There was a peculiar disadvantage in trying to convince the Germans generally that they were guilty of the crimes of the Reich. The German people have never, as single individuals, had to assume the responsibility of sovereignty over their government. The self-governing American regards his government as his mere agent, an animated tool in his hand. If it doesn’t suit his purposes, he discards it and tries a new one. He, the constituent, constitutes the State; his ministers minister to him. My Nazi—and most of my non-Nazi—friends in Germany simply do not understand this view of government in which the enduring fact of society, the will of the people, is represented by an instrument which is here today and gone tomorrow. The government must be embodied. To say that it is embodied in the law is, in their view, so much gobbledygook; laws are enacted by men. (The Nazis did not even bother to repeal the Weimar Constitution.)
The English constitutional monarchy, a monarchy they themselves never had, my friends might comprehend, with the greatest difficulty; our constitutional democracy, not at all. This seems to say that my friends want despotic rule. They do, if by despotism we mean, not the ruler’s oppression, but the ruler’s independent right to rule.
This does not mean totalitarianism; it does not mean that there is no opposition. It means that the opposition is limited to matters below the level of general policy; Bismarck did not govern without the advice of the Reichstag he governed without its consent, as the Kaiser, when he finally chose, governed without Bismarck’s. The story is told of the last emperor of Austria-Hungary, the famous-visaged Franz Josef of the great white burnsides, that, having on one occasion received an Opposition delegation and heard its demands, he turned to his prime minister and said, “This is not opposition—this is factious opposition!” My friend Willy Hofmeister, the policeman, who, now that I think of it, looked like Franz Josef, was telling me that a German policeman never used his gun except in cases of extreme personal peril. “Well,” I said, “when you order a car to stop and it doesn’t, don’t you fire?” “We wouldn’t,” he said, “but when you order a car to stop, it stops.” Opposition.
The history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany is suggestive. In 1890 the Kaiser, with Bismarck gone, let the anti-Socialist laws lapse. In a single generation of legal status the Social Democratic Party transformed itself from a revolutionary underground to a governmental party, reformist, to be sure, even radically reformist, but not, as it was in England and even in Austria, an opposition with an independent program of its own for altering the very basis of government.
In 1914 the Socialists, supporting the Kaiser’s demand for war credits, proclaimed that Germany was fighting a defensive war—“In the hour of danger, we will not leave our country in the lurch.” A generation later, after its country had left it in the lurch, the Party was even more nationalistic than the anti-Socialist coalition of the Adenauer government; “never again,” said the Socialist leader Schumacher, “will the Socialists be caught being less nationalistic than their opponents.”—Thus they who of yore proclaimed “the commonwealth of man and the parliament of the world.”
The formation of Germany’s “black” army after 1918 had its sanction and support from the Reich Ministry of War under the Socialist leadership of Severing, and, at the end of Wiemar, only the Prussian Socialist leadership stood firm in resistance. Like all the rest of the pre-Nazi parties in Germany, left, right, and center, the Social Democratic Party as such provided no independent alternative to the Nazis and the Communists, each of which parties was ready to rule with a program of its own uninhibited by any atavistic subservience to the tradition of the suprapolitical Sovereign. “There was one thing you had to say for the Bolsheviks,” said the Nazi Fanatiker Schwenke. “Their ‘No’ wasn’t a three-quarters ‘Yes.’”
It hadn’t always been that way. Just before the first World War one-fourth of the deputies in the Reichstag were Social Democrats, at a time when parliamentary government was a rich man’s game, with the deputies unsalaried; at a time, too, when to be a Social Democrat in Germany was almost as bad as being a Communist in the United States thirty years later. Regarded still in those days, as they had been under Bismarck, as traitors, the future party of loyal opposition fought to change the character of their country and the basis of its government. Their workingmen’s education movement, although (unlike our own adult programs) it was education for specific social purposes, was the most advanced and widespread in Europe. Their trade-unions, and the men in them, were politically conscious and aggressive; unlike American workers, who were born with civil rights, the German and all other European workers had had to fight to win theirs. Immediately prior to their turning respectable, at the outset of the first war, the German Social Democrats had been a force for fundamental change among perhaps one-third of all the Germans. Respectability, which the Social Democrats finally achieved by supporting the war government in 1914, killed that force and left its vestiges to the Nazis and the Communists.
Twice in our time, at Weimar and at Bonn, Germany’s victorious enemies have tried to turn Germany upside down and install government (as my Nazi friends see it) without rule. Hitler turned Germany (as they see it) right side up. He was an independent Sovereign, popularly supported, in part for no other reason than that he was an independent Sovereign. This was government.
