Review: The Holocaust as Suicidal Enterprise

Subject:	Review: The Holocaust as Suicidal Enterprise
Date:	Fri, 1 Jan 2010 05:51:19 -0800 (PST)

Review: The Holocaust as Suicidal Enterprise

by Ludo Abicht

Reviewed work(s):
Deutschland ohne Juden. Eine Bilanz by Bernt Engelmann
Besuch im Hades by G=FCnther Anders
Source: New German Critique, No. 20, Special Issue 2: Germans and Jews
(Spring - Summer, 1980), pp. 177-186

In her autobiographical work Dies ist nicht mein Land - Eine J=FCdin
verl=E4sst die Bundesrepublik,' Lea Fleischmann describes a faculty
meeting at the high school where she was teaching. A colleague had
been unjustly reprimanded by the director, and the 43 teachers,
including Fleischmann, remained silent: "It won't be all that bad. I
don't want to make myself unpopular, as I often come late anyhow. Next
week Frau Ullmann (the director) has to write an evaluation of me. All
this crosses my mind, and at the same time my soul is burned by the
thought that an injustice is happening here. You're witnessing it, and
you don't say anything." The link is easily maybe too easily -
established between this collective cowardice and the Nazi horrors
that had victimized her parents and her people. Against this ugly,
obedient "German," the author equates "Jewishness" with courage,
revolt and the unwillingness to participate in this dehumanizing
experience.
This typical example of traditional German authoritarianism shows one
of the problems that the literature about the Holocaust confronts us
with: how does one critically assess this episode in European history
without either equating this authoritarianism with fascism or running
the risk of offending the memory of the victims, especially at a time
of renewed antiSemitic and openly fascist activity?2
In very different ways both Gunther Anders and Bernt Engelmann try to
transcend this dilemma as an unacceptable choice. Although neither of
them claims to be objective or "neutral" - both are German Jews, both
are militant humanists and socialists - their works reflect an
uncompromising attempt to place the discussion within the contemporary
public sphere of a "Germany without Jews," but a country still
uneasily struggling with its guilt-ridden Jewish problem which is
actually a German problem. Anders

* This review will focus on:
Bernt Engelniann, Deutschland ohne Juden. Line Bilanz. Munich: Wilhelm
Goldmann Verlag, 1979. 525 pages.
Gunther Anders, Besuch im Hades. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1979. 218 pages.

1. Lea Fleischmann, Dies is: nich: mein Land - Eine J=FCdin verldsst
die Bundesrepublik (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1980). See also the
review by Annette Gerhardt in Die Neue (May 8, 1980), p. 7.
2. See Henryk M. Broder, Deutschland erwacht (Cologne, 1978), a very
convincing collection of essays and documents about the neo-Nazis and
their sympathizers in West Germany today.

[*178] starts his reflections from his very personal impressions and
experiences, whereas Engelmann takes a sociological, even statistical
approach in the style of his ongoing critical exposure of German
history and the developments in the German Federal Republic today.
Their attempt, however, necessarily entails the breaking of a number
of tacitly agreed upon explanations and taboos. This becomes
abundantly clear in Engelmann's treatment of the symbiosis of Germans
and Jews before and even after Hitler's takeover.
It is possible that the sudden explosion of public discussion in West
Germany after the showing of the tv film "Holocaust" has begun to
clear the path for a more mature, less inhibited critical debate of
all the aspects and implications of the tragedy. This includes those
aspects which the Left and/or the official Jewish representatives have
hitherto managed carefully to avoid. If this assumption is true, then
both books will have been published right on time.

