Paul Johnson writes in his classic book Modern Times:
Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief
that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed,
was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik. There was very little basis
for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories
that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist
network. The Jews, it is true, had been prominent in the first
Communist movements. But in Russia they lost ground steadily once
the Bolsheviks came to power, and by 1925 the regime was already
anti-Semitic. In Germany also the Jews, though instrumental in
creating the Communist Party (kpd), were quickly weeded out once
it was organized as a mass party. By the 1932 elections, when it put
up 500 candidates, not one was Jewish. 29 Nor, at the other end of the
spectrum, were the Jews particularly important in German finance
and industry. The belief rested on the mysterious connection between
Bismarck and his financial adviser, Gerson von Bleichroder, the Jew
who organized the Rothschilds and other banking houses to provide
the finance for Germany’s wars. 30 But in the 1920s Jews were rarely
involved in government finance. Jewish businessmen kept out of
politics. Big business was represented by Alfred Hugenberg and the
German Nationalist People’s Party, which was anti-Semitic. Jews
were very active at the foundation of Weimar, but after 1920 one of
the few Jews to hold high office was Walther Rathenau and he was
murdered two years later.
In culture however it was a different matter. There is nothing more
galling than a cultural tyranny, real or imaginary, and in Weimar
culture ‘they’ could plausibly be identified with the Jews. The most
hated of them, Tucholsky, was a Jew. So were other important critics
and opinion formers, like Maximilian Harden, Theodor Wolff,
Theodor Lessing, Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten. Nearly all the best
film-directors were Jewish, and about half the most successful
playwrights, such as Sternheim and Schnitzler. The Jews were
dominant in light entertainment and still more in theatre criticism, a
very sore point among the Easterners. There were many brilliant and
much publicized Jewish performers: Elizabeth Bergner, Erna Sack,
Peter Lorre, Richard Tauber, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner, for
instance. Jews owned important newspapers, such as Frankfurt’s
Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung. They ran
the most influential art galleries. They were particularly strong in
publishing, which (next to big city department stores) was probably
the area of commerce in which Jews came closest to predominance.
The best liberal publishers, such as Malik Verlag, Kurt Wolff, the
Cassirers, Georg Bondi, Erich Reiss and S.Fischer, were owned or run
by Jews. There were a number of prominent and highly successful
Jewish novelists: Hermann Broch, Alfred Doblin, Franz Werfel,
Arnold Zweig, Vicki Baum, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank,
Alfred Neumann and Ernst Weiss, as well as Franz Kafka, whom the
intelligentsia rated alongside Proust and Joyce and who was an
object of peculiar detestation among the Easterners. In every depart-
ment of the arts, be it architecture, sculpture, painting or music,
where change had been most sudden and repugnant to conservative
tastes, Jews had been active in the transformation, though rarely in
control. The one exception, perhaps, was music, where Schoenberg
was accused of ‘assassinating’ the German tradition; but even here,
his far more successful and innovatory pupil, Berg, was an Aryan
Catholic. However, it is undoubtedly true to say that Weimar culture
would have been quite different, and infinitely poorer, without its
Jewish element, and there was certainly enough evidence to make a
theory of Jewish cultural conspiracy seem plausible. 31
This was the principal reason why anti-Semitism made such
astonishing headway in Weimar Germany. Until the Republic,
anti-Semitism was not a disease to which Germany was thought to be
especially prone. Russia was the land of the pogrom; Paris was the
city of the anti-Semitic intelligentsia. Anti-Semitism seems to have
made its appearance in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time
when the determinist type of social philosopher was using Darwin’s
principle of Natural Selection to evolve ‘laws’ to explain the colossal
changes brought about by industrialism, the rise of megalopolis and
the alienation of huge, rootless proletariats. Christianity was content
with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular
faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The
enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race.