Were the props to be pulled out from under it, the Bonn Republic would sooner or later fall, as surely as Weimar, not because Germans find it oppressive but because they find it a nonregnum. The chancellor is a party politician at the mercy of party politicians who, to the extent that they are responsible to the people, derive their power, and therefore his, from those creatures furthest removed, in their own estimate, from Sovereignty. A fifty-year-old non-Nazi acquaintance of mine remembered that, when she was a teen-ager, not in the feudal east or imperial south of the country but in modern Westphalia, the farmers took off their hats when the Count’s carriage went by empty, and Policeman Hofmeister told me, “When all is said and done, it is cheaper to pay one man, who knows how to rule, twenty million marks than to pay five thousand men ten thousand marks apiece.”
Chancellor Bismarck ruled Germany; he was the Chancellor of Iron. But the King-Emperor could and did dismiss him, could and did use the independence of the Crown (which Bismarck, in his hatred of parliamentarianism, had fortified) to launch a mad attack upon Europe in what he regarded as the interest of the German people. He may have been wrong and Bismarck right, but the German people, who regarded him as the man whose business it was to rule them, fought when he told them to. Neither Americans unlaureled nor English poets laureate believe (though the latter say) that it is not ours to reason why. But my Nazi, and some of my non-Nazi, friends believe it; “the King makes war, and the people die.” They are good soldiers, these Germans; they lack only what Bismarck (of all people) said they lacked, “civilian courage,” the courage which enables men neither to be governed by nor to govern others but to govern themselves.
This does not mean that my Nazi—or non-Nazi—friends are bad men. (They may be bad, but, if they are, it is for other reasons.) It means that their political history is different from ours—we should say “behind” ours. I put “behind” in quotation marks because my friends do not see it that way; they are less ready than we are to identify chronological change with progress. Without having read the Greeks, they use all the arguments against democracy that the Greeks used. “In your government,” said the argumentative bill-collector, who wanted to talk about America and had read about it in Luckner, “nobody has authority. This is a fine thing, to be sure, in a big, rich, empty land, unless there is an emergency. Then you suddenly establish authority. You boast that you have elections even in wartime, but you never change governments then; then you say, ‘Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream’ (we have the same saying in Germany); and you don’t. We don’t pretend that we can.”
Nor does it mean that my Nazi—or non-Nazi—friends are politically unconscious. Far from it; their conversation is more political than ours, and they take their politics with what Schopenhauer called tierischer Ernst, bovine seriousness. The German press devotes much more of its space than ours to politics and more of its political discussion to issues than to personalities. In our first conversations, when I found that my friends preferred talking about Versailles or the Polish Corridor to talking about themselves, I thought that they were running away from their guilt. I was wrong. They did not regard what they themselves did as important, and they were interested in important things like Versailles and the Polish Corridor.
To say that my German friends were nonpolitical, and to say no more, is to libel them. As in nearly all European countries, a very much larger proportion of Germans than Americans turns out for political meetings, political discussions, and local and general elections. Where the German was (in contrast with the American) nonpolitical was at a deeper level. He was habitually deficient in the sense of political power that the American possesses (and the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Scandinavian, and the Swiss). He saw the State in such majesty and magnificence, and himself in such insignificance, that he could not relate himself to the actual operation of the State.
One of my non-Nazi friends made a relevant point, however, in defense of his countrymen, at least against the Americans, if not against the rest of the Europeans: “Our situation differs from yours the way city life differs from the country. Ours is intensely complicated and difficult, sophisticated, so to say, while yours (at least until very recently) has been almost pastoral, primitive in its clarity and simplicity. Ours is much less readily intelligible to us than yours is to you, and our ‘average citizen,’ therefore, feels more inadequate than yours to deal with it.” But the nonpolitical, or, more accurately, politically nonconfident, German, who minded his own business and confined his business to his Fach (which means both pigeonhole and specialty), was just as prevalent in business, industry, and finance, in education, in the church, and in the press as in tailoring, baking, or cabinetmaking.
The German universities were crawling with experts on the Akka pygmies of the Aruwimi Congo, but they were closed to political thinking except on the level of detached theory; in the whole state of Hesse not a single course in political science was offered. The German universities began their life with theology, and German theology began its life with the great bicker, the Luther-Melanchthon-Zwingli disputation over the Eucharist, which broke up with Luther’s adherence to the literality of the words Hocest corpus meum, which he carved in great letters on the table at Marburg. The German church was out of this world; the social gospel did not enter German preaching, and preaching was rigidly separated from theology (and prophecy from them both).
