The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  His brother, Matthias—again—put it more strongly. “The British behave as if they had conquered Hitler’s hordes single-handedly. And they continue to see us as Nazis, as if they have to refight the battles every evening [i.e., on TV]. They are enchanted by this Nazi dimension.” Gisela Stuart, a German-born British Member of Parliament for the Birmingham Edgbaston constituency, said that the Mattuseks were “quite right to say the British are still obsessed with the Nazi period.”11

  In 2006 John Ramsden, professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London, published an entire book, Don’t Mention the War, a study of the relationship between Germans and the British since 1890. He concluded that there had been several periods of friction during that time—around the turn of the twentieth century, in the run up to World War I, in the midst of that war—but that the British had thought highly of Weimar Germany and had not shown the same level of hate during World War II that they had in the earlier conflict (it was a clash more of ideologies than of peoples). Since 1945, war films and novels had kept the friction warm, however, aided by the Thatcher government when “Britain experienced…more open anti-German prejudice among her rulers than at any time since 1945.”12 He concluded that the defeat of Germany “seemed still to be essential to the English sense of who they are, and how they got here.”13

  That obsession shows no sign of diminishing. In July 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Bavaria became pope. The following day the London Sun, a tabloid newspaper, splashed its front page with the headline “From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi.” Several other tabloids had a similar reaction and the Daily Mirror, in an article exploring the new pope’s conduct in wartime, quoted an eighty-four-year-old woman from his hometown, Marktl am Inn, who said that, contrary to His Holiness’s claims that he had no choice but to enroll in the Hitler Youth, “it was possible to resist.” She said her own brother, a conscientious objector, had been sent to Dachau for his beliefs.14

  In Berlin, Franz Josef Wagner, a columnist on the popular newspaper, Bild, was beside himself with anger. In an open letter to the British tabloids he warned them that “the devil seems to have slipped into your newsrooms…Anyone reading your British popular newspapers must have thought Hitler had been made pope.”

  All this seems to make Ambassador Mattusek right on both counts—Britain is obsessed by the Nazis and history teaching in British schools is unbalanced, concentrating too much on the years 1933–45.

  But this fascination with the Third Reich has done more than unbalance British education and foster an obsession with twelve years of dictatorship, helping to create an ignorance of the reality of modern Germany. It may well be the case that, as the Mattuseks say, defeating Nazism is now part of Britain’s self-identity. More than that, there is now a much wider sense that the Nazi period operates as an obstacle, a stumbling block, a reflecting mirror, that hinders us from looking back beyond that time, which has closed British minds to the Germany that preceded Hitler, an extraordinary country that he—a product of the Vienna gutter—on assuming office set about dismantling in a shocking and unprecedented way. Though the Russians and Poles and Czechs may not be as obsessed as the British, this blindness does apply in certain other countries as well. Wherever you look, Hitler still makes history but he also distorts it.

  On February 20, 2006, in Vienna, Austria, David Irving, a British historian who has specialized in writing books about the Second World War, was sent to prison for three years, found guilty of denying the Holocaust.* Irving pled guilty to delivering two speeches in Austria in 1989, sixteen years before his trial, in which he had denied that Hitler was aware of the Holocaust and that millions of Jews had been murdered. Irving was arrested in November 2005, when he reentered the country, where it has been a crime since 1946 to deny the Holocaust. It was by no means the first occasion Irving had crossed the legal line on this matter. He was already banned in a dozen countries from Canada to South Africa for broadcasting these views. In 2000 he was forced into bankruptcy in Britain when he unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic who, in her book Denying the Holocaust, branded him one of the worst culprits. He was ordered to pay £3 million in legal costs and forced to sell his home in the fashionable Mayfair area of central London.15

  Irving’s trial came barely two months after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, called the Holocaust a “myth,” claiming he did not believe that 6 million Jews had perished at the hands of the Nazis. Given the incendiary context of Middle Eastern politics, President Ahmadinejad’s statement is perhaps not strictly comparable with David Irving’s—we do not hold politicians to the same level of truth (unfortunately) as we do historians. But these two nearly contiguous events do underline how the Holocaust has become—and continues to be—an important focus of debate, even now, more than sixty years after it happened. If we are obsessed with Hitler, as we seem to be, can it be said we are likewise obsessed with the Holocaust?

