When I wrote about the porn industry, I was struck by the many parallels between present-day American and 1920s Weimar Republic.<\/p>\n
I just did this podcast interview (Weimerica Weekly)<\/a> with Ryan Landry.<\/p>\n Here are some of the questions I faced:<\/p>\n \n1. 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?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 5a. In the same vein, have you ever seen the pro-sex worker poster and ads in cities or on the net?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wrote about 15 years ago:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n Americans after the War took revenge on their enemies by caricaturing the Nazis in pornographic stories and images. Eventually Nazism became sexy.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Nazism, as portrayed in the rape sequence in Never a Tender Moment, is a common theme in porn and pop culture.<\/p>\n “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..<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n William S. Pechter termed this combination of sex, sadism, violence and Nazism “death-camp chic” in his May 1976 Commentary essay.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n “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)<\/p>\n The world’s most powerful pornographer may be Beate Uhse, a German woman.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n At 25 years of age, Beate had a two-year old boy to look after and 200 Reichsmarks to her name.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.’<\/p>\n 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)<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Turnover amounted to about $50 million in 1987.<\/p>\n Paul Johnson writes in his classic book Modern Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief In culture however it was a different matter. There is nothing more This was the principal reason why anti-Semitism made such Marx’s invention of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was the most comprehensive But if modern anti-Semitism was by no means a specifically German The Volk movement spawned a crop of anti-Semitic ‘peasant’ German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a ‘back to the It is, indeed, impossible to list all the varieties of ingredients which, By the 1920s, in brief, any political leader in Germany who wished The Jews tried everything to combat the poison. Some brought up Germany’s defeat in 1918 was bound to unleash a quest for It was at this point that the notion of a violent resolution of the The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary 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: … Continue reading
\nthat Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed,
\nwas not the entire regime a Judenrepublik. There was very little basis
\nfor this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories
\nthat Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist
\nnetwork. The Jews, it is true, had been prominent in the first
\nCommunist movements. But in Russia they lost ground steadily once
\nthe Bolsheviks came to power, and by 1925 the regime was already
\nanti-Semitic. In Germany also the Jews, though instrumental in
\ncreating the Communist Party (kpd), were quickly weeded out once
\nit was organized as a mass party. By the 1932 elections, when it put
\nup 500 candidates, not one was Jewish. 29 Nor, at the other end of the
\nspectrum, were the Jews particularly important in German finance
\nand industry. The belief rested on the mysterious connection between
\nBismarck and his financial adviser, Gerson von Bleichroder, the Jew
\nwho organized the Rothschilds and other banking houses to provide
\nthe finance for Germany’s wars. 30 But in the 1920s Jews were rarely
\ninvolved in government finance. Jewish businessmen kept out of
\npolitics. Big business was represented by Alfred Hugenberg and the
\nGerman Nationalist People’s Party, which was anti-Semitic. Jews
\nwere very active at the foundation of Weimar, but after 1920 one of
\nthe few Jews to hold high office was Walther Rathenau and he was
\nmurdered two years later. <\/p>\n
\ngalling than a cultural tyranny, real or imaginary, and in Weimar
\nculture ‘they’ could plausibly be identified with the Jews. The most
\nhated of them, Tucholsky, was a Jew. So were other important critics
\nand opinion formers, like Maximilian Harden, Theodor Wolff,
\nTheodor Lessing, Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten. Nearly all the best
\nfilm-directors were Jewish, and about half the most successful
\nplaywrights, such as Sternheim and Schnitzler. The Jews were
\ndominant in light entertainment and still more in theatre criticism, a
\nvery sore point among the Easterners. There were many brilliant and
\nmuch publicized Jewish performers: Elizabeth Bergner, Erna Sack,
\nPeter Lorre, Richard Tauber, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner, for
\ninstance. Jews owned important newspapers, such as Frankfurt’s
\nZeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung. They ran
\nthe most influential art galleries. They were particularly strong in
\npublishing, which (next to big city department stores) was probably
\nthe area of commerce in which Jews came closest to predominance.