The press, unlike the church and the universities, was not a state institution, but it was characteristically cautious and dull in a nation where the right to suppress had never been overturned. The Frankfurter Zeitung, until it was picked up by the I.G. Farben trust in the 1920’s, was a very conservative newspaper of great cultural interest, and the provincial press lacked even cultural interest. The fact that the trade-unions were predominantly Social Democratic said nothing of breadth of the German worker; the leadership was as independent of the membership as it was in some of the more notorious unions in the United States; strikes in Germany were called, not voted; and the Social Democratic workers, “good citizens,” were absorbed, with almost no resistance, in the Nazi Labor Front. Outside the great business, industrial, and financial combines, which influenced public policy through court camarillas, the Kaiserreich boss was no more politically alive than his worker. A member of the pre-Hitler Prussian cabinet, asked what caused Nazism, said: “What caused Nazism was the clubman in Berlin who, when he was asked about the Nazi menace in 1930, looked up from his after-lunch game of Skat and replied, ‘Dafür ist die Regierung da. That’s what the government’s there for.’”
Arguing with an American, you may ask him, with propriety, “All right—what would you have done if you had been President?” You don’t ask one of my Nazi friends what he would have done if he had been Führer—or Emperor. The concept that the citizen might become the actual Head of the State has no reality for my friends. Why not?—Didn’t Hitler become the Head of the State? “Not at all,” said Herr Simon, the bill-collector, and then he went on to enlighten me on legitimacy. Hitler was appointed by the Head of the State. The true German ruler is the monarch. The first President of Germany, Ebert, was not elected by the people at all, and the second (and last), Hindenburg, was not really elected but was chosen by the German people as custodian for the monarchy. My friends, like all people to whom the present is unpalatable and the future unpromising, always look back. Looking back, they see themselves ruled, and well ruled, by an independent Sovereign. Their experience with even the outward forms of self-government does not, as yet, incline them to it.
The concept that the citizen actually is, as such, the Head of the State is, in their view, nothing but self-contradiction. I read to three of my friends a lecture I had prepared, in which I was going to say that I was the highest official of the United States, holding the office of citizen. I had used the word Staatsbürger. “But that,” said all three, in identical words, “is no office at all.” There we were. “But it really is the highest office in America,” I said; “the citizen is the Sovereign. If I say ‘souveräner Staatsbürger,’ will that be clearer?”
“Clearer, certainly,” said Herr Kessler, the bank clerk, “but wronger, if I may, Herr Professor. Those two words do not go together. The idea is not a German idea. It says that the citizen is the ruler, but there are millions of citizens, so that would be anarchy. There could be no rule. A State must have a Head, not a million or fifty million or a hundred million Heads. If one of your ‘sovereign citizens’ does not like a law, do you allow him to break it? If not, your ‘sovereign citizen’ is only a myth, and you are, like us, ruled by real rulers. But your theory does not admit it.”
“We hear a lot about America,” said Policeman Hofmeister, “not only now, but all our lives we have heard a lot, because so many of us have relatives who have gone there. Now we always say in Germany, ‘Monarchic oder Anarchie’; there is nothing in between, and Anarchie is mob rule. We have heard of your American cities ruled by gangsters working with dishonest politicians who steal the people’s money and give them poor service, bad roads, and such, charging them always for good roads or good sewers. That we have never known here in Germany, not under the Kaiser, not under Hitler. That is a kind of Anarchie, maybe not mob rule but something like it.”
“You think,” said Herr Simon, who did not always remember to call me Professor, “that there is one kind of dictatorship, the kind we had here. But you might have a dictatorship not by the best of your people but by all, or a majority, of your people. Isn’t that possible, too?”
“I suppose so,” I said, “but it is hard to believe. I should say that National Socialism had some of that in it, that dictatorship by the majority.”
“Yes,” said Herr Simon, “but what about the law against drinking liquor that you had in the United States. Wasn’t that a majority dictatorship?”
I explained, and we went on, but my friend was trying to make a point. In Tennessee a kind of legal mob rule forbade the teaching of evolution, in California (long afterward) it forbade the teaching of internationalism as manifested in UNESCO. My Nazi friend Simon had not heard of John Stuart Mill, the philosopher of liberty, who was worried about “the tyranny of the majority,” or of Alexander Hamilton’s staggering dictum, “Your ‘People,’ Sir, is a great beast.”