  At first sight that may seem a contentious and insensitive statement in itself. Can the murder of 6 million people—simply because they were members of a particular ethnic group—ever not be an important focus of debate and memory, however long after it occurred? But there is more to it than that. Of particular relevance is the fact that the Holocaust was not a focus of debate for many years immediately following World War II. It has become so only in recent decades, to the point where, it will be argued here, this “focus” (if it is not an obsession) is also distorting our view of the past, especially in the United States.

  THE HOLOCAUST: AN OBLIGATION TO REMEMBER; THE RIGHT TO FORGET

  In his level-headed study, The Holocaust in American Life (published in Britain as The Holocaust and Collective Memory; 2000), Peter Novick examines—as he puts it—how “the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our life.” He begins with the observation that, generally speaking, historical events are most talked about shortly after their occurrence and then, about forty years afterward, they “fall down a memory hole where only historians scuttle around in the dark.” This was true about events such as the Vietnam War, he says, but “with the Holocaust the rhythm has been very different: hardly talked about for the first twenty years or so after World War Two” but, from the 1970s on, “becoming ever more central in American public discourse—particularly, of course, among Jews, but also in the culture at large.”16 He records how, in recent years, “Holocaust survivor” has become an honorific title, “evoking not just sympathy but admiration, even awe.” This was by no means the case in the immediate aftermath of war, where the status of Holocaust survivor was far from being honorific. Novick quotes the revealing comments by the leader of one American community in Europe, in a letter to a colleague in New York: “Those who have survived are not the fittest…but are largely the lowest Jewish elements, who by cunning and animal instincts have been able to escape the terrible fate of the more refined and better elements who succumbed.”17 No less a figure than David Ben-Gurion, Novick says, wanted to play down the magnitude of the tragedy because of the effect he thought it would have on Zionism—it might seem to others there would not be enough Jews to create Israel. In the United States, in 1946, 1947, and 1948, the main Jewish organizations (including the Jewish War Veterans) unanimously vetoed the idea for a proposed Holocaust memorial in New York City, on the grounds that such a monument would result in other Americans thinking of Jews as victims, and the monument become “a perpetual memorial to the weakness and defencelessness of the Jewish people.” In the first postwar years, “much more than nowadays,” the Holocaust was historicized—thought about and talked about as just one terrible feature of the period that had ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany. “The Holocaust had not, in the postwar years, attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons that could be derived from contemplating it. Since the Holocaust was over and done with, there was no practical advantage to compensate for the pain of staring into that awful abyss.” In his 1957 book, American Judaism, a scholarly
survey of Jews in the fifties, Nathan Glazer observed that the Holocaust “had had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”18

  In the immediate aftermath of World War II “everything about the contemporary presentation of the reports, testimonies, photographs, and newsreels was congruent with the wartime framing of Nazi atrocities as having been directed, in the main, at political opponents of the Third Reich.” (Italics added.) The words “Jew” or “Jewish” did not appear in Edward R. Murrow’s (horrifed, awestruck) radio broadcast about entering Buchenwald. General Dwight Eisenhower, disturbed by the camps, said he wanted “legislators and editors” to visit these locations where the Nazis had incarcerated “political prisoners”—again, no mention of Jews. Other reports spoke of “political prisoners, slave laborers and civilians of many nationalities.” Jews did not go unmentioned, and some reports observed that they had been treated worse than others. “But there was nothing about the reporting on the liberation of the camps that treated Jews as more than among the victims of the Nazis…nothing, that is, that associated them with what is now designated ‘the Holocaust.’” (Italics in the original.)19

  Attitudes only began to change, Novick says, with the Eichmann trial in 1961–62, the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967, and, most of all, after the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, when Israel—for a brief time—looked as though she might be defeated. Novick again: “As part of this process, there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘the Holocaust’—an event in its own right, not simply a subdivision of general Nazi barbarism.”20 It was now that the word “Holocaust” entered the language as a description of all manner of horrors.

