The Coming of the Third Reich, page 7
National feeling must not degenerate into one nation setting itself above another. Worse still, if one regards the Jews as a subordinate race, and thus fights the race. Can the Jews help it if they descend from another lineage? They have always been an oppressed people, hence their scattering (over the world). For the Social Democrat it’s self-evident that he wants the equality of everyone with a human spirit. The Jew’s not the worst by a long way.63
Other workers on other occasions were heard to pour scorn on the antisemites, condemn antisemitic violence and support the Jewish desire for civil equality. Such views were entirely typical of workers in the labour movement milieu before 1914.64
The worst the Social Democrats could be accused of was not taking seriously enough the threat posed by antisemitism, and of allowing a few antisemitic stereotypes to creep into a small number of cartoons printed in their entertainment magazines.65 In some areas, the Social Democrats and antisemites supported each other in electoral run-offs, but this did not imply approval of each other’s principles, merely a desire to make temporary common cause as parties of protest against established elites.66 In a few backward small towns and villages, mainly in the deeply rural east, medieval accusations of ritual murder were occasionally brought against local Jews and won some popular support, even arousing protest demonstrations on occasion. Not one of them was ever proved by the courts. Small businessmen, shopkeepers, artisans and peasant farmers were more inclined to overt antisemitism than most, continuing a tradition of organized popular antisemitism that can be traced back at least as far as the 1848 Revolution in some areas, though not in its modern, racist form.67 But among the educated middle classes, non-Jewish businessmen and professionals for the most part worked quite happily with Jewish colleagues, whose representation in the liberal political parties was sufficiently strong to prevent these from taking on board any of the central arguments or attitudes of the antisemites. The antisemitic parties remained a fringe, protest phenomenon and largely disappeared shortly after the turn of the century.
Nevertheless, their decline and fall was to some extent deceptive. One of the reasons for their disappearance lay in the adoption of antisemitic ideas by the mainstream parties whose constituents included the economically imperilled lower-middle-class groups to which the antisemites had originally appealed - the Conservatives and the Centre Party. The Conservatives built on the antisemitic policies contained in their 1893 Tivoli programme and continued to demand the reduction of what they thought of as the subversive influence of Jews in public life. Their antisemitic prejudices appealed to significant groups in Protestant rural society in north Germany and to the artisans, shopkeepers and small businessmen represented in the party’s Christian-social wing. For the much larger, though under the Reich arguably less influential, Centre Party, the Jews, or rather a distorted and polemical image of them, symbolized liberalism, socialism, modernity - all the things the Church rejected. Such a view appealed to large numbers of peasants and artisans in the party, and was spread by autonomous protest groups amongst the Catholic peasantry whose ideas were not dissimilar to those of Otto Böckel; it was also shared by much of the Church hierarchy, for much the same reason. In the Vatican, religious and racial antisemitism merged in some of the anti-Jewish diatribes published by clerical writers in a few of the more hardline Ultramontane newspapers and magazines.68
Moreover, antisemitic prejudice was powerful enough in the higher reaches of society, the court, the civil service, the army and the universities to constitute a permanent reminder to Jews that they were less than equal members of the German nation.69 The antisemites succeeded in placing ‘the Jewish question’ on the political agenda, so that at no time was Jewish participation in key social institutions not a matter for discussion and debate. Yet this was all relatively low-level, even by the standards of the time. A historian once speculated on what would happen if a time-traveller from 1945 arrived back in Europe just before the First World War, and told an intelligent and well-informed contemporary that within thirty years a European nation would make a systematic attempt to kill all the Jews of Europe and exterminate nearly six million in the process. If the time-traveller invited the contemporary to guess which nation it would be, the chances were that he would have pointed to France, where the Dreyfus affair had recently led to a massive outbreak of virulent popular antisemitism. Or it might be Russia, where the Tsarist ‘Black Hundreds’ had been massacring large numbers of Jews in the wake of the failed Revolution of 1905.70 That Germany, with its highly acculturated Jewish community and its comparative lack of overt or violent political antisemitism, would be the nation to launch this exterminatory campaign would hardly have occurred to him. Antisemitic politics were still very much on the fringe. But some of the antisemites’ propaganda claims were beginning to gain a hearing in the political mainstream - for example, the idea that something called the ‘Jewish spirit’ was somehow ‘subversive’, or that Jews had supposedly ‘excessive’ influence in areas of society such as journalism and the law. Moreover, the antisemitic parties had introduced a new, rabble-rousing, demagogic style of politics that had freed itself from the customary restraints of political decorum. This, too, remained on the fringes, but, here again, it had now become possible to utter in parliamentary sessions and electoral meetings hatreds and prejudices that in the mid-nineteenth century would have been deemed utterly inappropriate in public discourse.71
