When I wrote about the porn industry, I was struck by the many parallels between present-day American and 1920s Weimar Republic.
I just did this podcast interview (Weimerica Weekly) with Ryan Landry.
Here are some of the questions I faced:
1. I noticed a couple of years ago that you were talking about the dark enlightenment and mentioned a birth control proposal that I had satirically called A Modest Proposal. I have to ask, what was it about the dark enlightenment that you found appealing or interesting?
2. Now the dark enlightenment is both accused of being a jewish conspiracy and anti-semitic at the same time. I try to be an honest guy, assign blame when responsible when you have proof. As a Jewish individual, how do you see the dark enlightenment?
3. There is a website called MPC that has a comical image of Lena Dunham and a blurb “Have the jews gone too far” in the style of news site advertisement poll. As weirder deviances are pushed, and often by Jewish writers or academics, do you ever worry that there will be one step too far?
4. I occasionally write on the porn world. Broad themes and trends. It fits with my Weimerica focus. The biggest trend that stuns me since my childhood, and I wanted to hear your take on it, was the amazing normalization of porn and mainstreaming of that world into broader culture. Is this surprising and why do you think this has happened?
4a. Tied to that question, part of why I write on porn is from the occasional tip but often it is just to combat something ridiculous written in the media. Why do you think the media handles porn the way it does and skews positive?
5. The media treatment is stunning. Sex positivism reigns. As the industry has moved from narrative storytelling with sex to simple sex scene after sex scene compilations, the tone has shifted from what the butler saw to simple sport sex. there seems to be also a tone shift from pitching to a frustrated guy the idea of “she’s cute, what would i do to sleep with her” to “she’s cute, let’s use and destroy her”. The porn of today is the sickest warnings from 20-40 years ago. Why doesnt the media touch porn now that it is far rougher today than back then?
5a. In the same vein, have you ever seen the pro-sex worker poster and ads in cities or on the net?
6. If the Left is going pro-sex worker but anti-trafficking, why doesnt the media take that next step of pro-porn articles and rah-rah segments and spotlight the number of performers who are also escorting when not on camera?
7. Is porn far too useful for the progressive system of sociopolitical control to properly ban it or regulate it to hell or even set up an internet red light district?
8. Someone once told me that is was not just VHS in the early 80s that helped porn but the ability to buy personal lubricants over the counter in the early 80s. A similar thing has happened with the Internet making porn more readily available but at the same time, viagra is readily accessible. While HIV/AIDS scared the crap out of the industry in the late ’80s, do you think there is anything that could scare the industry or kill it naturally today?
I wrote about 15 years ago:
Early German cinema gave birth to the horror film which flourished during the excesses of the short-lived Weimar Republic of the 1920s. It was replaced by censorious and totalitarian Nazism, and then after WWII, by liberal democracy.
Nazism abhored explicit sexual expression. National Socialism viewed pornography as the speech of “bestial Jews” who used Weimar permissiveness to turn Berlin into “the national sewer.” (Joachim C. Fest. Hitler. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1973. p. 94)
Passed November 12, 1918, Article 118 of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic abolished all censorship. This atmosphere of sexual freedom, combined with inflation, led many into such marginal industries as pornography, and porn exploded in storefronts. (Joseph Slade, “Nazi Imagery in Contemporary Culture,” Dimensions, V. 11, No. 2, pp. 9-15)
The public protested and on May 29, 1920, the Reichstag passed the Reich Film Act, re-establishing censorship for movies. In 1926, Germany made all forms of porn criminal. Jewish intellectual Kurt Tucholvsky said the law truly aimed at allowing the government to curb all independent expression.
Tucholsky at one time edited the Berlin weekly Die Weltbuhne, whose staff was mainly composed of Jewish radicals. (Dennis Prager. Why the Jews. p. 64)
The magazine indiscriminately attacked Germany. Tucholsky wrote: “This country which I am allegedly betraying is not my country; this state is not my state; this legal system is not my legal system.”
Ordinary Germans reacted with fury to these nihilistic attacks, electing the Nazis in 1932 to bring order. On May 6, 1933, Nazi sympathizers raided the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, the creation of Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfield (1868-1935). Dr. Hirschfield fought for rights for homosexuals and for open sexual discussion. He authored the two-volume Sexual History of the World War and the five-column Encyclopedia of Sexology; “both mapped uncharted terrains of human sexuality.” (Slade)
A month before the raid, Dr. Hirschfield shipped boxes of scholarly and pornographic material to Argentina which eventually found its way to the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Reproduction, and Gender at Indiana University.
The Nazis campaign against sexual expression ranged from common porn to high art. The Nazis hated such artistic movements as Dad, Expressionism, and Futurism, which overflowed with erotic themes.
Imprisoning pornographers as “asocials,” the Nazis held public trials which may’ve been greeted by public approval. Porners were identified in concentration camps with black stars.
