by Thomas Weber
Even though anti-Semitism had been part and parcel of Hitler’s emerging worldview since the summer of 1919, only two of his previous speeches in 1920 had explicitly had anti-Semitism as their sole focus. His August 13 speech likely stemmed from a realization that more needed to be done to get his message through to the public.
Hitler spoke for more than two hours during the Wednesday evening event in the Hofbräuhaus. From his first to last sentence, he tried to convey the message that the NSDAP was not just any anti-Semitic party. In his opening statement, he boldly proclaimed that his party stood “at the head” of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany. Seemingly effortlessly, Hitler kept his audience spellbound. He was interrupted fifty-eight times by applause, even shouts of “bravo.” His speech was awash with jokes full of mockery, sarcasm, and irony intermingled with occasional dry or self-deprecating jokes. The audience roared with laughter when he stated that the Bible was not exactly the work of an anti-Semite and when he said, “We are constantly looking for ways to do something, and when Germans cannot find anything else to do, then they will at least bash in one another’s head.”20
Just as in the past, the anti-Semitic message that Hitler presented that night combined anticapitalist anti-Semitism with racial Judeophobia. His central theme was the warning that international Jewish capitalism was in the process of destroying Germany and the rest of the world; that Jews were selfish, working just for themselves rather than for the common good. This is why, he posited, Jews were incapable of forming a state of their own but had to rely on parasitically sucking the blood of other people. In that way, he said, Jews could not help but to destroy states in order to rule them. To him, Jewish “materialism and mammonism” were the antithesis of true socialism. He reiterated Gottfried Feder’s ideas about Jewish finance, without mentioning him by name. And he defined Britain as “that other Jewry.”
The bottom line of Hitler’s argument was that Jews were weakening Germany, as they were bringing about a “lowering of the racial level.” People therefore faced the choice either “to liberate themselves from the unwanted visitor or themselves to perish.” Hitler’s central political preoccupation ever since the days of his politicization during the previous year—how to build a greater Germany that would never again lose a major war and would survive for all times in the emerging international system—clearly shone throughout his speech.
Hitler also used this speech to attack mainstream conservative Bavarian attitudes toward Judaism, faulting Munich’s most important newspaper, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, for giving the city’s Jews a voice in its pages. Not incidentally, the newspaper’s new editor in chief was none other than Mayr’s collaborator Fritz Gerlich, an opponent of anti-Semitism. And just as in Hitler’s first anti-Semitic pronouncements in 1919, anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism was only a bit of an afterthought in his speech. He did not treat internationalist communists as actors in their own right, but presented them, as well as Karl Marx himself, as opportunistic Jewish actors in the hands of an international Jewish plutocracy consisting of investors and high financiers.
That evening, Hitler essentially held out his hands to former Spartacists. Whether doing so was a reflection of his own activities on the left during the revolution in Munich seems likely but is impossible to prove (or disprove, for that matter). He argued that even the “fiercest Spartacists” were, in reality, good-natured and had merely been misled by internationalist Jews.21 This is a view that he expressed publicly not only for tactical purposes. He would state much the same in private for the rest of his life. For instance, on August 2, 1941, he would tell his inner entourage in military HQ: “I won’t reproach any simple folks for having been communists. It is a matter of reproach only for an intellectualist.” He would also say that “on the whole I find our communists a thousand fold more agreeable” than some of the aristocrats who would collaborate with him for a while.22
In his entire speech of August 13, Hitler did not mention the term “Bolshevism” a single time.23 Only during the discussion following his speech, when political opponents directly challenged him by invoking the situation in Russia, did he finally utter it. Yet he did so only to tell his critics that they “haven’t got a clue about the whole system of Bolshevism,” as they failed to realize that its aim was not to improve the lot of the people but to destroy races on behalf of internationalist Jewish capitalists. In Hitler’s anticapitalism and his emerging anti-Bolshevism in 1919 and 1920, there was a clear hierarchy: he presented Bolshevism as being in the hands of internationalist Jewish capitalists residing in Britain, the United States, and France, thus framing anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism as an important means to a greater end.24