What the 1880s and early 1890s were essentially witnessing, in addition to this domestication of antisemitism, was the assembling, on the fringes of political and intellectual life, of many of the ingredients that would later go into the potent and eclectic ideological brew of National Socialism. A key role in this process was played by antisemitic writers like the popular novelist Julius Langbehn, whose book Rembrandt as Educator (published in 1890) declared the Dutch artist Rembrandt to be a classic north German racial type, and pleaded for German art to return to its racial roots, a cultural imperative that would later be taken up with great enthusiasm by the Nazis. These authors developed a new language of vehemence and violence in their diatribes against the Jews. The Jews, for Langbehn, were a ‘poison for us and will have to be treated as such’; ‘the Jews are only a passing plague and a cholera’, as he put it in 1892. Langbehn’s book went through forty reprints in little over a year and continued to be a best-seller long after, combining scurrilous attacks on what its author called ‘Jews and idiots, Jews and scoundrels, Jews and whores, Jews and professors, Jews and Berliners’ with a call for the restoration of a hierarchical society led by a ‘secret Kaiser’ who would one day emerge from the shadows to restore Germany to its former glory.72
Such ideas were taken up and elaborated by the circle that gathered around the widow of the composer Richard Wagner at Bayreuth. Wagner had made his home in this north Bavarian town until his death in 1883 and his epic music-dramas were played every year in the opera house he had had constructed specially for the purpose. They were designed not least to propagate pseudo-Germanic national myths, in which heroic figures from Nordic legend were to serve as model leaders for the German future. Wagner himself had already been a cultural antisemite in the early 1850s, arguing in his notorious book Judaism in Music that the ‘Jewish spirit’ was inimical to musical profundity. His remedy was for the complete assimilation of Jews into German culture, and the replacement of the Jewish religion, indeed all religion, by secular aesthetic impulses of the sort he poured into his own music-dramas. But towards the end of his life his views took on an increasingly racist tone under the influence of his second wife, Cosima, daughter of the composer Franz Liszt. By the end of the 1870s she was recording in her diaries that Wagner, whose outlook on civilization was distinctly pessimistic by this time, had read Wilhelm Marr’s antisemitic tract of 1873 and broadly agreed with it. As a consequence of this shift in his position, Wagner no longer desired the assimilation of the Jews into German society, but their exclusion from it. In 1881, discussing Lessing’s classic play Nathan the Wise and a disastrous fire in the Vienna Ring Theatre, in which more than four hundred people, many of them Jewish, had died, Cosima noted that her husband said ‘in a vehement quip that all Jews should burn in a performance of “Nathan” ’.73
After Wagner’s death, his widow turned Bayreuth into a kind of shrine, at which a band of dedicated followers would cultivate the dead Master’s sacred memory. The views of the circle she gathered round her at Bayreuth were rabidly antisemitic. The Wagner circle did its best to interpret the composer’s operas as pitting Nordic heroes against Jewish villains, although his music was of course capable of being interpreted in many other ways as well. Among its leading figures were Ludwig Schemann, a private scholar who translated Gobineau’s treatise on racial inequality into German in 1898, and the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, born in 1855, who married one of Wagner’s daughters and in due course published an admiring biography of the great man. While Cosima and her friends propagated their ideas through the periodical publication the Bayreuth Papers, Schemann went round the country addressing antisemitic meetings and founding a variety of radical racist organizations, most notably the Gobineau Society in 1894. None of them was particularly successful. But Schemann’s championing of the French racial theorist still did a great deal to bring Gobineau’s term ‘Aryan’ into vogue amongst German racists. Originally used to denote the common ancestors of the speakers of Germanic languages such as English and German, the term soon acquired a contemporary usage, as Gobineau put forward his argument that racial survival could only be guaranteed by racial purity, such as was supposedly preserved in the German or ‘Aryan’ peasantry, and that racial intermingling spelled cultural and political decline.74
It was Chamberlain who had the greatest impact, however, with his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900. In this vaporous and mystical work Chamberlain portrayed history in terms of a struggle for supremacy between the Germanic and Jewish races, the only two racial groups that retained their original purity in a world of miscegenation. Against the heroic and cultured Germans were pitted the ruthless and mechanistic Jews, whom Chamberlain thus elevated into a cosmic threat to human society rather than simply dismissing them as a marginal or inferior group. Linked to the racial struggle was a religious one, and Chamberlain devoted a good deal of effort to trying to prove that Christianity was essentially Germanic and that Jesus, despite all the evidence, had not been Jewish at all. Chamberlain’s work impressed many of his readers with its appeal to science in support of its arguments; his most important contribution in this respect was to fuse antisemitism and racism with Social Darwinism. The English scientist Charles Darwin had maintained that the animal and plant kingdoms were subject to a law of natural selection in which the fittest survived and the weakest or least well adapted went to the wall, thus guaranteeing the improvement of the species. Social Darwinists applied this model to the human race as well.75 Here were assembled already, therefore, some of the key ideas that were later to be taken up by the Nazis.
