Gustav Schwenke, the tailor’s son, was twenty when he became a Nazi. This was in 1932. His father’s business had collapsed; he himself, after his apprenticeship to his father, had never found work. There was simply no work to do for a strong, intelligent, well-trained young man of nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen. For four years he had gone on foot, like hundreds of thousands of other young men, from village to village, looking for work. Apart from an occasional odd job, he had, during this period, two months of state work relief service on the roads, for food and lodging and two dollars a week. Then his “old sickness,” bed-wetting, came on him again and he had to go home and start over. But he never became a bum or a brawler; he slept only in youth hostels or in the fields. And then, in 1932, Gustav Schwenke became an SA policeman, for pocket money and a uniform—and a place in the sun.
What Gustav Schwenke wanted, and the only thing he wanted, was security. The job he wanted, and the only job he ever wanted, was a job with the State, any job with the State, with its tenure, its insurance, and its pension. Gustav was not, I imagine, the only boy born in Germany in 1912 who wanted security and thought, until 1933, that he would never have it. When he got it, when the Party Police were incorporated into the Military Police in 1935, his dream was come true. At last he belonged. He was a man at last.
As a boy, Gustav had clung to his father and kept away from his mother. He always did his homework in the afternoons in his father’s workshop in the front of the house. There he fed on his father’s manhood, which took the form of political power, and starved out his mother’s womanhood, which took the form of domestic power. When he was seven he heard his father call the Weimar Constitution Dreck, dirt. So Gustav hated the Constitution. (He didn’t know what it was.) When he was eleven, a customer came in to call for a suit, which had been ordered eight days before for 8,000 Reichsmarks; now, eight days later, 8,000 Reichsmarks would buy one pound of butter; and, when Gustav asked his father what caused the inflation, his father said, “The Jews.” So Gustav hated the Jews. (He didn’t know any Jews and wouldn’t have bothered them if he had. His father would.)
Old Karl-Heinz Schwenke was a product of “the golden time” before the first World War. Even in the golden time he had, as he said, “only been a tailor.” “But I had ten suits of my own when I married,” said the iron-faced old dandy. “Twenty-five years later, when their ‘democracies’ got through with me in 1918, I had none, not one. I had my sweater and my pants. Even my Army uniform was worn out. My medals were sold. I was nothing. Then, suddenly, I was needed. National Socialism had a place for me. I was nothing—and then I was needed.”
“And now,” I said, “you are down to your sweater and pants again.”
“Yes,” he said, “now that their ‘democracies’ are through with me again.”
“National Socialism,” I said, gently, “didn’t leave its enemies that much.”
“They had it coming. You see what their ‘democracies’ did to us.”
By “they” Herr Schwenke always meant the Jews. He was the most primitive of my ten friends. He was a very limited man. Facts, although he could apprehend them, had no use he could put them to; he could neither retain nor relate them. He could talk, but he could not listen. I let him talk.
“They say six million Jews were killed”—not that “we” or even “the Nazis” killed them—“but when you see how many there are all over the world today, there are just as many as ever. There are fifteen million in America—”
“Only six or eight, I believe,” I said.
“Naturally, that’s what they tell you. Do you know how many there are in Russia right now? They control the government, money, everything, everywhere.”
I wanted to tell him a story, but I didn’t. It’s a story about a Jew riding in a streetcar, in Germany during the Third Reich, reading Hitler’s paper, the Völkische Beobachter. A non-Jewish acquaintance sits down next to him and says, “Why do you read the Beobachter?” “Look,” says the Jew, “I work in a factory all day. When I get home, my wife nags me, the children are sick, and there’s no money for food. What should I do on my way home, read the Jewish newspaper? ‘Pogrom in Roumania.’ ‘Jews Murdered in Poland.’ ‘New Laws against Jews.’ No, sir, a half-hour a day, on the streetcar, I read the Beobachter. ‘Jews the World Capitalists.’ ‘Jews Control Russia.’ ‘Jews Rule in England.’ That’s me they’re talking about. A half-hour a day I’m somebody. Leave me alone, friend.”
National Socialism was anti-Semitism. Apart from anti-Semitism, its character was that of a thousand tyrannies before it, with modern conveniences. Traditional anti-Semitism—what Nietzsche, beloved by the Nazis for his superman, called “the anti-Semitic swindle”—played an important role in softening the Germans as a whole to Nazi doctrine, but it was separation, not prejudice as such, that made Nazism possible, the mere separation of Jews and non-Jews. None of my ten friends except Herr Hildebrandt, the teacher, had ever known a Jew at all intimately in a town of twenty thousand, which included a nine-hundred-year-old Jewish community numbering six or eight hundred persons. The last traces of the ghetto had gone a century and more ago. Generation after generation, these people went on living together, in a small town, with a nonexistent wall between them over which the words “Good morning” and “Good evening” were tossed.
My ten friends had all had business relations with Jews, as both buyers and sellers. Springer, the Jewish jeweler, had even belonged to the town Glee Club, along with the Schwenkes, father and son. “I bought Mushi’s wedding ring from Springer,” said the tailor, patting his old wife’s hand.