The Nazis used pornography, however, when it suited them. Hitler’s lieutenant Julius Streicher, who bragged about his porn collection, edited the tabloid Der Sturmer which showed drawings and fiction of Jews raping Aryan women. “Those of a psychoanalytic bent could make much of the fact that a number of German fascists demonized Jews by using the language and lore of pornography – while castigating Jews for immorally wielding pornographic material against the German nation in order to corrupt its youth.” (Slade)
A bureaucrat in Goebbels Propaganda Ministry, said that when pornography goes public, it produces “a truly pagan Kulturpolitik.” When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they flooded bookstores with pornography. In 1940, Josef Goebbels proposed a plan to turn the French against the English by faking a “pornographic diary” of an English prisoner of war, “with a detailed and salacious account of his bedroom adventures in Paris with their wives, sisters and sweethearts of French soldiers at the front.” (The Jewish Presence)
During World War II, Allied troops told each other dirty jokes about the Fuhrer’s supposed “missing testicle.” Writes Dr. Slade: “It is a classic example of the political function of pornography; a demotic – perhaps even democratic – attempt to reduce the mighty by rooting their motives within the mechanisms of basic bodily functions.”
Americans after the War took revenge on their enemies by caricaturing the Nazis in pornographic stories and images. Eventually Nazism became sexy.
The Mitchell Brothers released Never a Tender Moment in 1979, featuring Marilyn Chambers, Tanya Robertson and Carol Christy in a series of vignettes. The film lives up to its title, particularly in its second story “Hot Nazis.” First you see two naked women doing each other until Nazi guards, both men and women, arrive and brutally rape the women.
The Mitchell Brothers also released Beyond De Sade in 1979, as a continuation of Never a Tender Moment. “If you don’t do bizarre things and enjoy them, that will screw you up,” says Marilyn Chambers. “So, 24 hours a day, I think of all kinds of ways to have sex.”
Bob Rimmer recommends collecting this movie because it’s “the only real-life demonstration of masochism I have ever seen. It’s mind-boggling!”(Guide, p.216)
It’s no accident that Beyond De Sade and Never A Tender Moment appeared together, for there’s a straight line from the Marquis De Sade’s philosophy of might makes right to Hitler and German fascism.
Nazism, as portrayed in the rape sequence in Never a Tender Moment, is a common theme in porn and pop culture.
“We are the Master Race,” proclaims the American rock group The Dictators on a record album. Another rock group, Blue Oyster Cult whose umlaut over the capital O in Oyster seems to be part of the message, uses a quasi-swastika emblem and sings such songs as “Career of Evil,” “Subhuman,” and “Dominance and Submission.” Many rock performers sport swastikas and Iron Crosses as adornments. Trade in Nazi memorabilia is big business. Best-selling souvenirs include portraits and photographs of Hitler, Himmler, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, etc..
“The stuff that sells the best,” a storekeeper told a reporter, “are concentration-camp objects. Photographs, shots of concentration camps. That’s what people want.”
Generally, softcore films more than hardcore sexualized Nazism. The all-male film The Golden Boys of the S.S. said in ads that it was “the first daring look at the secret tortures and brutal pleasures” of those golden boys. The earlier film, 1975’s Ilse the She-Wolf of the S.S. is set in a Nazi Concentration camp where male prisoners were sterilized. It’s for those who like straight sex with their sadomasochism. Nazism and big tits proved a winner at the box office with the sequel, 1976’s Ilsa, Harem Keeper. In the same year, Russ Meyer combines big tits with Nazi humor in Up!. Lieben-Camp promises “violence and horror in a female concentration camp.” Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter reduces the Holocaust to sadomasochistic sex between an SS officer and his lovely virgin victim, first performed in a concentration camp and then later in a postwar reunion. “Seducer and seduced, torturer and victim become locked in an embrace of sexual perversity. In this film, as in Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties, the concentration camp, even the death camp, serves as a kind of prefabricated locale, with its images of sadism built it – whips, beatings, tortures, naked bodies, blood, urine, excrement. The Nazis, who mastered, refined, and mass-produced methods of torture and murder, continue to fascinate today’s generation of sadomasochists and other consumers of the culture of pornography.” (The Jewish Presence by Lucy Dawidowitz)
William S. Pechter termed this combination of sex, sadism, violence and Nazism “death-camp chic” in his May 1976 Commentary essay.
“Nazism is a ready source of authority fantasies,” writes Craig Anthony of RAME. “It doesn’t follow that an interest in such fantasies translates into affiliation with racism and genocide. Fantasies are the ultimate refuge from conformity.”
Commenting on the relations between Nazism and pornography in reviewing the pornographic The Olympia Reader, Lewis Corey wrote: “That those who turn to Sade, to books on torture or to the interminable floggings and humiliations detailed in a number of Olympia Press publications also dream of Hitler and the beauteous SS, of pogroms and the sexual torment of children is an obvious yet profoundly disturbing truth…. It makes it doubly important that we reexamine the political, psychological, social aspects of “total freedom” of publication. “Total freedom” of publication includes Streicher on the need to castrate all Jews; or any flysheet instructing us of the racial inferiority and sexual aggressiveness of Negroes or West Indians.”