\nThe best liberal publishers, such as Malik Verlag, Kurt Wolff, the
\nCassirers, Georg Bondi, Erich Reiss and S.Fischer, were owned or run
\nby Jews. There were a number of prominent and highly successful
\nJewish novelists: Hermann Broch, Alfred Doblin, Franz Werfel,
\nArnold Zweig, Vicki Baum, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank,
\nAlfred Neumann and Ernst Weiss, as well as Franz Kafka, whom the
\nintelligentsia rated alongside Proust and Joyce and who was an
\nobject of peculiar detestation among the Easterners. In every depart-
\nment of the arts, be it architecture, sculpture, painting or music,
\nwhere change had been most sudden and repugnant to conservative
\ntastes, Jews had been active in the transformation, though rarely in
\ncontrol. The one exception, perhaps, was music, where Schoenberg
\nwas accused of ‘assassinating’ the German tradition; but even here,
\nhis far more successful and innovatory pupil, Berg, was an Aryan
\nCatholic. However, it is undoubtedly true to say that Weimar culture
\nwould have been quite different, and infinitely poorer, without its
\nJewish element, and there was certainly enough evidence to make a
\ntheory of Jewish cultural conspiracy seem plausible. 31 <\/p>\n
\nastonishing headway in Weimar Germany. Until the Republic,
\nanti-Semitism was not a disease to which Germany was thought to be
\nespecially prone. Russia was the land of the pogrom; Paris was the
\ncity of the anti-Semitic intelligentsia. Anti-Semitism seems to have
\nmade its appearance in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time
\nwhen the determinist type of social philosopher was using Darwin’s
\nprinciple of Natural Selection to evolve ‘laws’ to explain the colossal
\nchanges brought about by industrialism, the rise of megalopolis and
\nthe alienation of huge, rootless proletariats. Christianity was content
\nwith a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular
\nfaiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The
\nenemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race. <\/p>\n
\nof these hate-theories and it has continued to provide a foundation
\nfor all paranoid revolutionary movements, whether fascist-
\nnationalist or Communist-internationalist. Modern theoretical anti-
\nSemitism was a derivative of Marxism, involving a selection (for
\nreasons of national, political or economic convenience) of a particu-
\nlar section of the bourgeoisie as the subject of attack. It was a more
\nobviously emotional matter than analysis purely by class, which is
\nwhy Lenin used the slogan that ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism
\nof fools’. But in terms of rationality there was little to choose
\nbetween the two. Lenin was saying, in effect, that it was the entire
\nbourgeoisie, not just Jewry, which was to blame for the ills of
\nmankind. And it is significant that all Marxist regimes, based as they
\nare on paranoid explanations of human behaviour, degenerate
\nsooner or later into anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism, in short,
\nwas part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of
\nindividual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt \u2014 the
\nrevival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous,
\neven bestial, of instincts. It is very curious that, when the new
\nanti-Semitism made its appearance in Germany, among those who
\nattacked it was Nietzsche, always on the lookout for secular,
\npseudo-rational substitutes for the genuine religious impulse. He
\ndenounced ‘these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites . . .
\nwho endeavour to stir up all the bovine elements of the nation by a
\nmisuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude.’ 32 <\/p>\n
\nphenomenon, there were powerful forces which favoured its growth
\nthere. The modern German nation was, in one sense, the creation of
\nPrussian militarism. In another, it was the national expression of the
\nGerman romantic movement, with its stress upon the Volk, its
\nmythology and its natural setting in the German landscape, especially
\nits dark, mysterious forests. The German Volk movement dated from
\nNapoleonic times and was burning ‘alien’ and ‘foreign’ books, which
\ncorrupted ‘ Volk culture’, as early as 1817. Indeed it was from the Volk
\nmovement that Marx took his concept of ‘alienation’ in industrial
\ncapitalism. A Volk had a soul, which was derived from its natural
\nhabitat. As the historical novelist Otto Gemlin put it, in an article in Die
\nTat, organ of the Vo\/^-romantic movement, ‘For each people and each
\nrace, the countryside becomes its own peculiar landscape’. 33 If the
\nlandscape was destroyed, or the Volk divorced from it, the soul dies.