G=FCnther Anders: The Poet as Moralist

Besuch im Hades consists of four separate parts, held together by the
subjective views of the author and the central topic: Parts 1 and 3
are Anders' travel diary during a 1966 visit to Auschwitz and his
native Breslau, part 2 is a selection of excerpts from his
philosophical diaries, written in the USA between 1944 and 1949, and
part 4 was written in 1979 during the debates following the showing of
"Holocaust" in Europe. This timespan of about 35 years makes it hard
to consider this publication as one book. Yet, it enables us to
discover the similarities and discrepancies between the early and the
later reflections on the same events. As a student of Husserl, Anders
has always been concerned in philosophical questions but with a moral
orientation. He is an internationally known opponent of the Vietnam
War and nuclear energy and traces his ethics and commitments back to
his experiences as a boy in World War I followed by persecution and
exile during the Third Reich.
Contrary to what the title suggests, the book starts rather
surprisingly with a series of reflections after Anders and his
companion have already left the "Hades" of Auschwitz. In discussing
the meaning of the death camp, he focuses on the atypical fate of
Edith Stein, once a student of Anders' father Wilhelm Stern and Edmund
Husserl. After her conversion under the influence of Max Scheler, she
became a Catholic nun who pleaded with the Pope to intervene on behalf
of the threatened Jews, and who, a Jew herself, was finally murdered
in Auschwitz, surrounded by her own people and yet considered a
renegade and a traitor. Anders compares her absolute, totally non-
opportunistic religious conversion to Husserl's own convenient
Protestant baptism, a typical and equally useless form of assimilation
of many Jews in the German-Austrian middle-class before World War II.
But [*179] this comparison becomes irrelevant and absurd faced with a
policy that took neither religious nor cultural assimilation into
account and decided arbitrarily who belonged to the real German
people. Edith Stein, more steeped in the great German traditions than
most Germans and definitely more Christian than most Christians, did
not. To Anders her fate symbolizes more than anything else the
permanent insecurity of the Jewish people in the diaspora. For, if
this complete integration of Edith Stein did not save her and
thousands of others, we should begin to look for other ways to stop
the madness of imminent genocide. Will the vivid memory of the
massacre be powerful enough to finally take away the threat?

If only three of us would speak
- three moaning in a meager chorus -
We'd soon and easily be entering
Your ears and hearts.
For three are father, mother and the child,
Three deaths each heart could measure,
But we, the millions, are today forgotten.
As we are millions and millions too many. ("Numbers," 1945)

