Heinrich Hildebrandt joined the Party in 1937. He may not have been the only one of my ten friends who was afraid not to join, but he was the only one of them who knew then and now, and says so, that fear was his reason—fear and advantage. (“But how,” he said, “is one to separate them?”) He had been an anti-Nazi, an active moderate democrat in East Prussia before he came quietly to Hesse in 1935 and, his past uneasily buried, got a job teaching literature Realgymnasium, the humanistic high school. An anti-Nazi and a cultivated man, more clearly aware than most men of the primitive considerations which directed his course of action—and yet he, too, once he was inside the system he hated, sheep that he was in wolf’s clothing, found something profoundly good in it.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it was because I wanted, unconsciously, to justify what I had done. If so, I succeeded. But I say it now, too, and I know it now. There were good things, great things, in the system—and the system itself was evil.”
“For instance?”
“You mean about the evils?”
“No, I know about those. About ‘the good things, the great things.’”
“Perhaps I should make it singular instead of plural, the good thing. For the first time in my life I was really the peer of men who, in the Kaiser time and in the Weimar time, had always belonged to classes lower or higher than my own, men whom one had always looked down on or up to, but never at. In the Labor Front—I represented the teachers’ association—I came to know such people at first hand, to know their lives and to have them know mine. Even in America—perhaps; I have never been there—I suspect that the teacher who talks about ‘the common people’ has never known one, really known one, not even if he himself came from among them, as I, with an Army officer as a father, did not. National Socialism broke down that separation, that class distinction. Democracy—such democracy as we had had—didn’t do it and is not doing it now.”
“Wedekind, the baker,” I said, “told me how ‘we simple working-class men stood side by side with learned men, in the Labor Front.’”
“I remember Wedekind,” said the teacher. “I didn’t know him before I joined the Party, and I don’t know him now. Why? Because he was my inferior. A baker is nothing, a teacher is something; in the Labor Front we belonged to something together, we had something in common. We could know each other in those days. Do you understand that, Herr Professor?”
“I understand it because you call me ‘Herr Professor,’” I said, smiling.
“Yes. The baker calls me ‘Herr Studienrat’—that was my rank—and I call you ‘Herr Professor.’ It is for me to accept the baker and for you to accept me.”
“Neither the baker nor the teacher would call a professor ‘Professor’ in America,” I said.
“Never?”
“Rarely. I can’t remember ever having been called ‘Professor,’ except by friends, who in an argument might say ironically, ‘Professor, you’re crazy.’”
“It was never like that in Germany,” he said, “or anywhere else in Europe—not even, from what I know, in England. Always in Germany, before Nazism, and again now, the title is a genuine reflection of class distinction.”
I told Herr Hildebrandt of an incident a German friend, an eminent physicist, had recently reported to me. He was returning to Germany from a scientific congress in Amsterdam, and an American colleague was traveling with him. At the Netherlands-German border the American discovered he had lost his passport. My friend observed that both the Dutch and the German passport inspectors were elderly men, obviously relics of the Imperial days, and he said to the two of them, “Gentlemen, I am Professor Doktor Karl Otto, Baron von G——, and you have my word that Professor W——possesses a valid passport properly visaed, which he has mislaid. I take personal responsibility for Professor W——’s transit.” “It was a gamble,” the physicist said, in reporting the incident to me, “but it succeeded. The obvious duty of the two old inspectors was overridden by the word of a Professor Doktor Baron, and W——came in with me. He was amazed.”
“Why was he amazed?” said the teacher, when I told him the story.
“Because,” I said, “every side-show medicine salesman in America calls himself ‘Professor,’ and a man who calls himself ‘Baron’ or ‘Count’ is an obvious fraud. An American passport inspector would have turned to one of his colleagues and said, ‘Here’s a hot one, Joe. The “Professor” wants in and he hasn’t a passport. What’re you peddling, “Professor,” cocaine?’”
“You exaggerate a little?” said the teacher.
“A little,” I said, “but only a little.”
“I understand,” he said. “This is your American feeling of absolute equality. That we have never had here. But there was a democracy in Nazism, and it was real. My—how shall I say it?—my inferiors accepted me.”
My inferiors accepted me.