“Why from a Jew?” I asked.
“N’ ja,” said the arsonist of the synagogue, “we always traded with Springer. For a Jew, he was decent.” I thought of Tacitus’ observation on the Hessian tailor’s forebears: “The Chatti [Hessians] are intelligent, for Germans.”
Seven of my ten friends had known Springer over a period of years, and all seven of them, when I interrupted their animadversions on the Jews to ask them if they had ever known a decent Jew, named Springer first. They had traded with him, sung with him, marched with him (in veterans’ organizations), but he had never been in any of their homes nor any of them in his. None of them knew how many children he had or where his ancestors came from.
“What became of him?” I asked the tailor.
“Oh, he went away.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. South America, maybe. It was early”—that meant before the synagogue burning of 1938—“and a lot of them went to South America or somewhere.”
None of the seven knew what had become of Springer.
I asked Horst Rupprecht, the student and Hitler Youth leader, who had lived around the corner from the synagogue and the Hebrew school, if as a child he had had Jewish friends. “Certainly,” he said at once. “I never had a fight with a Jewish boy.”
“I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean, did you play with any?”
“Oh, no,” he said.
“Why not?”
“‘Why not?’ I don’t know. They played together, and we played together.”
In the Dark Ages the Jews had to separate themselves to preserve their communion, just as the Christians (and the Jews) had had to do in pre-Constantine Rome; in the Middle Ages their separation had been recognized and progressively enforced by the non-Jews. But, with the elimination of the formal ghetto in Germany, under Napoleon, the causal conditions of separation had declined. Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of the Pentateuch into Luther’s High German, at the end of the eighteenth century, had drastically reduced (and was on its way to eliminating) the linguistic separation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the formal economic, educational, and occupational disabilities had all been progressively lifted (the last, in the Army and the higher civil service, after the first World War).
As the disabilities against them disappeared, the Jews disappeared. They had never numbered more than 1 per cent of the German population, and their rate of apostasy was higher in modern Germany than anywhere else except Italy. After the first World War, social scientists predicted that within two generations there would be no more Jews in Germany. The progression from orthodoxy to agnosticism (via “liberalism”) was the largest factor, underlying the conversion of thousands to nominal Protestantism, which had economic and, more significantly, social advantages, and even to Catholicism. Conversion tended, within limits, to remove the “cold” discrimination in the universities and the professions. Noblemen, Army officers, and professors married daughters of wealthy Jewish families, and the motivation was not always money; many Jews of consequence, having fallen away from their faith, ran as fast and as far as they could from it, and the distinguished non-Jew had his pick of not merely wealthy, but cultivated and beautiful young women. This did not, of course, affect the “little man” in Germany except, when he heard of it, to make him hate the “Jew plutocrats” a little more. Nor was he mollified when he heard that intellectuals, artists, “bohemians” intermarried without thought of religious distinction.
Jewish “suicide,” by apostasy or conversion, was thus reducing the Jews without reducing anti-Semitism; on the contrary. Four years before Hitler was born in Austria, that country’s great anti-Semite, Von Schönerer, said, “Ob Jud, ob Christ ist einerlei, in der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei. Whether he says he’s a Jew or a Christian doesn’t matter, he’s depraved by race.” Conversion and intermarriage simply shifted the emphasis from the economic and the civil to the racial basis of hatred, and, in doing so, invigorated in new and virulent form the anti-Semitism of the “little man,” who, whatever else he was or wasn’t, was of German “blood.” Long before the first World War, lower-middle-class holiday places, such as the island of Borkum, were beginning to boast of being judenfrei.
After all their centuries of exclusion from all the honorable pursuits, the Jews had turned, as their liberation began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the “free professions,” those which were not organized as guilds or associations excluding them: medicine, law, journalism, teaching, research, and, of course, for the greater part, retail merchandise. (The poorer among them had turned, when they were driven out of the towns in past centuries, to the only possible occupation, the ancestor of retail trade: peddling). Thus the Jews were, on the whole, better off in the years of inflation after the first World War because a smaller proportion of them than of non-Jews were on fixed money incomes of wages, salaries, or pensions; and the “old” Jews of Kronenberg were, before Nazism, nearly all “comfortable.” No one in Kronenberg was rich.
Besides the “old” Jews, there were the “new” ones, who had come principally from Poland after the first World War, who spoke Yiddish instead of German and lived as best they could—which might mean peddling and might mean pandering and might mean speculation of the pettiest or the wildest sorts. The Jewish community in Kronenberg had very few “easterners” or, as the “old” Jews called them, “kikes.” There were some, of course.
The tailor, Salo Marowitz, had been a Russian soldier, married to an “Aryan” wife after his release from a German prison camp after the first war. He was honest and respectable, a good man and a good Jew but (as the “old” Kronenberg Jews said) a “kike.” There was no doubt that the Marowitzes’ older son, Samuel, was born before his parents were married—the kind of scandal that died hard among the “old” German Jews, whose illegitimacy rate, even in the postwar years, was almost nil. Still, he was an honest man.