In his "philosophical diaries" (1944-1949), Anders is struck with the
poverty of our traditional, classical "imagination." The reality of
Auschwitz forces us to redefine this ability: "Because its object, the
phantastic reality, is phantastic in itself, imagination (die
Phantasie) has to function as an empirical method, as an organ to
perceive that which is factually enormous." In his "Analytics of the
Sublime," Kant concluded that man could never match the potential for
human grandeur. Anders reverses this inability: the gap he observes is
no longer between reason and imagination, but between human actions
and imagination, and the consequences have proven to be terrible, as
people who perpetrate the most heinous and monstrous crimes are no
longer capable consciously to realize the monstrosity of their deeds.
The optimism of the Kantian enlightenment has turned into an almost
absolute pessimism, for, even if our attempts at transcending this
inability would become universally accepted, it still would remain an
open question whether we could really "imagine" the possibility of an
apocalyptic end. The reaction of both the victims and the tormentors
to the Holocaust shows the dangerous limits of our humanistic
tradition: new genocides have happened since the end of World War II
and, again, people have failed to react in a significantly different
and more effective way. Despite Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the
existential philosophers, and especially despite the permanent
inhumanity of our own century, we still cling to the comforting
ideologies of human progress and developing "humanization" of the
private and the public spheres, still unable to imagine further
horrors, including our own self-destruction.
Anders' journey to his "roots" in Breslau reinforces these
observations: after 50 years of exile he feels like a Silesian coming
home to the Breslau of [*I8O] Kaiser Wilhelm and the First World War.
But the Jews and the Germans have left, and the few German speakers he
meets take it for granted that he, too, is an old Nazi, looking for
the former SA-Allee in a Polish city. This alienation in time and
history is stressed by the totally different reactions of his younger,
American companion, who only sees present-day Bratislava and cannot
possibly share his emotions. And the childhood memories exemplify the
contradictions of the German-Jewish experience. He thinks of older
friends, who enthusiastically volunteered to serve the Kaiser in 1914,
and who ended in Birkenau in 1944; of his mother who frantically
organized the ladies' relief organization for the herioc boys on the
Eastern and Western fronts, who thought of herself as a hundred
percent German and patriot, and who later was forced to adopt the
first name "Sarah" in her nonAryan passport as a token of degradation
and ridicule; of his father, who proudly celebrated July 12, "Dreyfus
Day," as a reassuring symbol of the final victory of reason and
tolerance in Western Europe.
But the irony does not stop here: Anders' father developed a set of
philosophical theories which he called "personalism."This concept was
first adopted by Max Scheler. From there it found its way into the
philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier and the progressive Catholics around
Esprit and finally emerged as the ideology of the ruling Diem clique
in South Vietnam: "My father, my father, if you only knew!" This
descent into Hades, Auschwitz and Breslau, by far the largest section
of the book, sets the tone for the subsequent discussion of the German
reception of the tv "Holocaust" series.
The lesson brought about by the telecast of this mediocre and
distorted product should not be forgotten: "Only through fiction can
the facts, only through individual cases can the innumerable be made
clear and unforgettable." Consistent with his earlier theories about
the gap between action and imagination, he rejects the usual
explanation of a past the majority of the Germans have "repressed,"
for "repression" presupposes at least some trauma, and Anders doesn't
believe those traumas ever existed. Of course, they had been
confronted, at least after the war, with the documents of the
Holocaust, but he doubts that they were fully grasped. The horror had
been "reduced to its enormity" and had therefore never reached the
popular consciousness. The fact that only a personalized,
fictionalized story finally reached that consciousness through a tv
soap opera is no automatic cause for hope, for "none of the prevailing
religious or philosophical ethics" are prepared to deal with Hiroshima
or Auschwitz, and the question whether it is still possible or even
makes sense to establish such a new morality must remain unanswered.
This would imply a moral and social revolution of hitherto unthinkable
dimensions, far beyond the obsolete and corrupt liberal-humanistic
ideology or even its dialectical materialist variant. Anders does not
reject the class nature of fascist anti-Semitism, but he is no longer
convinced that a mere socio-economic restructuration will guarantee
the development of a new ethic, strong enough to overcome the total
amorality Auschwitz revealed. He calls this amorality "ontological,"
as it [*181] enabled the destruction of individuals and groups simply
on the basis of their "being" (being Jewish, being Gypsy, being
"different"), rather than on account of their allegedly harmful or
"bad" behavior.

Bernt Engelmann as Seemingly Objective Pragmatist.