The German schoolteacher found himself, in Nazi Germany, as, I dare say, any schoolteacher finds himself in any emerging totalitarianism, in a unique situation which constituted a compulsion upon him unknown (or less painfully known) to other kinds of workers. The National Socialist development entailed the inexorable displacement of the teaching profession from its position in the German community. The teacher everywhere in Europe is much more highly honored than his American counterpart, and more highly paid. In addition, he has had, in Europe, an education so far beyond the financial ability of nearly all his countrymen that the very fact of his being a teacher is taken as evidence of his family’s having been prosperous, and the prosperous, in Europe no less than in America, are highly honored and highly paid.
In the small community, the village, and even the town, the teacher and the pastor stand alone in Germany, the two Respektpersonen, far above the mayor or the merchant. And, because of the Church-State identity, they stand together as the arbiters of the community’s moral and cultural, as well as its religious and intellectual, life. In the village which has only a visiting pastor who comes every second Sunday, the alternative sermon is “naturally” preached by the teacher. Religious education was officially, until 1918, an element of elementary-school education. And the teacher is like as not the organist in the village church.
The pastor sits in judgment on the old, the teacher on the young and on the young’s relations with the old. In the villages the parents are still literally afraid of the teacher. His knock at the door in the evening, when the child has misbehaved at school that day, means that the parents will have to promise, then and there, specific disciplinary action. The call will not be social, and the mother as well as the father will rise when he enters the house. If, on a happier occasion, he is willing to accept an invitation to call socially, the house will be cleaned and warmed, cakes will be baked, and the good wine brought out.
In Tailor Schwenke’s childhood, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the teacher had been there “all his life.” He may have come to the village directly from the teachers’ college, or he may have made one or two changes in his youth before he settled down to stay. The pastor, with his circuit of two or three villages, was likelier to change his residence or even go up the professional ladder. Young Karl-Heinz Schwenke’s teacher had taught Karl-Heinz’s father and had even taught the grandparents of some of the village children; these, grown to be parents and grandparents, saw their teacher still when he came to the door. And, where the parents might not have close contact with the pastor, they could not help having it with the teacher, who, besides learning the family secrets from the feckless offspring, had to be called in to help transact such business, especially official business, as transcended the father’s grasp or self-confidence.
In the summer, in Karl-Heinz’s village, the teacher went through the streets at 9 P.M., in the winter at dark; if he found a child on the street, his knock was heard at the door that same evening. At his own discretion, he himself did the disciplining with his Rohrstock. If the Rohistock was a hazel branch, it was possible to cut it part way through when the teacher was out of the room, so that, when applied, it would fly to pieces. But Herr Pietsch, who was wise in the ways of three rising generations, had a bamboo stick, which, besides being harder to cut, had a greater flexibility than hazel, adding injury to insult.
One day when the future Sturmführer Schwenke was eleven, he ditched school in the afternoon to engage in the revolutionary act of stealing cherries. That night Herr Pietsch came by the Schwenkes’. Karl-Heinz was lucky; his father, who, like all very small farmers, was often away from home working for other farmers, was away that night, and Mother Schwenke beat the truant. The boy’s luck lay in the fact that his mother’s beating him meant that she would not tell his father, who would have beat him much harder. But the luck didn’t last, for Herr Pietsch knew that Father Schwenke was away and that mothers’ hands are sometimes unconvincingly light. The next morning, at the opening of school, Karl-Heinz received the bamboo treatment. The beating was so fierce that the boy bit the teacher’s leg; then the teacher beat him harder. “Much harder?” I said. “So much harder,” said the old tailor, “that the whole class howled with pain just to see it. That old man Pietsch,” the arsonist of the Kronenberg synagogue went on, “he was a regular devil.”
The regular devil showered down favors, too, but never on Karl-Heinz, who was poor in his studies. The favorites, who might be the best students, and who might be the worst students who belonged to the best families, were allowed a half-hour out of school to go, in turn, to the teacher’s house each day to shine his shoes. Did the parents know this? Of course. Were the children paid? Of course not. What did the parents and children think about it? They didn’t think about it.
