Herr Simon, the bill-collector, was visiting me. He had brought tulips to my wife, as, when I went to his house, I took candy to his. We were drinking coffee, he and I, as, at his house, we (or, rather, I; he was a teetotaler, “like Hitler”) always drank wine. He was interested in finding out about America, at least in talking about it. I was telling him about the reservation of powers to the states in our federal system—.
“Do you know any Jews over there, Herr Professor?” he said.
“Oh, yes,” I said, “many, quite well. They live among us over there, you know, just like other people.”
“Not like Negroes,” said the “Old Fighter.” “But,” he went on, “I want to ask you about the Jews. Can you always tell a Jew when you see one, over there? We can, here. Always. They’re not like you and me.”
“How can you tell?” I said. “They sometimes look like you and me.”
“Certainly,” he said, “sometimes. It isn’t by looks, though. A German can tell. Always.”
“Well,” I said, like a man who is saying to himself, “You learn something new every day.”
“Yes,” he said.
Then I said, “Could you tell, if you saw Jesus, that he was a Jew, Herr Simon?”
“I think so,” he said, “if he was a Jew. But was he a Jew? If he was, why did the Jews kill him? Can you tell me that?”—He went right on—“I’ve never heard a pastor say that Jesus was a Jew. Many scientists say he wasn’t. I have heard that Hitler himself said that he was the son of a Greek soldier in the Roman Army.”
“I never heard that,” I said. I was lying; Reinhold Hanisch, in his memoirs, says that Hitler told him that in 1910, when they were living together in a Vienna flophouse.
“Yes,” said Herr Simon, “and do you know, Herr Professor, the Jews have a secret Bible, called the Talmud. Maybe you never heard that, either, but it’s true. They deny it, of course. You just ask a Jew about it, and watch him when he says it doesn’t exist. But every German knows about it; I’ve seen it myself. It has their ritual murder in it, and everything else. It tells them—mind you, it was written I don’t know how many centuries ago—that they must marry German women and weaken the German race. What do you think of that?”
What did I think of that? I thought I would telephone the dean of the theological faculty at Kronenberg University and ask him, even though it was a Sunday night and a blowy one, to bring a German Talmud to my house. That, I said to myself, will do it, much better than my telling him I’m a Jew. If, I said to myself, I tell him I’m a Jew now, he will be so furious at my previous deception of him that I shall have no opportunity to point out to him that he didn’t know a Jew when he saw one. I wanted a minute to think it over, first.
“You say,” I said idly, “that you have seen this—this—?”
“Talmud,” said the bill-collector, a small, spectacled man who needed a strong mustache (he had a weak one). “But watch out, Herr Professor, that they don’t fool you. I’ve seen the real one. The Jews would show you a fake, if you trapped them, and even in your own universities you will find professors in the pay of the Jews who will tell you that it is genuine. We had such professors here—before. And again now, of course.”
What did I think of that? I thought that I would not telephone to the dean, and, later on, as I said, “We’ll have to have many more talks, Herr Simon,” I thought that we’ll have to have many more generations of Herr Simons, emerging, somehow without being led or driven, from the wilderness in which this generation of Simons lived with their “real” Talmud.
I was visiting Tailor Schwenke, my lusty old Fanatikei friend. He was in his sweater and pants, and we were having soup and unbuttered bread, a meal which, German country bread being what it is, was not so light as it sounds. His wife had baked a cake, and I had brought tea. “And so,” I was saying, “we come to the end of your father’s life-story, and that brings us to the end of the story of all your ancestors on both sides, down to you. I marvel, Herr Schwenke, that you know so much about each one of them, for so many generations back.”
“That’s the way we Germans are,” said my friend. “We are proud of our families. The Americans took my Bible—they sent a Jew to do it, naturally—or I could give you all the dates exactly, birth, baptism, marriage, children, death.”
“Your family,” I said, very carefully, “seems always to have been lucky. Never any great troubles. Never lost their homes or their land. A very unusual family, always to have had such good fortune.”
“Always, always,” said the tailor. “As far back as we go–up to my own bad fortune—it was always very good, with my father, my grandfathers, my great-grandfathers, all of them.”
This exchange occurred in our fourteenth conversation. In the course of the second, long before we had begun the remarkably detailed examination of the lives of his ancestors, he had talked about the Jews, saying, “I had reason enough to hate them, even before, for the way they ruined my ancestors for generations back. Stole everything from them, ruined them,” and his face was furious with filial wrath.
I think that my friend believed what he was saying—at the time he was saying it—both in our second conversation and in our fourteenth. I might have shot home the contradiction. It would not have made him any less anti-Semitic, and, besides, men’s lives are what they think they are. So I didn’t.
I was visiting Herr Damm, the country boy who, his oldest brother being destined to get the family farm under Hessian primogeniture, had come to Kronenberg to get a job. He lost it in the depression and went back home, joined the Party at the “recruiting evening” the Nazis held in the village in 1932, and rose to be office manager of the Kronenberg Party headquarters. It was the twelve hundredth anniversary of the founding of the country village, where the Damms had settled in A.D. 808, and I was attending the celebration.
“Yes,” said Herr Damm, “our family were always great anti-Semites. My father and grandfather were followers of Dr. Böckel, who founded the Anti-Semitic Party in Hesse, way back in the eighties. We used to have the Party flag, with the anti-Semitic inscription on it, ‘Freedom from Jewry,’ but the Americans took it away.”
“Did you ever have any dealings with Jews?” I said.