The three brothers Lipsky, from Poland, were honest, too, but their profession was less creditable. They were notion-peddlers, and they had little dignity. They couldn’t afford to have, perhaps; they were none of them very bright. Even though they knew that Tailor Schwenke was a violent anti-Semite, they still came to his house trying to sell him soap. He always called them names and slammed the door on them, but they always came back. The youngest Lipsky, somehow come by the good German name of Bruno, was badly crippled from the waist down. When he walked he had to throw his legs out in front of him, which was enough to make children laugh. Back in the 1920’s, when the Reichswehr was supposedly limited to 100,000 men, Kronenberg had a “nonmilitary” battalion which drilled in white shirts, and Bruno insisted on marching beside them, whistling. He would have marched later alongside the SA if they’d let him. He was not very bright.
The Kronenberg Jews were dying out fast enough before Nazism. After 1933 they began moving away from Kronenberg, and from Germany. Most of them stayed on—they didn’t believe that “it” would last forever—until the synagogue burning and the pogrom laws of late 1938. But the Jewish community, as a formal organization to which almost every Jew, through choice, heredity, inertia, or social compulsion belonged in a small town, was shrinking steadily before 1933.
There was a special reason for the decline of Kronenberg Jewry. The Jewish community, like the town itself, was conservative, old-fashioned, and pietistic. The younger generation, since the first World War, had been turning away from the Tuesday and Thursday prayer service, from the prayer shawl and the white Kitl to be worn at the Passover ceremony, even from learning Hebrew. It is true that nearly all of them attended the synagogue school rather than public school; but this was largely a hangover from the days just gone when Christian religious services were part of the public school program. Look at Springer, the jeweler: a member of the community, yes, but when his father died in the 1920’s, he had the tombstone inscription carved in German instead of Hebrew!
The Kronenberg synagogue had, under this kind of pressure in the 1920’s, inaugurated new, more acceptable “German” customs and abandoned some of the old sacramental and liturgical forms. It had become more liberal. At the time the Nazis came to power, the synagogue’s Shames, or sexton, a non-Jew, lit fires in only a dozen homes of members who still observed the rigid Saturday Shabbath prohibition against work, and Jewish-owned shops were open on Saturdays and closed on Sundays, just like the Gentiles’.
The concessions to liberalism had not arrested the decline of the Kronenberg congregation. After 1933, however, it began to grow again, in spite of the fact that members were emigrating. Some of those who remained and had fallen away from the faith came back. The Jewish Charity was, of course, more active than it had ever been before, with the demands imposed by the continuing boycott, and the children (who, if they attended a public school and did not belong to the Hitler Youth, had to remain in the schoolroom alone when the rest were dismissed for celebrations) were all back in the synagogue school.
True, the Jews had been disappearing in Germany; and intermingling, at least at the higher levels of culture and society, had been increasing. But the nonexistent wall between the Jews and the “little men” of Germany was as high as ever, and it was a wall with two sides. It was not clearly and simply a matter of exclusion but, rather, of two-way separation, of the independent existence of two communities in one town, a condition which distinguished the small-town situation in Germany from anti-Semitism in, say, the United States.
In this separation the devil slumbered and in slumber built sinew before Hitler was born. “When I was a boy,” said the old tailor whom the teacher had caned, “there were maybe half-a-dozen Jew boys in the village. They had their own school and learned Yiddish—”
“Hebrew,” I said.
“Hebrew, if that’s what it was, and they could talk to each other in it so that the German kids couldn’t understand them. They could understand us, but we couldn’t understand them. When there was trouble, just kid trouble, they would talk Yiddish to each other. It scared a person; do you know what I mean?” I said I did. And I did.
When my friend Kessler, the former bank clerk, was a child in a Catholic village in Württemberg, a Jewish peddler came to his village once a month. The peddler transacted all the villagers’ business for them, including their banking, without charge, and in return he stayed two or three days with the families of the village, in rotation, on his monthly visits. “He was just like a member of the family to us children,” said Herr Kessler, “except for one thing. After dinner, when we read from the Lives of the Saints, the peddler went into the corner and stood there facing the wall and put a shawl on and a band around his forehead and said prayers different from ours. It must have frightened us somehow, because I remember my mother’s saying not to be frightened—it was because he was a Jew he did that. We did not know what ‘Jew’ meant.
“I remembered him only many years afterward, after the first war, when I first heard Nazi propaganda in Munich. And I remembered how I had been afraid—perhaps only mystified, but I suppose that with children the two are the same—when the Jew stood in the corner, facing the wall, with that band around his forehead, saying prayers we couldn’t understand, in Yiddish.”
“In Hebrew,” I said.
“Yes, in Hebrew.”
“Did your memory of the peddler make you anti-Semitic?”
“No—not until I heard anti-Semitic propaganda. Jews were supposed to do terrible things that the peddler had never done. And still—I had been frightened by him when he prayed, although I think I really loved him otherwise. The propaganda didn’t make me think of him as I knew him but of him as a Jew. And it was as a Jew, praying alone, that he frightened us. So I suppose that, in the end, that was part of it, of my anti-Semitism. I can still make myself frightened, put myself back there. I hear my mother saying not to be frightened.”