\nThe Jews were not a Volk because they had lost their soul: they lacked
\n‘rootedness’. This contrast was worked out with great ingenuity by a
\nBavarian professor of antiquities, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, in a series of
\nvolumes called Land und Leute {Places and People), published in the
\n1850s and 1860s. 34 The true basis of the Volk was the peasant. There
\ncould of course be workers, but they had to be ‘artisans’, organized in
\nlocal guilds. The proletariat, on the other hand, was the creation of the
\nJews. Having no landscape of their own, they destroyed that of others,
\ncausing millions of people to be uprooted and herded into giant cities,
\nthe nearest they possessed to a ‘landscape’ of their own. ‘The
\ndominance of the big city’, wrote Riehl, ‘will be the equivalent to the
\ndominance of the proletariat’ ; moreover, the big cities would link hands
\nacross the world, forming a ‘world bourgeois’ and a ‘world proletariat’
\nconspiring to destroy everything that had a soul, was ‘natural’,
\nespecially the German landscape and its peasantry. 35 <\/p>\n
\nnovels, of which the most notorious was Herman Lons’s Der
\nWehrwolf (1910), set in the Thirty Years’ War, and showing the
\npeasants turning on their oppressors from the towns like wolves:
\n‘What meaning does civilization have? A thin veneer beneath which
\nnature courses, waiting until a crack appears and it can burst into the
\nopen.’ ‘Cities are the tomb of Germanism.’ ‘Berlin is the domain of
\nthe Jews.’ Jews functioned among the peasants as money-lenders,
\ncattle-dealers and middlemen, and the first organized political anti-
\nSemitism surfaced in the peasant parties and the Bund der Land-
\nwirte, or Farmers’ Union. Hitler was an avid reader of ‘peasant
\nnovels’, especially the works of Dieter Eckhart, who adapted Peer
\nGynt into German, and of Wilhelm von Polenz, who also identified
\nthe Jews with the cruelty and alienation of modern industrial society. <\/p>\n
\ncountryside’ movement. There were special Volk schools, which
\nstressed open-air life. ‘Mountain theatres’, shaped from natural
\namphitheatres, were built in the Harz Mountains and elsewhere, for
\ndramatized ‘Volk rites’ and other spectacles, an activity the Nazis
\nlater adopted on a huge scale and with great panache. The first youth
\nmovements, especially the highly successful Wandervogel, strum-
\nming guitars and hiking through the countryside, took on an
\nanti-Semitic coloration, especially when they invaded the schools
\nand universities. The ‘garden city’ movement in Germany was led by
\na violent anti-Semite, Theodor Fritsch, who published the Antisem-
\nitic Catechism, which went through forty editions, 1887-1936, and
\nwho was referred to by the Nazis as Der Altmeister, the master-
\nteacher. Even the sunbathing movement, under the impulse of Aryan
\nand Nordic symbols, acquired an anti-Semitic flavour. 36 Indeed in
\n1920s Germany there were two distinct types of nudism: ‘Jewish’
\nnudism, symbolized by the black dancer Josephine Baker, which was
\nheterosexual, commercial, cosmopolitan, erotic and immoral; and
\nanti-Semitic nudism, which was German, Volkisch, Nordic, non-
\nsexual (sometimes homosexual), pure and virtuous. 37 <\/p>\n
\nfrom the 1880s and 1890s onwards, were stirred into the poisonous
\nbrew of German anti-Semitism. Unlike Marxism, which was essen-
\ntially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a
\ncultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism. It was
\nEugen Diederichs, the publisher of Die Tat from 1912, who coined
\nthe phrase ‘the new romanticism’, the answer to Jewish Expression-
\nism. He published Der Wehrwolf, and at his house in Jena, sur-
\nrounded by intellectuals from the Youth Movement, he wore
\nzebra-striped trousers and a turban and launched the saying ‘Demo-
\ncracy is a civilization, while aristocracy equals culture.’ He also
\ncontrived to transform Nietzsche into an anti-Semitic hero. Other
\naudacious acts of literary theft were perpetrated. Tacitus’ Germania
\nwas turned into a seminal Volkisch text; Darwin’s works were
\ntortured into a ‘scientific’ justification for race ‘laws’, just as Marx
\nhad plundered them for class ‘laws’. But there were plenty of genuine
\nmentors too. Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion
\nstripped of Christianity because it had been Judaized by St Paul, ‘the
\nRabbi’. Julius Langbehn taught that assimilated Jews were ‘a pest
\nand a cholera’, who poisoned the artistic creativity of the Volk: they
\nshould be exterminated, or reduced to slavery along with other
\n‘lower’ races. 38 Both Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Eugen
\nDiihring stressed the necessary ‘barbarism’ or Gothic element in