Marx’s invention of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was the most comprehensive
of these hate-theories and it has continued to provide a foundation
for all paranoid revolutionary movements, whether fascist-
nationalist or Communist-internationalist. Modern theoretical anti-
Semitism was a derivative of Marxism, involving a selection (for
reasons of national, political or economic convenience) of a particu-
lar section of the bourgeoisie as the subject of attack. It was a more
obviously emotional matter than analysis purely by class, which is
why Lenin used the slogan that ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism
of fools’. But in terms of rationality there was little to choose
between the two. Lenin was saying, in effect, that it was the entire
bourgeoisie, not just Jewry, which was to blame for the ills of
mankind. And it is significant that all Marxist regimes, based as they
are on paranoid explanations of human behaviour, degenerate
sooner or later into anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism, in short,
was part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of
individual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt — the
revival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous,
even bestial, of instincts. It is very curious that, when the new
anti-Semitism made its appearance in Germany, among those who
attacked it was Nietzsche, always on the lookout for secular,
pseudo-rational substitutes for the genuine religious impulse. He
denounced ‘these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites . . .
who endeavour to stir up all the bovine elements of the nation by a
misuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude.’ 32
But if modern anti-Semitism was by no means a specifically German
phenomenon, there were powerful forces which favoured its growth
there. The modern German nation was, in one sense, the creation of
Prussian militarism. In another, it was the national expression of the
German romantic movement, with its stress upon the Volk, its
mythology and its natural setting in the German landscape, especially
its dark, mysterious forests. The German Volk movement dated from
Napoleonic times and was burning ‘alien’ and ‘foreign’ books, which
corrupted ‘ Volk culture’, as early as 1817. Indeed it was from the Volk
movement that Marx took his concept of ‘alienation’ in industrial
capitalism. A Volk had a soul, which was derived from its natural
habitat. As the historical novelist Otto Gemlin put it, in an article in Die
Tat, organ of the Vo/^-romantic movement, ‘For each people and each
race, the countryside becomes its own peculiar landscape’. 33 If the
landscape was destroyed, or the Volk divorced from it, the soul dies.
The Jews were not a Volk because they had lost their soul: they lacked
‘rootedness’. This contrast was worked out with great ingenuity by a
Bavarian professor of antiquities, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, in a series of
volumes called Land und Leute {Places and People), published in the
1850s and 1860s. 34 The true basis of the Volk was the peasant. There
could of course be workers, but they had to be ‘artisans’, organized in
local guilds. The proletariat, on the other hand, was the creation of the
Jews. Having no landscape of their own, they destroyed that of others,
causing millions of people to be uprooted and herded into giant cities,
the nearest they possessed to a ‘landscape’ of their own. ‘The
dominance of the big city’, wrote Riehl, ‘will be the equivalent to the
dominance of the proletariat’ ; moreover, the big cities would link hands
across the world, forming a ‘world bourgeois’ and a ‘world proletariat’
conspiring to destroy everything that had a soul, was ‘natural’,
especially the German landscape and its peasantry. 35
The Volk movement spawned a crop of anti-Semitic ‘peasant’
novels, of which the most notorious was Herman Lons’s Der
Wehrwolf (1910), set in the Thirty Years’ War, and showing the
peasants turning on their oppressors from the towns like wolves:
‘What meaning does civilization have? A thin veneer beneath which
nature courses, waiting until a crack appears and it can burst into the
open.’ ‘Cities are the tomb of Germanism.’ ‘Berlin is the domain of
the Jews.’ Jews functioned among the peasants as money-lenders,
cattle-dealers and middlemen, and the first organized political anti-
Semitism surfaced in the peasant parties and the Bund der Land-
wirte, or Farmers’ Union. Hitler was an avid reader of ‘peasant
novels’, especially the works of Dieter Eckhart, who adapted Peer
Gynt into German, and of Wilhelm von Polenz, who also identified
the Jews with the cruelty and alienation of modern industrial society.
