One Saturday afternoon in Kronenberg three house-painters, who were off at noon, got hold of some Weinbrand at our house, and, when we returned from a visit, we found the house torn up and the painters howling drunk. Tante Käthe, our five-foot-tall housekeeper, was with us. She handed them mops and brooms and said, “Clean up and get out.” In instant, silent sobriety they cleaned up and got out. They were back Monday morning for work, without a word of apology, a blush of shame, or a man-to-man wink.
The speed of the German is the initial speed of release under pressure, soon spent. Then the pressure reasserts itself, and the German re-emerges as he is: sober, a heavy, heavy man. His personality, under pressure, is just as excessively submissive as it is assertive. Its essence is excess. On November 9, 1938, word went through the country that the synagogues were to be burned. A million men, released like jack-in-the-boxes, sprang to action. Pushed back in the boxes, as they were by Göring’s order the following morning, a million men dropped their fagots; another sixty-nine million, who had not thought much about it the night before, reproached the million in silence; and the work of arson, robbery, enslavement, torture, and murder proceeded in legalized form, in Zucht und Ordnung.
Zucht und Ordnung, discipline and order. My two friends Hofmeister and Schwenke, the policeman and the tailor, who hated one another and who represented two incompatible moralities, agreed that “it doesn’t matter whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have discipline and order.” The sensitive cabinetmaker, Klingelhöfer, and the insensitive bill-collector, Simon, said the same thing. Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one.
The gas ovens of Belsen were peculiarly German; the improvised slaughter pits of the Ukraine were Nazi. The distinction is a large one. Nazism, like the Lutheran Reformation and all other German upheavals, contained revolutionary elements of improvisation. But Nazism was always at war with the Army. The Army was German. The remarkable fact of the Putsch against Hitler of July 20, 1944, is that a handful of Army officers could be found to undertake it; that it was planned so recklessly; that it happened at all, not that it failed or might have succeeded. It was treated as treason. What it was was un-German.
What was truly German was what has come to be called the cold pogrom, the systematic persecution, legal, methodical, and precisely co-ordinated, of the “national enemies.” When you have combined “cold” with “pogrom“—they appear to be uncombinable—you have Nazi Germany, the organism as a whole gone wild, its organs admirably coordinated. The universal witness of the people invaded by the Germans is the nonhumanity of the conqueror, his push-button transition from fury to formality, from fire to ice and back again, depending on whether he is under orders or out from under orders. A Nazi might be moved by a prisoner’s plea that he had a wife and children; but a German would say, “So have I.”
The German’s incapacity for calm, consistent insubordination—for being first and last a free man—is the key to his national history. Germany has often had a counterrevolution, but never a revolution. What the Germans would call a revolution the Americans would call a Putsch. “The German revolutionaries,” said Lenin, “could not seize the railways because they did not have a Bahnsteigkarte”—the ten-pfennig ticket admitting visitors to the train shed. The Reformation and the Counter Reformation were both counterreformations. (Luther’s “peasant” uprising ended with Luther’s tract Against the Murderous and Rapacious Hordes of the Peasants.) The German War of Liberation against Napoleon saddled Germany with peacetime conscription, and the revolutionary unification of the Reich in 1871 was achieved by the reactionary Junker of Prussia.
The German breakout—call it liberation, call it aggression, call it what you will—is a kind of periodic paranoid panic. In between times, the pressure from outside having supervened, and having been passed on from Germany to the Germans, the next panic cooks silently, symptomlessly, in Zucht und Ordnung. To blame Germany—still less the Germans—is to blame the thistle for its fruit. It is fantastic to suppose that, with the pressures of destruction, defeat, partition, foreign rule, and cold war superimposed upon those that already existed, “it” will not happen again. It not only will happen; it must, unless the life of seventy million Germans is altered at the very depth and they find a way to live wie Gott in Frankreich, “like God in France.”