A recurring feature of Hitler’s speeches, not just the one on August 13, was a biologized form of anti-Semitism he had already hinted at in his letter to Adolf Gemlich: the use of medical terminology to describe the supposedly harmful influence of Jews. In a speech of August 7, 1920, he had said, “Do not think that it is possible to combat a disease without killing the cause, without exterminating the bacillus. And do not think that it is possible to combat racial tuberculosis without taking care that the nation is freed from the cause of its racial tuberculosis.” Jews, therefore, had to be fought without any compromise: “The effect of Jewry shall never pass, and the poisoning of the nation shall not end until the cause, the Jew, has been removed from our midst.”25
From this talk about Jews in 1920, there was a direct line to Hitler’s biologized utterances about the Jews as the Holocaust was getting under way in the early 1940s. In July 1941, as SS Einsatzgruppen—the mobile killing units of the SS that operated in the rear of regular army units during the invasion of the Soviet Union—massacred entire Jewish communities, Hitler would express much the same idea: “I feel like the Robert Koch of politics,” Hitler would tell his entourage in military HQ. “He found the tubercle bacillus and broke new ground for medical science. I discovered that the Jew is the bacillus and the ferment of all social decomposition.”26
Hitler’s anti-Semitic expressions were not particularly original.27 Even though his views differed from mainstream Bavarian anti-Semitism, they were nevertheless stitched together from ideas expressed by other extremists in Bavaria and elsewhere. However, the real question is not whether Hitler’s anti-Semitic language was original. Rather, it is whether it had the same meaning for him as it did for others who employed similar language.
Further, the question is why Hitler’s overt anti-Semitism had emerged in the summer of 1919. Linking Hitler’s anti-Semitism to his Damascus-road experience in July 1919 and identifying anti-Semitic influences to which he had been exposed at that moment in time still does not quite explain why his newfound anti-Semitism became such a powerful and all-encompassing tool for him to understand the world and to explain it to others.
To understand Hitler’s extreme anti-Semitism and its legacy for the rest of his life, a comparison of the shape of his anti-Semitism and that of other people in post-Versailles Munich will be of limited use. To comprehend why anti-Semitism became so attractive for Hitler, it needs to be understood why for so many people in post–First World War Europe, Hitler included, anti-Semitism became the prism through which to view and make sense of all the ills of the world. Further, it needs to be explored whether people used extreme forms of anti-Semitism as a metaphor to understand the world, or whether they understood their anti-Semitism in a literal sense.
Simply to state that anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred in the world and that it is irrational in character conceals as much as it reveals.28 Why do people invoke such an irrational sentiment at certain points in time, and not at others? Why does anti-Semitism take such diverse forms? And why, in cases of social tension between Jews and non-Jews—not just in postwar Munich but in the history of Western civilization in general, including the present—does anti-Jewish hostility tend to take a form grossly disproportionate to the act or social phenomenon that triggers it?
The history of the
social relations between Jews and non-Jews over the last two and a half millennia has not shown a constant, linear, and unchanging hostility toward Jews. Anti-Semitism’s resilience and ability to cross cultural, religious, political, economic, and geographical boundaries and persist from generation to generation lies in its being a powerful tool with which to discuss and try to make sense of the problems of the world during particular times. It first was employed in ancient Egypt and subsequently became a defining feature of the underbelly of the Western tradition.
When producing fresh waves of anti-Jewish thought, successive generations of anti-Semites were not responding to Jewish social practices. Rather, they recast earlier expressions of anti-Semitic ideas as frames into which they could fit the issues of their own world and thus make sense of them.29 It is this tradition that Hitler and other Europeans invoked to make sense of the world revolutionary crisis of the late 1910s and early 1920s. And it is to this tradition that Adolf Hitler turned, to make sense of the origins of historical evil in general30 and of Germany’s weakness in particular. This is why anti-Semitism then became so attractive as a motivating power for Hitler and countless other people in guiding and transforming events at a moment of intense national crisis.