In his 1952 essay, Lewis Corey traces the influence of de Sade and his philosophy of perversion among nineteenth and twentieth century writers, artists, and intellectuals who “were overwhelmingly anti-humanist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic.” The Italian decadents turned to Mussolini; the artistic and literary cults turned to Hitler.
“The Nazi elites were adepts in the practice of sadism, from homosexuality to lust murder. Their concentration camps became a king of ‘public brothel’ where sadistic practices flourished. including hypochorematophily (sic), necrophilia and anthropophagy.”
“The anti-humanists and sadists helped create and develop Fascism and Nazism. These movements, in turn, bred new generations of anti-humanists and sadists, providing ever-increasing audiences for the consumption of pornography, plain and political. Today a sizable population views the Third Reich’s terrors and murders only through a prism of pornography. Their loss of moral affect becomes a loss of political affect. Morally dulled, they become more vulnerable to the appeal of antihumanist movements and eventually more receptive to the obscenity of anti-Semitism.” (The Jewish Presence by Lucy Dawidowicz)
The world’s most powerful pornographer may be Beate Uhse, a German woman.
Shortly after Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, Uhse flew out of Berlin’s Gatow airport, just ahead of Red Army advanced units, to the only part of Germany not yet in the hands of Allied forces, Flensburg, 250 miles north west of Berlin.
Beate’s husband had been killed on a night-fighter mission towards the end of the war. Her parents had died at the hands of the Russians advancing into East Prussia where she’d grown up.
At 25 years of age, Beate had a two-year old boy to look after and 200 Reichsmarks to her name.
“There were a great many refugees there, women alone, with and without children. A village of 300 people was trying to cope with thousands. And when the war finally ended the men began to turn up, men who had survived the war and had gradually been released from prisoner-of-war camps. In those first days there was enormous joy, then after six weeks – tears and misery because they were having a baby. In Germany at that time there was no bread and butter, no cooking pots, no flannels and towels – nothing; and no contraceptives. So they were stuck there. They had lost their homes, the man had no job, he’d been a soldier for five years, and now there was a baby on the way. It was a total catastrophe.”
Nazism had discouraged contraception and sex education. But Beate knew about that stuff from her mother – one of the first five women in Germany to qualify as a doctor. She’d told Beate about the rhythym method, a way of calculating a woman’s fertility days in her menstrual cycle. Uhse printed up several thousand copies of a book on the subject which she sold for two Reichsmarks. Business boomed and soon she sold other books, contraceptives and sex aids.
In 1962, Uhse opened the world’s first sex shop, named Sex Institute for Marital Hygiene in Flensburg. Within a decade every major German city had one. Income from them allowed Beate to pay for a new company premises in Flensburg which the Mayor opened in 1969, saying that “People can work here with pleasure and love for the business of pleasure and love.”
In 1975 West Germany legalized hardcore, but it could only be bought in shops, not through the mail. So Beate began stocking fully explicit magazines and films, many of them from Scandinavia. She then opened movie theaters where she played X-rated features.
“And there was also the feeling, very much current at the time, of a need to educate the new generation and clear the guilt of the past; sex was as good a place to start as any.” (Immoral Tales, p. 45)
Since 1949, Germany has had law guaranteeing free expression, but the motion picture industry developed a board that classified films with an age limit. Porno films, when explicitly legalized in 1974, are restricted to places where alcohol is sold.
By the 1980s, all three of Uhse’s sons worked in the family business. One of them, Uli Rotermund, tried to establish a chain of retail porn in the US. David Friedman remembers. “Beate Uhse tried to set up business in the USA. She was about as welcome here as a case of hives.’
None of the established US chains would sell Beate’s movies. “Someone called Uli and pointed out how unfortunate it would be for business if he kept finding bodies in his auditoriums,” says one source. Uhse eventually pulled out of the US after losing $500,000. (Porn Gold)
Started in 1974, ZBF Vertrieb is the acronym for a leading German porn distributor. A limited liability company, it was run through the late ’80s by general manager Georg Schmitt and his four sons, Peter, Dieter, Lothar and Gunther. “There were three groups of people in the business before legalization in Germany,” a veteran told the authors of Porn Gold. “Horst Peter and his partner Wolf Waterschild, Charlie Brown and myself. Georg Schmidt started late. Officially he didn’t start until the law was changed [1975] but he and his sons did take some risks between 1973 and 1975. Everyone knew it was going to be legalized in the end.”
ZBF negotiates distribution deals with many of the big magazine and video producers. About 70% of their product, as of 1987, was distributed through an exclusive deal.
Turnover amounted to about $50 million in 1987.
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.
