Two New Boys in the Neighborhood
In other countries governments have been willing to foment and exploit—but always deplore—anti-Semitism. In Germany, and in Germany alone, was it made the cornerstone of public policy. Why? The peculiar ferocity of civil war, the war of brother against brother, comes to mind as hypothesis. The hypothesis is not original; Rauschning says that Hitler once told him that the Germans and the Jews could not live together because they were too much alike.
The Germans and the Jews are wonderfully alike. There are, of course, great and obvious differences between them, because the Jews are few, scattered, anciently civilized, and southern in origin, while the Germans are many, concentrated, primitive, and northern. That the Jew is tasteful and epicurean, more so than the German, is the mere consequence of his geographical origin and his cultural age. That he is subtle, much more so than the German, is the mere consequence in part of his geographical origin, in part of his defenselessness. That his passion for individual independence is exalted, as the German’s is not, is the mere consequence of the world’s pariahism; and his interest in righteousness, which is not nearly so prominent among the Germans, the mere consequence of the unrighteousness of that pariahism.
There is (or, until very recently, was) no Jewish nation to suffer pressure and put consequent pressure on both its members and the outside world. It is the individual Jew who is both object and subject of the pressures which, in Germany’s case, are sustained and exerted by the nation. Germany’s internal Diaspora, the first Thirty Years’ War, set the stage for German romanticism and German aggressiveness. The history of the combative, incurably restless German nation begins with the reduction of Germany to the depths. The history of the individual Jew is parallel. But what the German nation could seek by weight—its restoration, its “place”—the Jewish individual had to seek by speed.
The dispersed and scattered Jews—who were once much more fiercely tribal than the Germans—were compelled by their situation to become cosmopolitans. This forced cosmopolitanism of the isolated Jew has two polar consequences. Oppressed by each nation, the Jew must be the reformer of the nation, as Germany, isolated and oppressed by the world, must be the reformer of the world. At the same time the Jew must be the most adjustable of men. Except for his religion—which, in the modern West, is weak—he has no continuing mold to contain and shape him. He has nothing to hold to, to fall back upon, to hide behind when war, revolution, famine, tyranny, and persecution sweep over him. He has nothing to turn to but God.
The German has Germany. The German individual, living his changeless generations in his own land, among his own people, and on his own soil, has had no need for adjustability and has never developed it. What for the Jew is the central problem of life does not—I must say did not, for times are changing—exist for the German.
From the Castle hill in Kronenberg one can still see the country German in the second half of the twentieth century—the thousand-skirted costumes (the Protestant and Catholic aprons tied differently), the oxen (and often the women and the children) pulling a perforated cheese cask on wheels through the fields for irrigation. The first World War shook the little valleys; on the walls of a village church one counts a hundred memorial wreaths from the first World War, in a village of a thousand population. The peasant youth began to move to the towns. The second World War blew the town and city people out of their houses and packed the railroad trains and the roads.
After 1918 the immobile German, incapable of adjusting to the new conditions inflicted upon him, turning romantically and meaninglessly toward the hope of restoring the old, found himself bewildered and increasingly helpless, while the Jew was in the element in which, through no fault (or virtue) of his own, he thrives best: changing conditions, requiring rapid and radical adjustment. Instead of saying that the Jews were the “decomposing element” in Imperial Rome—a favorite citation of the Nazis—Mommsen should have said that the Jew was able, because he had to be, to adjust himself to a decomposing, as to any other kind, of Rome.
Between 1918 and 1933 this marginal man, the Jew, this Luftmensch, this man in the air, in a situation which put a premium on speed and a penalty on weight, rose to such power in a decomposing Germany that his achievement looked dangerously like that of a superman. But wasn’t the German to be the superman?—Very well, then. The order in which the Jew was usurping this role would have to be reversed, the standards of supermanliness redefined to fit the German. Superman, the German, would not adjust to this world; he would adjust it. So—oder so.
The pliant German, beaten into shape by centuries of nonresistance, could not compete with the subtle Jew. Germany, the marginal nation, had always had to struggle to survive—but not the German. The German had only to do as he was told, while to do as he was told would have been fatal to the Jew. The Jew had to take chances, and so did the German nation. But the German individual, unless he was crazy drunk, could not take chances. The Jew did not drink; he had to be light to live. The German nation had to drink to lighten itself, and what do nations drink but blood?