“Always,” he said. “We had to, in the country. Before the farmers’ credit union was founded by Dr. Böckel—it was anti-Semitic, to save the farmers from the Jews—we were at the mercy of the cattle dealers. They were all Jews, and they all worked together.”
“How do you know that they all worked together, Herr Damm?”
“They always do. They held us in the palm of their hand. Do you know what one of them once did? He bought a calf from my father and took it to town and sold it to my father’s cousin, at a profit.”
“Yes,” I said, “but that is just the profit system. You believe in the profit system, don’t you? You’re certainly no Communist!”
“Of course,” he said, “but only think—to my father’s own cousin! If my father had known his cousin wanted the calf, he could have sold it to him himself, without the Jew.”
“Well—” I said.
“Look, Herr Professor, a Jew buys a cow. When he buys it, it’s terrible, everything’s wrong with it, he wouldn’t have it for a gift. So he pays a few Marks for it. Then he goes to the next farmer with it, to sell it, and it’s the most wonderful cow in the world. Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said, wreathed, internally, with a smile as I thought of “the American Way,” “but don’t Germans,” that is, non-Jews, “buy as low and sell as high as possible?”
“Yes, but that’s just it. Look, Herr Professor,” he went on, patiently, “Germans couldn’t trade with one another. There was always a Jew between them. All Jews are Handler, traders, never workers or farmers. Every child knows this. All trade was in the hands of the Jews. What could we poor Germans”—he was speaking of what Hitler calls, in Mein Kampf, the “genius-race”—“do?”
I liked Herr Damm. He was a professional clodhopper-he had been used for Party work among the farmers, whose “language,” that is, whose mind, he spoke—but he was still a clodhopper. On another occasion, he was visiting me in town; or, rather, since it was to be our last talk together, I was his host at a one-dollar de luxe dinner at Kronenberg’s best restaurant. I brought the talk back to one of our first conversations, in which he had told me that he was the only Kreisamtsleiter in our whole Gau who had refused to leave the Church. “I told them I was born in the Church,” he had said, “and I would die in it, and not in the ‘German Church,’ but the Christian Church.”
“Now,” I said, as we were lighting up after dinner, “what many Christians in America cannot understand is how you Christians in Germany could accept the persecution of the Jews, no matter how bad they were. How could you accept it as Christians?”
It was the first time I had taken the initiative on the subject. “The Jews?”—he said—“but the Jews were the enemies of the Christian religion. Others might have other reasons for destroying them, but we Christians had the Christian duty to. Surely, Herr Professor, you know how the Jews betrayed our Lord?”
None of my friends was the least interested in Nazi race theory as such, not even the tailor or the bill-collector. Five of the ten of them laughed when they spoke of it, including the cabinetmaker. “That was nonsense,” said Herr Klingelhöfer, “for the SS and the universities. Look at the shape of my head: broad as a barnside. Look at my brunette wife. Do you suppose we’re not Germans? No; that they could teach to the SS and the university students. The SS Flott [“cream,” sacastically] would believe anything that made them great, and the university students would believe anything complicated. The professors, too. Have you seen the ‘race purity’ chart?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, then, you know. A whole system. We Germans like systems, you know. It all fitted together, so it was science, system and science, if only you looked at the circles, black, white, and shaded, and not at real people. Such Dummheit they couldn’t teach to us little men. They didn’t even try.”
What my friends believed—and believe—is an accumulation of legend, legend which comes to them no more guiltily than the cherry-tree story comes to us. Only in their case, esteeming themselves as they did as “little men,” “little people,” who did not amount to anything except in so far as they were Germans, the legend of a people among them who were not Germans and who, therefore, were even less than they, was especially precious.
Nobody has proved to my friends that the Nazis were wrong about the Jews. Nobody can. The truth or falsity of what the Nazis said, and of what my extremist friends believed, was immaterial, marvelously so. There simply was no way to reach it, no way, at least, that employed the procedures of logic and evidence. The bill-collector told me that Jews were filthy, that the home of a Jewish woman in his boyhood town was a pigsty; and the baker told me that the Jews’ fanaticism about cleanliness was a standing affront to the “Germans,” who were clean enough. What difference did the truth, if there were truth, make?
I suggested from time to time, and always in hesitant fashion, that perhaps the medieval exclusion of Jews from citizenship and landholding, their subsequent exclusion, after 1648, from guild apprenticeship, and their confinement for a thousand years to the practice of moneylending, with the attendant risk of the despicable creditor against the knightly debtor, might have required cunning of most of the Jews in most of early Europe as the condition of survival itself; that the consequent sharpening of the intellect under such circumstances would have produced a disproportionate number of unusually noble and unusually ignoble dispositions among any people, their unusualness, in the marginal occupations to which they were driven, disappearing as the great community removed the disadvantagements which produced it. I reminded the bank clerk, Kessler, that the ancestors of the Christians who now forbade Jews to be bank presidents once compelled them to be. He was a Swabian, from Württemberg, and the Swabians are humorous—“for Germans,” as Tacitus would say. He appreciated the joke.
None of my ten friends argued with me when I said these things. None of them, except the bank clerk and, of course, the teacher, listened. Everything I said, all of them might have learned long ago. But there are some things that everybody knows and nobody learns. Didn’t everybody know, in America, on December 8, 1941, that the Japanese, or Japs, were a treacherous people?
In the American Embassy in Berlin, in 1935, an official of the German Foreign Press Office told me the story of a North Sea town where there had never been a Jew. When Goebbels announced the boycott of the Jews for the month of April, 1933, the Bürgermeister of the town sent him a telegram: “Send us a Jew for our boycott.”