Germany is the “new boy” in the neighborhood of the Western world. The one durable consequence of the first World War was the unification of a Germany some of whose states, up until then, had their own kings and courts, their own armies, ambassadors, and postal systems. And even the war did not complete the unification; Bavaria and Prussia, which hated one another, both defied the Weimar Republic with impunity, the one from the right, the other from the left.
Nationhood was nominally forced upon the dozens of “Sovereign German States” in 1871 by Prussia, of which the King of Württemberg had said, a half-century earlier, “Prussia belongs as little to Germany as does Alsace.” The nonexistent Germany of 1870 was composed entirely of foreigners, ethnically and historically so hodgepodged that an East Prussian or a Bavarian was just as likely to be taken for a Pole or an Austrian as for a German. Only by his language could a German be distinguished, and not always then; Low and High German are as mutually unintelligible as German and Dutch.
The language itself—a Mischmasch, Leibniz called it—reflected the German miscegenation, the “disgrace” which the elite passed on to the populace. “I have never read a German book,” the greatest of all German heroes boasted at the end of the eighteenth century; and his friend Voltaire wrote home from the Prussian court, “We all talk French. German is left for soldiers and horses.” Pre-Nazi nationalism tried to drive “loan” words out of the language—even universal European terms like Telefon—and Nazi nationalism intensified the campaign. But in vain; German remained a Mischmasch.
German nationalism was, and still is, the effort to create a German nation. The independence of the old German States had its merits, in spite of the ridiculous fragmentation it perpetuated and the dozens of ossified nobilities and their clumsy Ruritania courts in imitation of a Versailles long gone. Culture flourished (to be sure, at the whim of whimsical princes), but it was under such princes, and with their self-serving patronage, that German culture was great. It would be very nice, said Goethe to Eckerman, to cross the thirty-six States without having one’s trunk examined thirty-six times, “but if one imagines the unity of Germany with a single large capital for the whole nation, and that this great capital would encourage the development of genius or contribute to the welfare of the people, he is wrong.”
The nationalization of Germany, although it came too late to perform the historic function it performed everywhere else, was not to be stopped. When the liberal philosopher Feuerbach wrote his friend Friedrich Kapp, “I would not give a row of pins for unity unless it rests on liberty,” Kapp, a “Forty-eighter,” who had left his Fatherland to find liberty, wrote back from America: “To be sure, it is disagreeable that Bismarck, and not the democrats, achieved this magnificent consolidation, that the reactionary Junkers and bureaucrats of old Prussia rule. But are not the results achieved, and does it matter who is responsible for such a great achievement?”
Germany was a nation, but in 1871 it was prematurely a nation; in 1914 and in 1918 still prematurely. Like all parvenus, the German nation had, and still has, a compulsion to display its wealth, its nationhood, and a desperate terror of losing it, not of being broken apart from without, but, more terribly, of falling apart within. Englishmen and Frenchmen know that they are Englishmen and Frenchmen; when I asked a Danish Communist whether, in his heart, he was a Dane or a Communist, he said, “What a silly question; every Dane is a Dane.” But the German has to be reassured that he is a German. The German pressure cooker required, and still requires, the fierce, fusing fire of fanaticism under it.
Russia and the United States of America have both, until recently, at least, been spared this peculiar experience of German nationalism, partly because of their longer national history, partly because of their isolation. Like the other two “Pans,” Pan-Slavism and Pan-Americanism, expansionist Pan-Germanism is the none-too-paradoxical consequence of the dread of decomposition. As long as the self-consciously fragile German nation is threatened, internally no less than externally, it will threaten the world, and foreign statesmen who divide the Germans into our friends and their friends would do well to be mindful that those Germans who are neither, or who are one today and the other tomorrow, are thinking of Germany, not of Democracy or Communism.
Just as German nationalism was the effort to create a nation, so German racism was the effort to create a race out of a geographical group none of whose stocks, according to all the available pre-Nazi measurements, was Nordic. Ethnical heterogeneity is greater among the Germans (taking the Austrians as Germans) than it is among any other of the world’s peoples except the Russians and the Americans.