German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a ‘back to the
countryside’ movement. There were special Volk schools, which
stressed open-air life. ‘Mountain theatres’, shaped from natural
amphitheatres, were built in the Harz Mountains and elsewhere, for
dramatized ‘Volk rites’ and other spectacles, an activity the Nazis
later adopted on a huge scale and with great panache. The first youth
movements, especially the highly successful Wandervogel, strum-
ming guitars and hiking through the countryside, took on an
anti-Semitic coloration, especially when they invaded the schools
and universities. The ‘garden city’ movement in Germany was led by
a violent anti-Semite, Theodor Fritsch, who published the Antisem-
itic Catechism, which went through forty editions, 1887-1936, and
who was referred to by the Nazis as Der Altmeister, the master-
teacher. Even the sunbathing movement, under the impulse of Aryan
and Nordic symbols, acquired an anti-Semitic flavour. 36 Indeed in
1920s Germany there were two distinct types of nudism: ‘Jewish’
nudism, symbolized by the black dancer Josephine Baker, which was
heterosexual, commercial, cosmopolitan, erotic and immoral; and
anti-Semitic nudism, which was German, Volkisch, Nordic, non-
sexual (sometimes homosexual), pure and virtuous. 37
It is, indeed, impossible to list all the varieties of ingredients which,
from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, were stirred into the poisonous
brew of German anti-Semitism. Unlike Marxism, which was essen-
tially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a
cultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism. It was
Eugen Diederichs, the publisher of Die Tat from 1912, who coined
the phrase ‘the new romanticism’, the answer to Jewish Expression-
ism. He published Der Wehrwolf, and at his house in Jena, sur-
rounded by intellectuals from the Youth Movement, he wore
zebra-striped trousers and a turban and launched the saying ‘Demo-
cracy is a civilization, while aristocracy equals culture.’ He also
contrived to transform Nietzsche into an anti-Semitic hero. Other
audacious acts of literary theft were perpetrated. Tacitus’ Germania
was turned into a seminal Volkisch text; Darwin’s works were
tortured into a ‘scientific’ justification for race ‘laws’, just as Marx
had plundered them for class ‘laws’. But there were plenty of genuine
mentors too. Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion
stripped of Christianity because it had been Judaized by St Paul, ‘the
Rabbi’. Julius Langbehn taught that assimilated Jews were ‘a pest
and a cholera’, who poisoned the artistic creativity of the Volk: they
should be exterminated, or reduced to slavery along with other
‘lower’ races. 38 Both Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Eugen
Diihring stressed the necessary ‘barbarism’ or Gothic element in
German self-defence against Jewish decadence and the importance of
the ‘purity’ and idealism of the Nordic pantheon. Chamberlain,
whom Hitler was to visit on his deathbed to kiss his hands in 1927,
argued that God flourished in the German and the Devil in the
Jewish race, the polarities of Good and Evil. The Teutons had
inherited Greek aristocratic ideals and Roman love of justice and
added their own heroism and fortitude. Thus it was their role to fight
and destroy the only other race, the Jews, which had an equal purity
and will to power. So the Jew was not a figure of low comedy but a
mortal, implacable enemy: the Germans should wrest all the power
of modern technology and industry from the Jews, in order to
destroy them totally. 39 Some of the German racial theorists were
Marxists, like Ludwig Woltmann, who transformed the Marxist
class-struggle into a world race-struggle and advocated the arousal of
the masses by oratory and propaganda to mobilize the Germans into
the conquests needed to ensure their survival and proliferation as a
race: ‘The German race has been selected to dominate the earth.’
By the 1920s, in brief, any political leader in Germany who wished
to make anti-Semitism an agent in his ‘will to power’ could assemble
his campaign from an enormous selection of slogans, ideas and
fantasies, which had accumulated over more than half a century. The
Versailles Treaty itself gave the controversy new life by driving into
Germany a great wave of frightened Jews from Russia, Poland and
Germany’s surrendered territories. Thus it became an urgent ‘prob-
lem’, demanding ‘solutions’. They were not wanting either. There
were proposals for double-taxation for Jews; isolation or apartheid;
a return to the ghetto system; special laws, with hanging for Jews
who broke them; an absolute prohibition of inter-marriage between
Aryan Germans and Jews. A 1918 best-seller was Artur Dinter’s Die
Siinde wider das Blut {Sins Against the Blood), describing how rich
Jews violated the racial purity of an Aryan woman. Calls for the
extermination of the Jews became frequent and popular, and anti-
Semitic pamphlets circulated in millions. There were many violent
incidents but when, in 1919, the Bavarian police asked for advice on
how to cope with anti-Semitism, Berlin replied there was no remedy
since ‘it has its roots in the difference of race which divides the
Israelitic tribe from our Volk.
The Jews tried everything to combat the poison. Some brought up
their children to be artisans or farmers. They enlisted in the army.