In Germany or in England or in Russia, everywhere, indeed, except in the lost Homeland, the Jew had to be light as a feather and fast as the wind. Like Germany—but not like the German—he was hemmed in by hostile neighbors. He had to fight—honorably, if possible, dishonorably, if necessary, like the German nation. He was driven, like the German nation, to every extreme and every excess of good and evil, and his situation evoked in him whatever geniuses survival required of him. Moses Mendelssohn and the Jewish pander were both Jews, just as the Germany of Schiller and that of Streicher were both Germany. Germany is the Jew among nations.
“They are always insisting on something,” the hostess of one of the presently decrepit but eternally fashionable resort hotels on Lago Maggiore said. She was speaking of the Germans collectively. “One can’t say just what it is that they seem to be insisting on. But they are uncomfortable, and they must make the management and the rest of the guests uncomfortable. Just like the Jews.” “What?” I said, collectively insulted. She laughed. “Not every Jew,” she said, “and, of course, not every German; only enough of them to make one think, always, ‘the Germans.’ Perhaps I am prejudiced. I am half-German myself.”
Being beset, in fancy and in reality, has produced in the Jews and in the German nation the compensatory assertion of superiority and messianism. Each of them must save the world; so only, saving the world, are Germany and the Jew to be saved. But neither is evangelistic. Conversion (which implies humility) and love (which implies submission) have no place in either’s mission. The remaining alternative is mastery; mastery, of course, for the sake of the mastered. In the Germans the necessary means of mastery, imposed upon the benefactors by the intransigence of the prospective beneficiaries, were lately seen to be genocide. But genocide was not unknown, once, to the Jews, and, if survival requires excessive measures, the salvation of the whole world ennobles their use.
To other, less hard-pressed, peoples, the prejudice of the Jew against intermarriage is unintelligible. Among Westerners, only the Nazis share this prejudice. Doctrinal restrictions are not involved, as they are among Christians, where the prohibition against marriage is dissolved by conversion. To the Nazi the Jew is forever a Jew; to the Jew the non-Jew is always a non-Jew. In both cases the inference of taint is inescapable. And in neither the Nazi (who is nothing but the German stripped of religion) nor the Jew is there any confidence that the threatened taint might be diluted or dissipated; in both, the overriding concern is purity. That this arrogation of purity is an impudence other peoples than the Germans and the Jew will agree. But other peoples live in a different world from the Jew and the Germans. These two live in a world of their own.
The German Jew was the perfect German. The Jewish Encyclopaedia has, I suppose, fifty times as many citations of German specialists as of all the Jews all over the rest of the world together. Was there ever a “better” German than Bismarck’s adviser, the Jew Bleichröder, or than Wilhelm II’s, the Jew Ballin? And who but the Jew Stahl laid the constitutional foundations for what we call “Prussianism” in Germany? It is the German Jew who, in a minority, will soon or late dominate Israel; already we hear, in Israel, of what we think of as peculiarly German forms of extremist tendency, the same tendency toward “Nazi” behavior observed among the Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald by Professor Bruno Bettelheim.
And how this German Jew loved his Germany, for which he was willing to give up his Judaism! How German he seemed to be abroad, so much so that everywhere in the Allied countries in the first World War the Jew was suspected of being pro-German! What happened to him from 1933 on he could not believe; he stayed on, until 1936, until 1938, until 1942, until—. “It won’t last,” he told himself. What made him think it wouldn’t? Why, this was Germany, his Germany. And now, in England and America, in France and Brazil and Mexico, there is a new kind of Jew, the Jew who has learned, when he speaks of those who a few years ago were his countrymen in his beloved country, to say “the Germans,” to distinguish them, just as Hitler did, from the Jews.
The “Lorelei,” the song of the witch of the Rhine who dazzles and wrecks the boatman, is the German people’s most popular song, not today, or yesterday, but always; so popular that the Nazis did not dare eliminate it from the songbooks. Instead, they included it with the wonderful line, Dichtei unbekannt, “Author unknown.” Every German knew that the author of the most German of all German folksongs was Heinrich Heine. It took Heine, the German Jew, to write in exile:
Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vateiland.
Der Eichenbaum wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft.
Es war ein Traum
Das küsste mich auf deutsch und spiach auf deutsch
(Man glaubt es kaum,
Wie gut es klang) das Wort, “Ich liebe dich!“
Es war ein Traum.