True, my ten friends, not one of whom met or even approached the Nordic standard, rejected their own “Aryanism.” But they did accept a kind of racist “Germanism,” a biologized mystique which, I was surprised to discover, they were not alone in accepting. A university graduate of the pre-Nazi era, an anti-Nazi intellectual, when I asked her how many Jews there were still in Kronenberg, said, “Almost none—but, then, you would have to take biological as well as historical and religious data to find out exactly.”
My friend Simon, he of the secret Talmud, when he told me that, yes, the Jew Springer was a decent man, and I asked him how there could be a decent Jew when the “Jewish spirit” was a matter of blood, replied: “Of course it’s a matter of blood. It might skip a generation“—he had certainly not read Mendel—“but it would show up in the next. Only when the proportion of Jewish blood is small enough will it no longer be a danger to Deutschtum.” “How small,” I said, “would it have to be?” “The scientists have that worked out,” he said.
Herr Simon was not alone in his preoccupation with “pollution.” The tailor’s son, Schwenke, spoke frequently of the “race injury,” the relations between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” of opposite sexes, the special province of the Nazi SS. He and Simon both told me, in some genuine terror, mixed, I felt, with some of the titillation always involved in discussing sexual relations, that Jewish householders invariably hired “German” housemaids (this much was true, since housemaids came largely from the peasant or unskilled working classes), for the express purpose of “ruining” them. Neither Schwenke nor Simon, of course, had any evidence.
Once—as far as I could learn, only once—a Jew was seen walking through the streets of Kronenberg wearing a sandwich-board sign reading, Ich habe ein aryanisches Mädchen beschändet, “I have ruined an Aryan maiden.”
“No one looked at him,” said Policeman Hofmeister.
“Why?”
“Everyone felt sorry for him.”
“Why?”
“Because it was such—such nonsense.”
“Nonsense?”
“Yes. Here’s a Jewish boy. He has a German”—non-Jewish, the policeman meant—“girl friend. They quarrel. That can happen. They call each other names, then threaten each other. Now they hate each other, although maybe they are still in love; you know, that can happen, Herr Professor. She threatens to denounce him. He dares her to, and she does. And then this—this nonsense.”
Policeman Hofmeister was less remorseful about the gypsies, whose treatment was, if anything, more horrible than that of the Jews and who had no voice anywhere in all the world to cry out for them. The gypsies, said Policeman Hofmeister, who would not have said this about the Jews, were Menschen zweiten Grades, second-class humans, submen. “The idea,” he said, “was to preserve the pure gypsies,” the biologically pure, that is, “to preserve them intact, if possible, although, of course, outside the framework of German rights. But the gypsy Mischlinge, the mongrels, the half-breeds, were a great danger to the race, through intermingling. Gypsy blood”—I thought of the waltz—“was bad. Still”—here was a good man speaking, who thought he believed in “blood” and not in social determinants—“one felt sorry for them, for the conditions in which they had to live, without homes or towns or decent provisions for their children. How could they help themselves?”
“You will have to admit, Herr Professor,” said Baker Wedekind, “that Hitler got rid of the beggars and the gypsies. That was a good thing. The gypsies had lots of children, charming children, too, whom they taught to cheat and steal. In the village, in my childhood, we locked our doors when gypsies were there; otherwise, never. They were an alien race, alien blood.” He, too, would not have said that I should have to admit that Hitler had done a good thing in getting rid of the Jews.
I think that what worried Policeman Hofmeister and Baker Wedekind was their own common knowledge. The achievements of Jews in every field in which the “Germans” excelled gave rise to an essentially schizoid condition in my friends. The inferior race, the Jews, was also, like the Germans themselves, superior. The gypsies would have made a better Devil for German racism, if only the Devil were not, by definition, superhuman as well as inferior. The gypsies were adequately inferior, but they were not, in German terms, superhuman. They were, quite literally, such poor Devils. The Jew would have to do—if he could be distinguished from the German.