The authoritative, not to say authoritarian, role that the teacher played in the German community, a role which declined very little in the “democratic” days between 1918 and 1933, is wholly foreign to the American tradition of that sad sack, the schoolteacher (as witness the life and times of Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow). The teacher in Germany once was, and often is now, the only person in the community who has attended a nonvocational secondary school; the fact that everyone else can read and write does not mean that the villagers do not come to him with important documents to be read or written properly. He is quite likely to be the only university graduate in the village. And he is certain to be the leading cosmopolitan, in respect not only of learning but also of mobility. Two or three merchants may be richer, the landowner certainly so, but they do not waste their money on travel. No professional in America has the status of the teacher in Germany, and to have achieved, as Herr Hilde-brandt did, the rank of Studienrat (which means senior high-school teacher), with its title no less than its tenure and pension, is an eminence which no American teacher dreams of.
As the recognized repository of the community’s intellect, the teacher would probably be a political conservative, a man not to be influenced by reformers. As a man who, although decently paid, still had to live on a state salary, he would still more probably want to identify himself with the wealthiest members of the community, who could afford to pay him for special lessons for their children. As a State employee, he would not be likely to disagree with Bismarck. But he would not, for all this, be a political protagonist or even a conscious political partisan. He would be above politics, not merely as the public service is above politics, but as the intellect is above politics. His business, and his alone in the community, is thinking, just as the horseshoer’s, and his alone, is horseshoeing. Laymen do not presume to advise, still less to command, experts. And, while the historic sterility of German education may be laid in part to the academic’s unaccountability, there was, in the pre-Hitler community, an independent, if a rigid and shallow, mind.
This mind was a bulwark, however fragile, not against National Socialism but against National Socialism’s transition from practice to theory; for Nazism, unlike modern Communism, began with practice. Because the mass movement of Nazism was nonintellectual in the beginning, when it was only practice, it had to be anti-intellectual before it could be theoretical. What Mussolini’s official philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, said of Fascism could have been better said of Nazi theory: “We think with our blood.” Expertness in thinking, exemplified by the professor, by the high-school teacher, and even by the grammar-school teacher in the village, had to deny the Nazi views of history, economics, literature, art, philosophy, politics, biology, and education itself.
Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own—that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line. The nonpolitical pastor satisfied Nazi requirements by being nonpolitical. But the nonpolitical schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being nonpolitical, a dangerous man from the first. He himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion; but he could not help being dangerous—not if he went on teaching what was true. In order to be a theory and not just a practice, National Socialism required the destruction of academic independence.
In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community’s attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.
Tailor Schwenke, before the first World War, had made suits for some of the prosperous professors of Kronenberg University. If, as of course he did, he resented their superior station, he was nevertheless proud and boastful of being tailor to such a distinguished trade. In 1925, when he was starving and joined the new political movement, they, although they were no longer able to order tailor-made suits, still had their sinecures, and he was no longer able to identify himself with them; they were sinking, as he was, but they had much further to sink. In 1927 he left the Party in the hope of recapturing their custom; he himself says this is why. But what he calls the “boycott” persisted (partly, of course, because the ready-made suit had taken the custom tailor’s place).
In 1931, when Tailor Schwenke rejoined the Party, his Nazi indoctrination plus his personal experience had awakened his hostility toward professors in general, many of whom in Kronenberg, he told me, were Communists. (None was.) And in 1933, when the Party came to power, he was given a school janitor’s job—with, of course, the title of Hausmeister—and the command of the local SA Reserve Troop. From that point on, he had no difficulty in placing academics (who, no doubt, had been patronizing when they were patrons) entirely outside the pale of the great community, the New Germany, which he now represented.
He was not, of course, sure of the New Germany or of himself; he was still, after fifty years of being Karl-Heinz Schwenke, Karl-Heinz Schwenke, and the Herr Professor was still the Herr Professor. The New Germany was, of course, Schwenke’s, but the Herr Professor had something, and something German, that the New German had not. Tailor Schwenke would not, after 1933, any more than before, have failed to tip his hat to the Herr Professor; all the more joyously he received the revelation that half the academics were traitors and the other half dupes and boobies who might be tolerated—under close surveillance—by the New Germany which Tailor Schwenke, at your service, Sir, represented.