\nGerman self-defence against Jewish decadence and the importance of
\nthe ‘purity’ and idealism of the Nordic pantheon. Chamberlain,
\nwhom Hitler was to visit on his deathbed to kiss his hands in 1927,
\nargued that God flourished in the German and the Devil in the
\nJewish race, the polarities of Good and Evil. The Teutons had
\ninherited Greek aristocratic ideals and Roman love of justice and
\nadded their own heroism and fortitude. Thus it was their role to fight
\nand destroy the only other race, the Jews, which had an equal purity
\nand will to power. So the Jew was not a figure of low comedy but a
\nmortal, implacable enemy: the Germans should wrest all the power
\nof modern technology and industry from the Jews, in order to
\ndestroy them totally. 39 Some of the German racial theorists were
\nMarxists, like Ludwig Woltmann, who transformed the Marxist
\nclass-struggle into a world race-struggle and advocated the arousal of
\nthe masses by oratory and propaganda to mobilize the Germans into
\nthe conquests needed to ensure their survival and proliferation as a
\nrace: ‘The German race has been selected to dominate the earth.’ <\/p>\n
\nto make anti-Semitism an agent in his ‘will to power’ could assemble
\nhis campaign from an enormous selection of slogans, ideas and
\nfantasies, which had accumulated over more than half a century. The
\nVersailles Treaty itself gave the controversy new life by driving into
\nGermany a great wave of frightened Jews from Russia, Poland and
\nGermany’s surrendered territories. Thus it became an urgent ‘prob-
\nlem’, demanding ‘solutions’. They were not wanting either. There
\nwere proposals for double-taxation for Jews; isolation or apartheid;
\na return to the ghetto system; special laws, with hanging for Jews
\nwho broke them; an absolute prohibition of inter-marriage between
\nAryan Germans and Jews. A 1918 best-seller was Artur Dinter’s Die
\nSiinde wider das Blut {Sins Against the Blood), describing how rich
\nJews violated the racial purity of an Aryan woman. Calls for the
\nextermination of the Jews became frequent and popular, and anti-
\nSemitic pamphlets circulated in millions. There were many violent
\nincidents but when, in 1919, the Bavarian police asked for advice on
\nhow to cope with anti-Semitism, Berlin replied there was no remedy
\nsince ‘it has its roots in the difference of race which divides the
\nIsraelitic tribe from our Volk.<\/p>\n
\ntheir children to be artisans or farmers. They enlisted in the army.
\nThey attempted ultra-assimilation. A Jewish poet, Ernst Lissauer,
\nwrote the notorious ‘Hate England’ hymn. They went to the other
\nextreme and tried Zionism. Or they formled militant Jewish organiza-
\ntions, student leagues, duelling clubs. But each policy raised more
\ndifficulties than it removed, for anti-Semitism was protean, hydra-
\nheaded and impervious to logic or evidence. As Jakob Wassermann
\nput it: ‘Vain to seek obscurity. They say: the coward, he is creeping
\ninto hiding, driven by his evil conscience. Vain to go among them
\nand offer them one’s hand. They say: why does he take such liberties
\nwith his Jewish pushfulness? Vain to keep faith with them as a
\ncomrade in arms or a fellow-citizen. They say: he is Proteus, he can
\nassume any shape or form. Vain to help them strip off the chains of
\nslavery. They say: no doubt he found it profitable. Vain to counter-
\nact the poison.’ 41 Mortitz Goldstein argued that it was useless to
\nexpose the baselessness of anti-Semitic ‘evidence’: ‘What would be
\ngained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine. When all
\ncalumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions
\nabout us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable.’ 42 <\/p>\n
\nscapegoats, alien treachery in the midst of the Volk. Even without
\ncollateral evidence, the Jews, the embodiment of Westernizing ‘civili-
\nzation’, were automatically cast for the role. But there was evidence
\nas well! The influx of Jews in the immediate post-war period was a
\nfresh dilution of the Volk, presaging a further assault on its martyred
\nculture. And Weimar itself, did it not provide daily proof, in
\nparliament, on the stage, in the new cinemas, in the bookshops, in
\nthe magazines and newspapers and art galleries, everywhere an
\nordinary, bewildered German turned, that this cosmopolitan, cor-
\nrupting and ubiquitous conspiracy was taking over the Reich? What
\npossible doubt could there be that a crisis was at hand, demanding
\nextreme solutions? <\/p>\n
\nconflict between culture and civilization began to take a real grip on
\nthe minds of some Germans. Here, once again, the fatal act of Lenin,
\nin beginning the cycle of political violence in 1917, made its morbid
\ncontribution. Anti-Semitism had always presented itself as defensive.