III
Chamberlain was not alone in putting forward such views. A variety of authors, scientists and others contributed to the emergence in the 1890s of a new, tough, selectionist variant of Social Darwinism, one that emphasized not peaceful evolution but the struggle for survival. A characteristic representative of this school of thought was the anthropologist Ludwig Woltmann, who argued in 1900 that the Aryan or German race represented the height of human evolution and was thus superior to all others. Therefore, he claimed, the ‘Germanic race has been selected to dominate the earth’.76 But other races, he claimed, were preventing this from happening. The Germans, in the view of some, needed more ‘living-space’ —the German word was Lebensraum— and it would have to be acquired at the expense of others, most likely the Slavs. This was not because the country was literally overcrowded - there was no evidence for that - but because those who advanced such views were taking the idea of territoriality from the animal kingdom and applying it to human society. Alarmed by the growth of Germany’s burgeoning cities, they sought the restoration of a rural ideal in which German settlers would lord it over ‘inferior’ Slav peasants, just as they had done, so historians were beginning to tell them, in East Central Europe in the Middle Ages.77 Such visions of international politics as an arena of struggle between different races for supremacy or survival had become common currency in Germany’s political elite by the time of the First World War. Men such as War Minister Erich von Falkenhayn, Naval Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz, Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s adviser Kurt Riezler, and Chief of the Imperial Naval Cabinet Georg Alexander von Müller, all saw war as a means of preserving or asserting the German race against the Latins and the Slavs. War, as General Friedrich von Bernhardi famously put it in a book published in 1912, was a ‘biological necessity’: ‘Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow.’ Foreign policy was no longer to be conducted between states, but between races. Here was one beginning of the downgrading of the importance of the state that was to play such an important role in Nazi foreign policy.78
Success in war, an increasing preoccupation among Germany’s leaders and politicians from the centre to the right after the turn of the century, also (for some) demanded the undertaking of positive steps to bring about the improvement of the race. One aspect of the selectionist turn in Social Darwinism during the 1890s was to put greater emphasis than before on ‘negative selection’. It was all very well improving the race by better housing, health care nutrition, hygiene and sanitation and similar policies, some argued. But this would do little to counteract the influence of society’s abandonment of the principle of the struggle for survival by caring for the weak, the unhealthy and the inadequate. Such a policy, argued some medical scientists, whose views were reinforced by the emergence of the fledgling science of genetics, was bringing about the increasing degeneracy of the human race. It had to be counteracted by a scientific approach to breeding that would reduce or eliminate the weak and improve and multiply the strong. Among those who argued along these lines was Wilhelm Schallmayer, whose essay advocating a eugenic approach to social policy won first prize in a national competition organized by the industrialist Alfred Krupp in 1900. Alfred Ploetz was yet another medical man who thought that the height of human evolution so far had been reached by the Germans. He suggested that inferior specimens should be sent to the front if a war came, so that the unfit would be eliminated first. Most widely read of all was Ernst Haeckel, whose popularization of Darwinian ideas, The Riddle of the World, became a runaway best-seller when it was published in 1899.79
It would be a mistake to see such views as forming a coherent or unified ideology, however, still less one that pointed forward in a straight line to Nazism. Schallmayer, for instance, was not antisemitic, and he vehemently rejected any idea of the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race. Nor was Woltmann hostile towards Jews, and his fundamentally positive attitude towards the French Revolution (whose leaders, he somewhat implausibly claimed, were racially Germanic, like all great historical figures) was far from congenial to the Nazis. For his part, Haeckel certainly argued that capital punishment should be used on a large scale to eliminate criminals from the chain of heredity. He also advocated the killing of the mentally ill through the use of chemical injections and electrocution. Haeckel was a racist, too, and pronounced the verdict that no woolly-haired race had ever achieved anything of historical importance. But on the other hand he thought that war would be a eugenic catastrophe because it would kill off the best and bravest young men in the country. As a consequence, Haeckel’s disciples, organized in the self-styled ‘Monist League’, became pacifists, rejecting the idea of war altogether - not a doctrine that would endear them to the Nazis. Many of them would suffer dearly for their principles when war finally came in 1914.80
The nearest any of this came to prefiguring Nazi ideology was in the writings of Ploetz, who spiced his theories with a strong dose of antisemitism and collaborated with Nordic supremacist groups. Still, before the First World War there seems little evidence that Ploetz himself considered the ‘Aryan’ race superior to others, although one of his closest collaborators, Fritz Lenz, certainly did. Ploetz took a ruthlessly meritocratic line on eugenic planning, arguing, for example, that a panel of doctors should attend all births and determine whether the baby was fit to survive or should be killed as weak and inadequate. The Darwinist Alexander Tille openly advocated the killing of the mentally and physically unfit, and agreed with Ploetz and Schallmayer that children’s illnesses should be left untreated so that the weak could be eliminated from the chain of heredity. In 1905 Ploetz and his sometime brother-in-law, the like-minded Ernst Rüdin, founded the Racial Hygiene Society to propagate their views. It rapidly gained influence in the medical and welfare professions. Gobineau had been in many ways a conservative, and thought that the eugenic ideal was embodied in the aristocracy. These German thinkers took a far tougher and potentially more revolutionary line, often regarding hereditary traits as largely independent of social class.81
