguments that you presented in your article of last year. Indeed, Weizmann declared that Jews would fight against Nazi Germany. Not that this Zionist leader in any way represented Jews of different countries, but given the way the Third Reich was hounding the Jews and given the nature of the regime, he assumed quite rightly that Jews, wherever they lived, would be on the side of Great Britain.”
“But, Herr Friedländer, didn’t it mean that World Jewry was thereby at war with Germany and thus that Hitler could consider the Jews as enemies and intern them in concentration camps as prisoners of war, as the Americans did with the Japanese?”
So it went. Everybody was silent around us. Nolte was red in the face and I was pale, or perhaps it was the other way around. The soup was cold. My host carefully added, “Concentration camps, not extermination camps.” The entire situation was becoming unbearable, but Nolte was far from done.
“Did you know, Herr Friedländer, that Kurt Tucholsky wrote in the 1920s that he wished the German bourgeoisie would die from gas?”
“Herr Nolte, where do you read such insanities?”
“I find them, for example, in Wilhelm Stäglich’s Der Auschwitz Mythos [The Auschwitz Myth].”
“You use neo-Nazi literature as your source?”
“Of course. I find in it many unknown facts; then I go back to the references and check whether the facts are correct. Soon I shall bring out a book where many things, unsaid up to now, will come to light.”
“What you have ‘discovered,’ in a nutshell, is that soon after Adolf Hitler stated in Mein Kampf, ‘Had some tens of thousands of Hebrews died by gas, the war would have turned out differently,’ the Jew Tucholsky was wishing a similar fate to the German bourgeoisie.”
“That is correct.”
For me, this was it. I got up and asked for a taxi. Demetz got up with me; the Schwans remained. At the door, I told Nolte that where I came from, one did not invite people for dinner in order to insult them. In the taxi, I asked Demetz whether the Tucholsky quote was correct. “In part,” he said, “but entirely out of context.” Tucholsky, a converted Jew and a brilliant satirist of German society, was a staunch left-wing pacifist. When, under national conservative pressure, the Reichstag, in the late 1920s, started debating the building of a cruiser for the German navy, a furious Tucholsky addressed the German nationalist middle class: “If you want war again, you will have it and die by gas” (as so many soldiers did during the Great War).
As we were being driven back to our homes, I physically trembled. The trembling subsided eventually but sharp anxiety — of the kind I had not experienced since the early Geneva days — kept me miserably awake throughout the night. I wished for one thing only: to leave Berlin and Germany as quickly as I could. But this was far from the end.
During the last days of the stay, Die Zeit asked me about my Berlin experience. The interview lasted for two hours or more; the journalist turned it into a short excerpt of tidbits that were not inaccurate, but entirely out of context. In my conversation with him I mentioned all the good things I had experienced, my impressions of the Kolleg, the city, the conference, its theme and the discussions that took place; none of this was published. I also mentioned some of the views a well-known historian was peddling around (I didn’t indicate a name but quickly after publication, Nolte announced that he was the unnamed historian). Finally, I alluded to the dissonance between my perception of some sites or situations and that of truly excellent people who simply did not share my specific sensitivity or historical awareness, again without any attribution. What I referred to was the following incident.
A few days after the Nolte evening, I was invited for dinner at the Lepenieses’ (Wolf and his wife Annette), together with Wapnewski, his wife Gabrielle, and Nike Wagner. I should mention here that at the end of the conference, Lepenies’s words to me were particularly warm and kind. The dinner was very pleasant: excellent food, splendid wine, and lively conversation. I surely had nothing to complain about and was merely slightly astonished by the fact that the host served an outstanding 1943 white wine as aperitif and that, toward the end of the dinner, for whatever reason, Wapnewski started quoting the words and humming the tune of an apparently well-known hit of the 1970s, “Theo, wir fahr’n nach Lodz …” (Theo, we travel to Lodz …). On the spot, I merely wondered about the fact that both the 1943 wine and traveling to Lodz from Grunewald (where we were) didn’t ring a bell, except for me. I didn’t say a word, as it would have ruined an evening that, by itself, was very enjoyable and that the hosts meant to be so.
The episode, as minute as it was, continued to bother me, and whereas I assumed that traveling to Lodz couldn’t mean a thing for anybody except me, serving a 1943 wine could have been avoided. But then, I thought, how remarkable it was that “we” and “they” — the best among them — still have such different perceptions of dates, sites, events, or such different memories of them. That was all, nothing much in fact.
I take full responsibility for the two missteps that followed and, although I have mulled over all of this again and again for years, my only excuse is my own oversensitivity, probably aggravated by Nolte. First, I confided in a couple, among the fellows, who had become good friends; I told them about the evening and added how baffled I remained by the difference of perception between Jews and Germans over those years. Then — and this was my most egregious blunder — I repeated these remarks in the lengthy interview I gave to the Die Zeit journalist, naturally without mentioning any names. Unfortunately, this became one of his choice tidbits. A few days later, in early March 1986, I left Berlin.
Sometime in May, I met an acquaintance in Geneva who told me that he had just read an interview I had given to Die Zeit during my stay in Berlin. A glance at the paper sufficed to make me cringe. The article was a caricature of the interview, and I immediately sensed the turmoil it would cause if people at the Kolleg were to discover the identity of the hosts. Too late: the “culprits” were identified and all hell broke loose.
I wrote desperate letters to
Wapnewski and to Lepenies to explain what I meant and to repeat that I felt only friendship toward them and deep contrition for any offense I could have caused. I was called a liar, among other things, one who had invented facts and so on. It stuck with some of the fellows, at least for a while.
After a while, Wapnewski turned around and sent me a conciliatory letter; it took longer for Lepenies to let go (in the meantime he succeeded Wapnewski as rector of the Kolleg), but some years later our relations became friendly again and he introduced me very warmly when I came to Berlin to present the first volume of Nazi Germany and the Jews, in 1996. That is why I hesitated for so long over whether to mention this unfortunate event here. As already said, thirty years will have gone by if and when the memoir is published. In any case, the responsibility for this entire incident is mine.
For me, at the time, this episode became an ongoing torture: how could I have wronged my German hosts, people that I liked and respected, in such a dumb way? Couldn’t I keep my feelings to myself and hold my mouth shut? It took about three years, the move to Los Angeles, and an intervening series of new problems to partly (only partly) lessen the brooding about my final days at the Kolleg.
The Nolte story was different: it had a public and resounding afterlife.
3
In Antwort an meine Kritiker [Answer to my Critics], Nolte accuses me of starting the “historians’ controversy.” This wasn’t the case. Nolte was disinvited from a German intellectuals’ debate about to take place in Frankfurt in the spring of 1986, once the text of the speech he was about to give there became known. It included some of the items he had served me (the speech was probably circulated among the participants). No sooner had Nolte been disinvited than the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published his speech. The controversy started.
In the articles and books he brought out then and later, Nolte shifted the debate to what indeed became his main mantra over the years: the comparability between Bolshevism and Nazism. The additional twist he concocted was the historical priority of Bolshevik exterminations: the Gulag, according to Nolte’s notorious formula, was “the original,” whereas Auschwitz was “the copy.” Later, in his Der europäische Bürgerkrieg (The European Civil War), he came to portray Hitler as the protector of the European bourgeoisie against the threat represented by Bolshevism. The question of course arises: Why exterminate the Jews to protect the European bourgeoisie against Bolshevism? The answer had been offered by Nazi propaganda from the outset: the Jews were the initiators and the carriers of Bolshevism. Nolte, however, was careful enough not to use this argument.
When Memory Comes Page 19