Yet the fashion in which anti-Semitism operated as providing guidance in post–First World War Germany varied. For some people, anti-Semitism was literal in character and translated into direct action against Jews; for others, it was metaphorical; and for still others, its core was literal but some of its more extreme expressions were metaphorical. Examining these possibilities will help us determine how Hitler understood his own Judeophobia, and how others interpreted it.
It was not just mainstream anti-Jewish hatred in Munich after the fall of the Soviet Republic, which took the form of anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism, that was not universally directed against all Jews. In cases in which anti-Semitism sought to explain the world but was of metaphorical kind, anti-Semitism was not always directed intentionally against all people of Jewish origin. A prime example of this is the anti-Semitism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which is of the utmost importance as there are strong echoes of Chamberlain’s works in Hitler’s speeches and writings, and Hitler himself would identify Chamberlain as a major influence.31
The anti-Semitism of Richard Wagner’s English-born son-in-law was most famously expressed in his 1899 book Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the 19th Century), a two-volume treatise about the nexus between race and cultural development, which Chamberlain’s publisher Hugo Bruckmann—the husband of the impoverished Romanian Princess Elsa—had inspired him to write. The work was meant to make sense of the century that was coming to a close, so as to help people find a footing and guidance in the new century.32
Even though Chamberlain’s central category is “race,” his primary preoccupation was with Judaism, not with Jews. For Chamberlain, race was not really a biological category. Rather, he advocated that the creation of a new “pure” race would allow civilization to advance. For Chamberlain, that new kind of race would be defined by a common adherence to a set of ideas, rather than by common biological features. Chamberlain thus had no problem dedicating his Grundlagen to Julius Wiesner, a Viennese scientist of Jewish origin. Furthermore, a famous playwright-writer, Karl Kraus, an assimilated, non-Zionist Jew and convert to Catholicism, was full of praise for the Grundlagen, and did not believe that Chamberlain’s racial anti-Semitism was aimed at assimilated Jews or converts like himself.33
Indeed, as Chamberlain had made clear in a letter to Hugo Bruckmann, he thought that “the Jew is entirely an artificial product.” In his letter dated August 7, 1898, Wagner’s son-in-law argued that “it is possible to be a Jew without being a Jew; and that one need not necessarily be a ‘Jew’ while being Jewish.” Chamberlain did not really think that Jews—that is, people one might encounter—were the real problem: “The truth is that the ‘Jewish danger’ is much deeper, and the Jew is not in fact responsible for it: we ourselves created it and we must overcome it.”34 In other words, to Chamberlain, being Jewish meant adhering to a set of ideas that might infuse Jews and non-Jews alike. His ultimate goal was to purge those supposedly harmful ideas from the world.
The anti-Semitism of Otto Weininger, the person whom Hitler’s paternal mentor Dietrich Eckart admired most, closely resembled that of Chamberlain. For Weininger, Judaism was a state of mind that rejected transcendental ideas and celebrated materialism. Per Weininger, Judaism was a psychological constitution inherent in all mankind and which reached its highest expression in the Jew as an ideal type. He preached that all people had to struggle against the Jewishness in themselves, warning that Western civilization was becoming increasingly Jewish in spirit in the modern age.35
In short, Chamberlain and Weininger—the two thinkers who had the biggest influence, or at any rate one of the biggest, in the development of Hitler’s and his mentor’s anti-Semitism—understood their own anti-Semitism to be a rejection of a certain set of ideas. Chamberlain was not the only person to view his racial anti-Semitism as metaphorical in character. Many people who were, or would become, close to Hitler shared his views. And it was precisely because they perceived Chamberlain’s anti-Semitism as being metaphorical in character that they liked his anti-Semitism.
For instance, Hugo Bruckmann—who first had been introduced to Chamberlain by the author’s Jewish friend, the Bayreuth-based conductor Hermann Levi—as well as his wife, Elsa, were taken with Chamberlain’s book. On its publication, Elsa Bruckmann had written in her diary: “Read Chamberlain’s ‘Foundations of the 19th Century,’ am really taken by content and form; find no other book enjoyable after it.”36 Chamberlain’s metaphorical anti-Semitism was to her taste, as it did not create any conflict with her continued friendships with her close friend Yella and many other Jews.