I think it is unfair to say that my friends are irresponsible, at least without adding that irresponsibility, which is a moral failure, may be at least in part a consequence of nonresponsibility, which is historical fact. There is a distinction between “unconscionable” and “conscienceless.” The model of the conscienceless pattern of German behavior was (and is) the civil service, whose security and status are the dream of the “little man” in a world where, even in good times, to lose a job is a dreadful prospect. The magnificence of the German civil service is one side of the coin; the training and elevation of a whole conscienceless class of citizens, who hear nothing, see nothing, and say nothing undutiful, the other. The apprenticeship of a Beamte, a civil servant, is hard and long, and the man who is seen to do his duty reluctantly or squeamishly is never certified; he is kept on as Angestellte, employee. German bank employees, who are not Beamten, call themselves Bankbeam-ten, simply to swell their little pride.
This immense hierarchism, based upon blind servility in which the man on the third rung would never dare to imagine that the man on the second would order him to do something wrong, since, after all, the man on the second had to answer to the man on the first, nourished the buck-passing instinct to fantastic proportions. “If,” said a friend of mine whose sense of humor was surprising (“for a German”), “you ask the postman whether he thinks it will rain tomorrow (and tomorrow is the day of the Communist parade, and the Communists are illegal), he will excuse himself while he gets his immediate superior’s permission to answer, and his superior will take the question up through channels until it reaches an official whose sense of independent moral responsibility is so strong that he dares to lose the question rather than send it on higher. By the time the postman is able to tell you that he has no opinion on the matter, it is day after tomorrow.”
Men who learn to live this way get used to it and even get to like it. It is workable, too; good discipline produces, at least in limited areas, the same performance as good self-discipline. The only objection to the scheme is that men who always do as they’re told do not know what to do when they’re not. Without the thoughtful habit of decision, they decide (when they must decide for themselves) thoughtlessly. If they are forbidden to beat Jews, they learn how not to want to, something a free man who wants to beat Jews never learns; then, when they are allowed to, the release of their repressed wish to beat Jews makes maniacs of them.
All Germans are not “authoritarian personalities.” I imagine that most are not. But, while there have been intervals in which the German was actually allowed to concern himself with matters of State, the pattern of German life has been such, over the centuries, that free spirits either had to give up or get out. From Goethe, who said he preferred “injustice to disorder,” to Thomas Mann, who gloried in being nonpolitical, German intellectuals contrived to live “above it all,” in “the land of poets and thinkers,” as Mme de Staël described the Germany of 1810. Those who contrived to live in it all fared badly.
Other nations sent their worst people away. Germany sent—drove, rather—its best. Between Prince Metternich’s Mainz Commission of 1819 (the Un-German Activities Committee of its day) and the last renewal of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist laws in 1888, some four and a half million Germans came to the United States alone, 770,000 of them after the suppression of the Revolution of 1848. Wave after wave, after each unsuccessful movement against autocracy, came over to constitute, wherever they went, the finest flower of immigration. Their letters back home brought new and larger waves of their friends and relatives, who were, in large measure, moved more by economic opportunity than by political hope or necessity—who, however, belonged to families or circles in which political liberalism had led to emigration. Left behind were, in the main, those who conformed, willingly or because they saw no way out. Left behind, too, for the next generation, was the dream, always madder as it was frustrated, which produced new outbreaks, new suppressions, new emigrations. National Socialism brought dream and conformism together into something satanic.
Each new generation’s leadership was somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Argentine or Wisconsin or China. But millions of liberty-loving Germans remained, and all men, in whatever form they love it, love liberty. Thus throughout Germany, as everywhere where there is oppression among literate peoples, one encountered, and still encounters, more diversity, more individuality, than there is among, say, Americans, who are unoppressed; more variety in entertainment and in the arts, in political partisanship and in the political complexion of the press; all this, more individuality, more independence, stubborn or sublimated, in the land of the goose step than one finds in the land of the free. Free Americans all read the same papers, wear the same clothes, and vote for the same two transposable parties; Germans dress freely, freely read different papers, and vote a dozen different ways, but they are, in their submissiveness, the same.
Of what are these people guilty, who have never known the responsibility of the sovereign citizen? Of not assuming it, all at once, on January 30, 1933? Their offense was their national history. The crime of all but a million or so of them (and, in part, of these, too) had been committed long before National Socialism. All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany.
“That’s the way we Germans are,” said Herr Simon, the alter Kämpfer.
“But,” I said, “is this the Herrenrasse, the superior race?”
“Morally and mentally, yes,” he said. “We are industrious and orderly, too. But we are unfortunate in this one respect: we cannot rule ourselves; wir brauchen eine starke Hand, we require an iron hand.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That’s the way we Germans are.”
It is partly self-pity again, partly, of course, self-exculpation, the easy way out. My friends may not present an admirable spectacle. But failure to present an admirable spectacle is not a crime against humanity. Maybe it should be.