\nNow, its proposals to use violence, even on a gigantic scale, could be
\njustified as defensive. For it was generally believed, not only in
\nGermany but throughout Central and Western Europe, that Bolshevism was
\nJewish-inspired and led, and that Jews were in control of
\nCommunist Parties, and directed Red revolutions and risings wherever
\nthey occurred. Trotsky, the most ferocious of the Bolsheviks, who
\nactually commanded the Petrograd putsch, was undoubtedly a Jew; so
\nwere a few other Russian leaders. Jews had been prominent in the
\nSpartacist rising in Berlin, in the Munich Soviet government, and in the
\nabortive risings in other German cities. Imagination rushed in where
\nfacts were hard to get. Thus, Lenin’s real name was Issachar
\nZederblum. The Hungarian Red Revolution was directed not by Bela
\nKun but by a Jew called Cohn. Lenin’s Red Terror was a priceless gift to
\nthe anti-Semitic extremists, particularly since most of its countless
\nvictims were peasants and the most rabid and outspoken of the Cheka
\nterrorizers was the Latvian Jew Latsis. Munich now became the
\nanti-Semitic capital of Germany, because it had endured the Bolshevist-
\nJewish terror of Kurt Eisner and his gang. The Munchener Beobachter,
\nfrom which the Nazi Volkische Beobachter later evolved, specialized in
\nRed atrocity stories, such as Kun or Cohn’s crucifixion of priests, his use
\nof a ‘mobile guillotine’ and so on. And many of the news items reported
\nfrom Russia were, of course, perfectly true. They formed a solid plinth
\non which a flaming monument of fantasy could be set up. Hitler was
\nsoon to make highly effective use of the Red Terror fear, insisting, time
\nand again, that the Communists had already killed 30 million people.
\nThe fact that he had added a nought in no way removed the reality of
\nthose first, terrible digits. He presented his National Socialist militancy
\nas a protective response and a preemptive strike. It was ‘prepared to
\noppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater
\nterrorism’. 43 And in that ‘greater terrorism’ the Jews would be hunted
\ndown not as innocent victims but as actual or potential terrorists
\nthemselves. <\/p>\n
\nstage in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German
\nbody politic. The German state was a huge creature with a small and
\nlimited brain. The Easterners, following the example of Bismarck,
\ngrafted onto the Prussian military state a welfare state which provided
\nworkers with social insurance and health-care as of right and by law. As
\nagainst the Western liberal notion of freedom of choice and private
\nprovision based on high wages, it imposed the paternalistic alternative
\nof compulsory and universal security. The state was nursemaid as well
\nas sergeant-major. It was a towering shadow over the lives of ordinary
\npeople and their relationship towards it was one of dependence and
\ndocility. The German industrialists strongly approved of this notion of
\nthe state as guardian, watching over with firm but benevolent solicitude
\nthe lives of its citizens. 44 The philosophy was Platonic; the result
\ncorporatist. The German Social Democrats did nothing to arrest this
\ntotalitarian drift when they came briefly to power in 1918; quite the
\ncontrary. They reinforced it. The Weimar Republic opened windows
\nbut it did not encourage the citizen to venture outside the penumbra
\nof state custody. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"