It is untranslatably beautiful:
Once I had a Fatherland.
The oak grew there so great, the violet so small and sweet.
It was a dream
That kissed me in German and in German spoke
(If only you knew how good it sounded in German!)
The words, “I love you.”
It was a dream.
It took Heinrich Heine, the Jewish German, to write: “Better to die than to live, best of all never to have lived.” With the world—and themselves?—against them both, both Germany and the Jew appear to be indestructible. The Nazis’ “final solution” of “the Jewish question” was the destruction of the Jews, as the world’s “final solution” of “the German question,” advanced by the Morgenthauites, was the destruction of Germany. We may assume that the Morgenthauite program to reduce Germany to a primitive peasant nation was no more final than the Nazis’ program to reduce the Jews of Germany to primitive peasant persons, “working on the land.” What the world was too civilized to do (or to attempt to do), the Nazis were not. But the Nazis no more succeeded in reducing the status of the Jews than the world succeeded in reducing the status of Germany. German recovery, a few years after the lost war in 1945, was the wonder of the world. And the twenty thousand Jews left in Germany were on their way to greater distinction, in both the highest and lowest endeavors, than ever before.
The survival of Germany is much more easily explained, historically and anthropologically, than the survival of the Jew, two thousand years from his Fatherland and scattered into dozens of hostile environments. He has survived. Perhaps he has survived so that the survival of Germany, and of the Germany we have lately known, might bear witness to the world that there is more in the world than meets the eye. It may be that the explanation of survival is not exhausted by historical and anthropological analysis or by social-psychological curve-making; it may be that Cain’s answer to the Lord is relevant, too.
As the fate of the Jews—and of Germany—approached its climax in the last months of the second World War, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, published weekly by the German Jews at the order of the Nazi Government, to communicate “directives” to those of Nazism’s victims who were left alive, shrank in size and content and, finally, in frequency of publication. It shrank, too, in the quality of paper allotted to it, and it is for that reason that I wish to publish, in its original form, on paper which will outlast the March 5, 1943, issue of the Nachrichtenblatt, a story which appeared in the lower right-hand corner, on the reverse side of the single sheet, manuscript-paper size, which constituted the publication:
Alles zum Guten
Immer gewöhne sich der Mensch zu denken: “Was Gott schickt ist gut; es dünke mir gut oder böse.”
Ein frommer Weiser kam vor eine Stadt, deren Tore geschlossen waren. Niemand wollte sie ihm öffnen; hungrig und durstig musste er unterm treiem Himmel übernachten. Er sprach: “Was Gott schickt, ist gut,” und legte sich n ieder.
Neben ihm stand ein Esel, zu seiner Seite eine brennende Laterne um der Unsicherheit willen in derselben Gegend. Aber ein Sturm entstand und löschte sein Licht aus, ein Löwe kam und zerriss seinen Esel. Er erwachte, fand sich allein und sprach: “Was Gott schickt ist gut.” Er erwartete ruhig die Morgenröte.
Als er ans Tor kam, iand er die Tore offen, die Stadt verwüstet, beraupt und geplündert Ein Schar Räuber war eingefallen und hatte eben in dieser Nacht die Einwohner gefangen weggeführt oder getötet. Er war verschont. “Sagte ich nicht,” sprach er, “dass alles, was Gott schickt, gut sei? Nur sehen wir meistens am Morgen erst, warum er uns etwas des Abends versagte.”
(Aus dem Talmud).
In English:
EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR THE BEST
We know that whatever God sends us, however good or bad it may seem to us, is good.
A pious man came to a city whose gates were closed. No one would open them to let him in. Hungry and thirsty, he had to spend the night outside the gates. Still he said, “Whatever God sends us is good,” and he lay down to sleep.
Beside him stood his ass, and his lantern burned to ward off the dangers of the dark. But a storm came up and extinguished the lantern. Then a lion came up and, as the pious man slept, tore the ass to pieces. Awakening, and seeing his plight, the pious man said, “Whatever God sends us is good,” and serenely awaited the sunrise.
Day broke. The pious man found the gates open, the city laid waste and plundered. A band of robbers had fallen upon the city during the night and had murdered some of the citizens and enslaved the rest. The pious man had been saved. “Didn’t I say,” he said to himself, “that whatever God sends us is good? We must wait until morning, and then we will understand the meaning of the night.”
(From the Talmud).