Whereas Gunther Anders' ethical questions pointed to the moral
bankruptcy underlying the Holocaust, the author and polemicist Bernt
Engelmann approaches the same facts from a seemingly amoral, pragmatic
perspective: "So let us free ourselves of disgust, horror and guilt
feelings. Let us break through the taboo that until now has prevented
us from taking a closer look at the causes and the consequences of the
persecution of the Jews that culminated in the mass murder of the
1940s, and at the same time prevented the impartiality and objectivity
that are necessary to research the truth.
Let us instead try to carefully order the evidence, to register it
correctly and to strike a balance, whatever the outcome may be -
firmly convinced that one can only learn something, even from the most
terrible mistakes, when one is able to recognize them" (p. 10).
Engelmann understands this impartiality and objectivity quite
literally, as he is even prepared to look at the Holocaust from the
viewpoint of the anti-Semites and Nazis themselves, for whom the
results certainly surpassed their most ardent wishes. They have indeed
succeeded in curing Germany from "the Jewish disease," in creating a
virtually "Jew-free" (judenreines) post-war society. So, if they were
right in the first place - and Engelmann is willing to let this theory
go unchallenged - things must look much better and brighter today
than, e.g., during the days of the "Jew-dominated" Weimar Republic.
But even if we hypothetically accept the distorted viewpoint of the
Nazis, we must come to the conclusion that it was still not
advantageous for them to eliminate the Jews. In eight out of the ten
chapters of his book, Engelmann demonstrates in a chilling, detached
way how the destruction of the Jewish part of the German population
has affected specific areas of German cultural, technological and even
military developments. Before they could begin with the elimination of
the "Jewish virus" from the endangered German national body, the Nazi
"race researchers" had to define this virus as clearly distinct from
its environment. And this proved from the start to be an impossible
task: as a result of the complex racial history of the Jews,
especially since the 19th century, the "blood relationships" in the
medical sense of the word, were much closer between German Jews and
"Aryans" than between Jews in Europe and the Middle East, for example.
Thus, contrary to their own theories, they began to identify people
according to the religion of their grandparents and great-
grandparents, thereby including the Jews, who had converted to
Christianity, and the Christians, who had adopted the Jewish faith.
Furthermore, the cultural integration of Jews and [*182] converts in
German-Austrian life, from Rahel Levin to Johann Strauss, and from
Lorenzo da Ponte to Adolf von Baeyer, had been so thorough, that Nazi
historians had to rewrite entire chapters of the biographies of such
eminently German geniuses as Franz Lehar and Richard Wagner, whose
works they ought to have banned as the degenerated products of Jewish
artists.
As we know, all this did not confuse the Nazi architects of the
"Final Solution," among them the partially Jewish Reinhard Heydrich
(SUss), in the least, and the carefully planned genocide was carried
out. Engelmann starts his research in the field of medicine: before
1933 Germany was the world's most important center of medical research
and teaching. This he measures by the disproportionally high number of
Nobel Prize winners, scientific discoveries and the leading role of
the medical schools. After World War II the center completely shifted
to the USA. A careful examination of the list of researchers and
professors in both countries indicates the prominent place of German-
Jewish scientists, many of whom were refugees from the Nazi
persecutions, and this despite the quota system that kept the Jewish
presence at an "acceptable" minimum. At the same time the so-called
harmful effects of "Jewish medicine," such as the defense of
premarital sexual relations, birth control and the "commercial
specialization" of the profession - as opposed to the allegedly Aryan
family practice have become the general rule in a Jew-free Germany.
Besides exposing these accusations as totally unfounded myths, the
present-day state of the medical science, including psychoanalysis, in
Germany shows, according to Engelmann's findings, nothing but a marked
and miserable impoverishment.
The author finds this picture even more startling when he turns to
the world of theater, film, music and the performing arts in general.
Precisely those names who made the German-Austrian culture world
famous in the Weimar period were the ones who were silenced, driven
into exile or killed. Engelmann includes here the Jews as well as
those non-Jewish artists and performers, sponsors and critics who
preferred emigration to the cultural wasteland of a forcefully Aryan
German Reich. However, these "big names" (Bruno Walter, Otto
Kiemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Albert Bassermann, Richard Tauber, Max
Reinhard, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Bert Brecht, Paul Hindemith,
Josef von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, etc.) are only the tip of the
iceberg. One does not have to look for important people. On the
contrary, it becomes hard to find the names of those valuable artists
who were not part of this exodus, Gr=FCndgens being maybe one of the
great and sad exceptions. The Nazi "Kulturpolitik" virtually wiped out
the once flourishing German film industry, as this policy hit about
40% of the actors and more than 50% of the producers and directors,
many of whom contributed greatly to the development of British and
American film. And as Goebbels had proclaimed the equation Jewish =3D
"Marxist," the same measures were taken against any artist vaguely
suspected of leftist convictions or sum-[*183]-pathies so that the
socially critical members of the "purely German" artistic world were
also forced to leave with the Jews. The same applies to literature,
where more than three quarters of the important authors' were driven
into exile, sent to the concentration camps or, as in the case of
Marx, Heine, Luxemburg and Kafka, whose books were burned and taken
from libraries and bookstores, they were posthumously eliminated.
Moving into the field of politics, Engelmann finds that the political
attitudes of the Jewish community were not very different from those
of the educated middle-class to whom they belonged, thereby
invalidating the anti-Semitic myth of the Judaeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.
Even the often claimed "international orientation" of the European
Jews has to be rejected as false, for the overwhelming majority of
them were staunch and active nationalists who again in
disproportionately high numbers - volunteered for military service in
World War I.
This brings us to the central and most controversial theme of the
book: far from benefiting the Nazis, Engelmann argues, the persecution
and extermination of the Jews was one of the main causes of Hitler
Germany's military defeat. Already in World War I the German Supreme
Command issued proclamations in Yiddish, reminding the Eastern
European Jews of their century-old cultural relationship with Germany
and the advantages of joining the Germans in their struggle against
the anti-Semitic Czarist regime. Engelmann asserts that these feelings
remained mutual long after the end of World War I and the potential
for using the Eastern European Jews as allies was real. We can
summarize his arguments about the military question with the following
points:

1. If the 2.8 million "non-Aryans" in the Greater German Reich had
sent the average 12% of the population to the army, about 336,000 men
and women would have enlisted.
2. About 400,000 German soldiers (SS, service personnel, members of
the "death squads"), more than the entire Waffen-SS in 1943 and almost
the size of the Bundeswehr today, were involved in the "Final
Solution" instead of the war itself.
3. Nazi Germany had lost the potential support of about eight million
Jews in Eastern Europe, many of whom became very active in the Soviet
resistance forces.
4. Even G=E4ring admitted secretly in 1942 that the loss of specialized
researchers and skilled engineers (about 40% of the university
instructors) had been harmful to the German cause.
5. Maybe most fateful of all for the Nazis: practically all the
nuclear physicists who were responsible for the proposal that led to
the "Manhattan Project" and the building of the bomb (e.g. Victor
Weisskopf, Eduard Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugen Wigner) were Jewish-
Austrian or Jewish-
6. For example, it would be impossible to teach any course on 20th-
century literature if one were to stick to Goebbels' list of authors
acceptable to the national socialist definition of "German.' [*184]
German scientists who had been trained in Germany and left on account
of the anti-Semitic climate and persecution in their homelands. The
support of another refugee, Albert Einstein, was crucial to obtain the
approval of President Roosevelt. Also Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Rudolf
Ernest Peierls and Franz Eugen Simon, to mention only a few
internationally known names, had been directly or indirectly affected
by Hitler's or Mussolini's anti-Semitic policies, and Engelmann sees
no reason to believe that most of them would not have stayed in
Germany, Austria or Italy. And even if (and the possibility is real)
the remaining nuclear physicists could have produced "the bomb," the
Nazi regime's contempt for "the speculations of Jewish science"
effectively prevented the realization of such a project.

After all of the above, Engelmann's conclusions become predictable:
from a purely German national perspective the persecution of the Jews
was a suicidal enterprise with respect to culture, science, political
philosophy and even military research and practice. No sentimental or
hypocritical postfactum philo-Semitism can cover up this
impoverishment of public life in the German states that succeeded the
Great German Reich after 1945. "And worst of all: The citizens don't
seem to miss a thing."
This may be true for the majority of the West Germans, but the reader
of Engelmann's provocative book surely misses many other things. For
one, he does not live up to his initial promise (Introduction, p. 10)
to present a coherent and conclusive scientific argument for his
assertions. The method he uses is largely inductive and often
speculative, and many a fact seems to have been selected to fit the
thesis. Especially when he discusses the potential Jewish contribution
to the Nazi war effort, he makes a daring jump from middle-class World
War I patriotism in the Jewish community both in Germany-Austria and
abroad to a possible uncritical support of an imaginary non-racist
National Socialism. The historical record, however, shows that anti-
Semitism had always been one of the core elements of Nazi ideology,
from Hitler's pre-war fascination with Aryan theories to the
publication of Mein Kampf, and from the systematic anti-Semitism of
the founding meetings of the NSDAP to the "Final Solution." Of course,
Engelmann will not deny these facts, but they make his artificial
distinction between the real racist policies and some possible "purely
nationalistic" fascism rather specious. But worse than this
speculation is his virtual neglect of all the average, "non prominent"
Jews who were murdered. In Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt made
the point that such elitist thinking was one of the main causes of the
destruction of European Jewry. And while he mentions in passing the
attitude of the Germans and many of the assimilated Jews toward the
poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he, unlike Herbert S. Levine
and Thomas Rothschild in Fremd im eigenen Land,'

