The rise of National Socialism proved politics and religion don’t mix

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Features > October 10, 2005

A Fundamental History Lesson

The rise of National Socialism proved politics and religion don't mix

By Fritz Stern

 

 

To have witnessed even as a child the descent in Germany from decency

to barbarism gave the question " how was it possible " an existential

immediacy. So I have wrestled with that question, tried to reconstruct

some parts of the past and perhaps intuit some lessons.

 

The German-speaking refugees who came to this country in the '30s had

enthusiastic feelings about the United States. Not only gratitude for

saving them, giving many a chance for a new start, if often under

harsh circumstances, but love and admiration for a country that was,

when they arrived, still digging itself out from an unprecedented

depression, under a leader whose motto was, " the only thing we have to

fear is fear itself, " unlike his German contemporary, who preached

fear in order to exploit it.

 

The United States was the sole functioning democracy of the '30s—that

" low, dishonest decade " —and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt it was

committed to pragmatic reform and in inimitable high spirits. No, I

haven't forgotten the unpleasant elements of those days—the

injustices, the right-wing radicals, the anti-Semites—but the dominant

note of Roosevelt's era was ebullient affirmation of reform and progress.

 

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It is impossible to generalize about German Jews in the modern era,

but common to most of them was an earlier deep affection for their

country, its language and its culture. Perhaps they loved not wisely,

but too well. I remember from my childhood the decent Germans,

so-called Aryans, who being opponents of the Nazi regime disappeared

into concentration camps after 1933. The ties between us had been

close, and when they were broken, when so many Germans decided they

didn't want to know what was happening to their Jewish or " non-Aryan "

neighbors, when they denied their common past, the pain was deep.

 

It is appropriate to recall poet Heinrich Heine's thought—that Jews

are like the people they live among, only more so. Hence German Jews,

who came in great variety—orthodox, liberal, secular, converted—were

like Germans only more so: ambitious, talented, disciplined and full

of ambivalence.

 

After their civic emancipation in the nineteenth century, German Jews

made an unprecedented leap to achievement, prominence and wealth

within only three generations, but some special insecurity and

vulnerability clung to them, as it did to many Germans. I remember

finding in an obscure book Disraeli's confession to young Montefiore:

" You and I belong to a race that can do everything but fail. "

 

Now many Germans regret the absence of that creative complicated

element of German Jewry. They recall the inestimable contributions

that Jews made to German life and culture in their century of partial

emancipation. But their forbears had more complicated feelings on the

subject, and even the most successful Jews felt, as Walther Rathenau

once said, " there comes a moment in every Jew's life when he realizes

he is a second-class citizen. "

 

Perhaps that strange mixture of German hospitality and hostility to

Jews evoked the ambivalent response of some of the greatest of German

Jews. They were the brilliant diagnosticians of German-European

hypocrisy, the memorable breakers of taboos: think of Heine's mockery

of German sentimental pretense, of Karl Marx's insistence that the

cash nexus trumps virtue, or of Sigmund Freud's exposure of sexual

hypocrisy and falsehood. Disturbers of a false peace are indispensable

but rarely welcomed.

 

So anti-Semitism, which comes in many guises and degrees, existed in

pre-1914 Germany, as it did more ferociously in other countries. In

Germany, it became an all-consuming political weapon only after the

Great War.

 

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It is now conventional wisdom that the First World War and its

senseless, unimaginable slaughter was the Ur-catastrophe of the last

century.

 

It brutalized a Europe that before 1914, though deeply flawed by

injustice and arrogance, also contained the promise of great

emancipatory movements, championing the demands for social justice,

for equality, for women's emancipation, for all of human rights. The

war radicalized Europe; without it, there would have been no

Bolshevism and no Fascism. In the postwar climate and in the defeated

and self-deceived Germany, National Socialism flourished and

ultimately made it possible for Hitler to establish the most popular,

the most murderous, the most seductive and the most repressive regime

of the last century.

 

But the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor

accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to

remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the

many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should

not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is

that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for

the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans

recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.

 

We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed

the rise of National Socialism are left with that all-consuming,

complex question: How could this horror have seized a nation and

corrupted so much of Europe? We should remember that even in the

darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who,

defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease

suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European

memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of

future generations.

 

Let's consider not the banality of evil but its triumph in a deeply

civilized country. After the Great War and Germany's defeat,

conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between

moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the

right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany

as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by

socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a

moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger,

painted it in lurid colors and stoked people's fear in order to pose

as saviors of the nation. In the late '20s a group of intellectuals

known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish

authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate

interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious

threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and

cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of

being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were

exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power.

Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish

conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression

and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.

 

Twenty years ago, I wrote about " National Socialism as Temptation, "

about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the

terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks

Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and

probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany's savior,

that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged

with executing a divine mission.

 

God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler's

success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an

immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people

recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many

more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration

of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant

areas, where clergy shared Hitler's hostility to the liberal-secular

state and its defenders, and were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.

 

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming

that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they

didn't think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously.

They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis' cunning

transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into

flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments the National Socialists

would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to

traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German

people, 24 hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, " The National

Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which

our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the

foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of

national life. "

 

To cite one example of the acknowledged appeal of unreason, Carl

Friedrich von Weizsaecker, Nobel-laureate in physics and a

philosopher, wrote to me in the mid-'80s saying that he had never

believed in Nazi ideology but that he had been tempted by the

movement, which seemed to him then like " the outpouring of the Holy

Spirit. " On reflection, he thought that National Socialism had been

part of a process that the National Socialists themselves hadn't

understood. He may well have been right: The Nazis didn't realize that

they were part of a historic process in which resentment against a

disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of

unreason. German elites proved susceptible to this mystical brew of

pseudo-religion and disguised interest. The Christian churches most

readily fell into line as well, though with some heroic exceptions.

 

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Modern German history offers lessons in both disaster and recovery.

The principal lesson speaks of the fragility of democracy, the

fatality of civic passivity or indifference; German history teaches us

that malice and simplicity have their own appeal, that force impresses

and that nothing in the public realm is inevitable.

 

Another lesson is the possibility of reconstruction, for the history

of the Federal Republic since World War II, a republic that is now 55

years old, exemplifies success despite its serious flaws and

shortcomings. Postwar Germany made a democracy grow on what was

initially uncongenial ground, when its people were still steeped in

resentment and denial. American friendship supported that

reconstruction, especially in its first decade.

 

I fear that an estrangement is now taking place. German acceptance of

Western traditions has been the precondition for its gradual

reconciliation with neighbors and former enemies. The German

achievement is remarkable—but it too needs constant protection.

 

My hope is for a renewal on still firmer grounds of a trans-Atlantic

community of liberal democracies. Every democracy needs a liberal

fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this

alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform.

Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine

conservative knows this.

Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, is

the author of The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of

the Germanic Ideology. This essay is adapted from a speech that he

gave at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York last year.