They attempted ultra-assimilation. A Jewish poet, Ernst Lissauer,
wrote the notorious ‘Hate England’ hymn. They went to the other
extreme and tried Zionism. Or they formled militant Jewish organiza-
tions, student leagues, duelling clubs. But each policy raised more
difficulties than it removed, for anti-Semitism was protean, hydra-
headed and impervious to logic or evidence. As Jakob Wassermann
put it: ‘Vain to seek obscurity. They say: the coward, he is creeping
into hiding, driven by his evil conscience. Vain to go among them
and offer them one’s hand. They say: why does he take such liberties
with his Jewish pushfulness? Vain to keep faith with them as a
comrade in arms or a fellow-citizen. They say: he is Proteus, he can
assume any shape or form. Vain to help them strip off the chains of
slavery. They say: no doubt he found it profitable. Vain to counter-
act the poison.’ 41 Mortitz Goldstein argued that it was useless to
expose the baselessness of anti-Semitic ‘evidence’: ‘What would be
gained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine. When all
calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions
about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable.’ 42
Germany’s defeat in 1918 was bound to unleash a quest for
scapegoats, alien treachery in the midst of the Volk. Even without
collateral evidence, the Jews, the embodiment of Westernizing ‘civili-
zation’, were automatically cast for the role. But there was evidence
as well! The influx of Jews in the immediate post-war period was a
fresh dilution of the Volk, presaging a further assault on its martyred
culture. And Weimar itself, did it not provide daily proof, in
parliament, on the stage, in the new cinemas, in the bookshops, in
the magazines and newspapers and art galleries, everywhere an
ordinary, bewildered German turned, that this cosmopolitan, cor-
rupting and ubiquitous conspiracy was taking over the Reich? What
possible doubt could there be that a crisis was at hand, demanding
extreme solutions?
It was at this point that the notion of a violent resolution of the
conflict between culture and civilization began to take a real grip on
the minds of some Germans. Here, once again, the fatal act of Lenin,
in beginning the cycle of political violence in 1917, made its morbid
contribution. Anti-Semitism had always presented itself as defensive.
Now, its proposals to use violence, even on a gigantic scale, could be
justified as defensive. For it was generally believed, not only in
Germany but throughout Central and Western Europe, that Bolshevism was
Jewish-inspired and led, and that Jews were in control of
Communist Parties, and directed Red revolutions and risings wherever
they occurred. Trotsky, the most ferocious of the Bolsheviks, who
actually commanded the Petrograd putsch, was undoubtedly a Jew; so
were a few other Russian leaders. Jews had been prominent in the
Spartacist rising in Berlin, in the Munich Soviet government, and in the
abortive risings in other German cities. Imagination rushed in where
facts were hard to get. Thus, Lenin’s real name was Issachar
Zederblum. The Hungarian Red Revolution was directed not by Bela
Kun but by a Jew called Cohn. Lenin’s Red Terror was a priceless gift to
the anti-Semitic extremists, particularly since most of its countless
victims were peasants and the most rabid and outspoken of the Cheka
terrorizers was the Latvian Jew Latsis. Munich now became the
anti-Semitic capital of Germany, because it had endured the Bolshevist-
Jewish terror of Kurt Eisner and his gang. The Munchener Beobachter,
from which the Nazi Volkische Beobachter later evolved, specialized in
Red atrocity stories, such as Kun or Cohn’s crucifixion of priests, his use
of a ‘mobile guillotine’ and so on. And many of the news items reported
from Russia were, of course, perfectly true. They formed a solid plinth
on which a flaming monument of fantasy could be set up. Hitler was
soon to make highly effective use of the Red Terror fear, insisting, time
and again, that the Communists had already killed 30 million people.
The fact that he had added a nought in no way removed the reality of
those first, terrible digits. He presented his National Socialist militancy
as a protective response and a preemptive strike. It was ‘prepared to
oppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater
terrorism’. 43 And in that ‘greater terrorism’ the Jews would be hunted
down not as innocent victims but as actual or potential terrorists
themselves.
The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary
stage in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German
body politic. The German state was a huge creature with a small and
limited brain. The Easterners, following the example of Bismarck,
grafted onto the Prussian military state a welfare state which provided
workers with social insurance and health-care as of right and by law. As
against the Western liberal notion of freedom of choice and private
provision based on high wages, it imposed the paternalistic alternative
of compulsory and universal security. The state was nursemaid as well
as sergeant-major. It was a towering shadow over the lives of ordinary
people and their relationship towards it was one of dependence and
docility. The German industrialists strongly approved of this notion of
the state as guardian, watching over with firm but benevolent solicitude
the lives of its citizens. 44 The philosophy was Platonic; the result
corporatist. The German Social Democrats did nothing to arrest this
totalitarian drift when they came briefly to power in 1918; quite the
contrary. They reinforced it. The Weimar Republic opened windows
but it did not encourage the citizen to venture outside the penumbra
of state custody.