4. Fremd im eigenen Land, eds. Henryk M. Broder and Michel R. Lang
(Frankfurt am Main, 1979). Levine: "On the day when most of the
Germans will fully accept their foreign neighbors as fellow citizens
and when the 'Gastarbeiter' will feel comfortable and at home in
[*185] doesn't say a word about the general West German treatment of
the new immigrants, euphemistically called "Gastarbeiter," who today
have replaced the poor Eastern Jews on the social scale.

Is There Anywhere We Can Go from Here?

Aside from these substantial flaws in his argumentation, Engelmann's
concluding remarks about the state of affairs in present-day Germany
echo the equally somber conclusions of Gunther Anders, who recognizing
the vital necessity of a new, post-Holocaust morality, is rather
despairing that such a radical change would or even could ever occur
under the present circumstances. And the Jewish presence in the GDR is
so minimal, that a meaningful comparison is virtually impossible,
though the few known factors do not suggest a significantly different
pattern ,5 in spite of the official anti-fascist orientation and the
welcome absence of even the slightest neofascist activity. If we
accept this assessment of the situation, the discussion is practically
closed. In their own lives, however, neither Anders nor Engelmann has
resigned himself to this sad and threatening reality: Engelmann is a
vocal member of the West German democratic Left, and Anders remains an
active fighter against nuclear energy power and military build-ups. A
renewed attempt to sterilize "the womb out of which that here
crept" (Brecht, The War Primer) will have to go beyond the usual
critique of anti-Semitism and, at the same time, beyond the
understandable but simplistic anti-Germanism. For a link between some
form of liberal philo-Semitism (in a "Jew-free" society) and a
continued discrimination against e.g. foreign workers is readily
established as Germans ease their conscience about Jews while the
hatred for the alleged "alien element' (Fremdkorper) remains virulent.
But blanket anti-Germanism has to be countered as well since it helps
cover the historical truth and absolve the non-German nations and
individuals of their part in anti-Semitism and the Holocaust which in
no way means that we should belittle the emergence of a new German
Right and its ugly practices. The Berufsverbote are a reality, and so
is Franz Josef Strauss.
The Right in Germany has always made good opportunistic use of
knifein-the-back theories. Though it is difficult to calculate the
role the Versailles Treaty and the anti-German attitude in pre-World
War II Europe played in furthering the Nazi rise to power, a certain
responsibility cannot be denied. Surely Gunther Grass exaggerated when
he put the blame for a Germany the last remnants of the German-Jewish
problem will have been solved. Not before" (p. 278). Rothschild: "The
equation is quickly made: he doesn't like those people, so he doesn't
like the others, and all of them cheat us. So: 'The foreigners are all
Jews anyway." (p. 356).

5. See the prolonged discussion around Christa Wolf's fictional
autobiography Kindheitsmuster, 1977. [*186] reemergence of West German
nationalism squarely on the "anti-German hysteria" in the neighboring
countries. 6 But, again, there is nothing more conducive to a kneejerk
nationalist reaction than the feeling of isolation and unfair
treatment by "the others." After 35 years, the time for taboos and
myths of any kind has long run out, in Germany as well as abroad.
6. In a speech delivered at the Brussels Europalia Festival in
November, 1977.