Her interaction with Jews then as well as for the rest of her life is of the utmost importance, not just due to her husband’s friendship with Chamberlain, but because from the mid-1920s to the 1940s, Elsa and Hitler would be so close that Elsa would be almost a mother figure to him. Her interaction with Jews thus sheds light on Jewish-Gentile interactions in some of Hitler’s closest social circles, and by extension on how people close to him viewed the character of Hitler’s own anti-Semitism, and on how their perception of his attitudes toward Jews changed over the years.
Elsa Bruckmann and Gabriele “Yella” von Oppenheimer had been intimate friends ever since they had first met in 1893, when Elsa, then still an impoverished princess, had spent several weeks in the Palais of the Tedescos, an upper-class Viennese Jewish family. In the years following the First World War, the relationship of the two women was as close as was humanly possible to maintain for people living in different cities. For instance, in both 1921 and 1922, Elsa and her husband would spend more than two weeks with the Oppenheimers on their estate in the Austrian Alps.37
Elsa Bruckmann would continue to admire the writings of her husband’s star author. For instance, on December 31, 1921, she would write a letter to Austrian nationalist poet Max Mell in which she would share her thoughts about Chamberlain’s just-published, deeply anti-Semitic Mensch und Gott (Man and God): “I am not surprised that Ch.’s Mensch und Gott made such a profound impression on you: it is a very personal, very earnest book; real engagem[en]t with essential things!”38
Elsa Bruckmann was also close to Jewish writer Karl Wolfskehl and his wife, Hanna. In 1913, Hanna had professed that both her husband and she “love her [i.e., Elsa] very much.” Karl’s three passions were mysticism, collecting things (in particular, old books, walking sticks, and elephants in any form), and Zionism. Prior to the turn of the century, he even had met Theodor Herzl, the father of modern-day Zionism. He also was friends with Martin Buber, possibly the twentieth century’s most famous Zionist philosopher. Wolfskehl also was involved with the Munich Zionist local chapter and, in 1903, he had covered the Basle Zionist (Uganda) Congress for a Munich newspaper. Nevertheless,
he considered himself first a German and then a Jew. Wolfskehl had little interest in political Zionism; rather, he saw in Zionism the source of a cultural and spiritual renewal of Judaism.39 Possibly the reason Elsa Bruckmann and Karl Wolfskehl could be friends was that her anti-Semitism and his Zionism, while real and deep-seated, were both first and foremost metaphorical.
Elsa would continue to adhere to her early 1920s anti-Semitism even after she developed a mother-son relationship with Hitler. Hence, both Bruckmanns would be shocked by the gathering anti-Semitic storm in 1938, as would Karl Alexander von Müller, the historian who had been such an influence on Hitler during his propaganda course and who was close to the couple. The three took particular exception to the persecution of Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht, as they informed their common friend Ulrich von Hassell on a visit to Hassell’s house in Ebenhausen to the south of Munich. As Hassell would write in his diary on November 27, 1938: “Their [i.e., the Bruckmanns’ as well as Müller and his wife’s] horror about the shameless persecution of Jews is as great as that of all decent people. Even the most loyal National Socialists living in [the town of] Dachau, who ‘stuck with it’ until now, are, according to Bruckmann, completely finished after witnessing the devilish barbarism of the SS tormenting those unfortunate Jews who had been detained.”40
In May and June 1942, Elsa Bruckmann would intervene repeatedly with Nazi authorities to try to prevent Yella’s deportation, ultimately arranging for Yella to be permitted to stay for the rest of her life with her grandson Hermann in Wartenburg Castle in Austria. In November 1942, her friendship with Jewish playwright Elsa Bernstein allowed the latter to avoid being deported from Theresienstadt concentration camp to a death camp in Poland, simply by virtue of Bernstein’s mentioning she was on close terms with Elsa Bruckmann and Chamberlain’s sister-in-law Winifred Wagner (Bernstein would survive the Holocaust).41