  It was now, Novick says, that the Holocaust became in effect sacralized, so that it was almost above criticism. Almost, but not quite. Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist and author of Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, about two Holocaust survivors who fall in love, was one who asked whether, alongside the obligation to remember, there wasn’t also a right to forget: “Are we…to sit forever mourning for our dead?” In the first year of the Intifada (1987), the distinguished Israeli philosopher Yehuda Elkana, who had been interned in Auschwitz as a child, published “A Plea for Forgetting.” The Holocaust’s “lesson,” that “the whole world is against us,” that the Jews “are the eternal victims,” was, for Elkana, “the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler.” This lesson, he thought, had contributed to Israeli brutalities on the West Bank and to the unwillingness to make peace with the Palestinians.21 This change in feeling culminated in 1998 when, in a survey of American Jewish opinion, respondents were asked to rate the importance of various activities to their Jewish identity. This was the first year that “remembrance of the Holocaust” was included (a revealing development in itself)—and it won hands down, chosen many more times than “attending synagogue” or “observing Jewish holidays.”22

  Novick further observed that since the 1970s the Holocaust has come to be presented as not just a Jewish memory but as an American one. In a 1995 poll, to gauge Americans’ knowledge of World War II, 97 percent knew what the Holocaust was, substantially more than could identify Pearl Harbor or knew that the United States had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and far more than the 49 percent who knew that the Soviet Union fought on the American side in the war.23 By 2002, in a growing number of states, the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools was mandated by law.

  Norman G. Finkelstein was much more acerbic than Novick. In The Holocaust Industry, published to some acclaim in 2000, stimulating great interest (and criticism) in Germany but relative silence in the United States, Finkelstein, whose own mother was in Majdanek concentration camp and the slave labor camps at Czestochowa and Skarszysko, accused American Jewry in particular of exploiting the Holocaust, of being “Holocaust hucksters,” exaggerating the numbers who suffered and the numbers who survived, for their own ends, mainly to benefit Israel. He described what he called a “sordid pattern” and detailed the large salaries and fees being drawn by officials administering compensation claims, far larger than the claims themselves. Again, his theme underlines the fact that interest in the Holocaust is a recent phenomenon.24

  THE HISTORIANS’ DISPUTE

  Just how extreme or unique was the Holocaust? This is a sensitive question that the Germans themselves have had difficulty adjusting to. Whereas in America, as Novick has shown, the Holocaust has grown in salience as the years have passed, in Germany there have been some equally forceful attempts to take the debate in the opposite direction and play down its extent, significance, and singularity. Charles Maier is just one American historian who has remarked on how the German scholarly community has been polarized by this subject.

  It was a division that first revealed itself in the 1980s in a phenomenon known as the Historikerstreit, the “historians’ dispute,” an acrimonious debate that was carried on among distinguished historians, such as Helmut Diwald, Ernst Nolte (a student of Heidegger), and Andreas Hillgruber, who had each produced solid, “regular” histories before. When it broke open, it comprised the following arguments:

  It was argued that Fascism was not a totalitarian system in the mold of Stalinism, but a response to it;

  Auschwitz was not a unique event but a copy of the Gulag; other, earlier, genocides had taken place in the twentieth century;

  More Aryans than Jews were killed in the death camps;

  Poles and Romanians were just as anti-Semitic as Germans;

  The worst excesses of the war—the invasion of Russia and the extermination of the Jews—came about because one man, Hitler, intended them to happen.

  There are good answers to these arguments, not least, as Charles Maier dryly observed, “The Final Solution must not be made into a question of bookkeeping.”25 Beneath the surface, however, was there more to it? Was the Historikerstreit the symptom of a deeper malaise that, forty years after the end of the war, was at last beginning to surface?

  There were those who thought that it was. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas observed that, “In the recent past, the memories accumulate of those who for decades could not speak about their suffering and we do not really know whether one may really still believe in the redemptive power of the word.” He thought that, in the historians’ dispute, the “floodgates of memory” had finally been opened “and made the [German] public realise that the past was not simply fading.” In 1986, in a German historical journal, Hermann Rudolph agreed that the Germans were more concerned with the war just then than they had been in the past. That concern, he said, was “apparently not wearing thin; rather the opposite…the question that is now thrown open is: should the Third Reich be treated historiographically so that it no longer blocks the way to our own past like some sombre and monstrous monument…?” 26

  Is there something to this? In an account of the Historikerstreit, Richard Evans, professor of history at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, has noted that, after World War II in Germany, “very little was said about Nazis. Next to nothing was taught about it in the schools. The Nazi affiliations of major figures in the economy were never mentioned. Even in politics, there was no great stigma attached to a Nazi background, so long as this did not become the embarrassing object of public debate.”27 The desire, in West Germany, for a more determined confrontation with the German past only began, Evans says, with the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1960 and the Auschwitz trials in 1964.28 So here is a tidy parallel with the growth in interest in the Holocaust in the United States.

  The importance of the Historikerstreit, in our context, is that it is yet further evidence of the obsession with Hitler and the Holocaust and of a particular pattern of forgetting or, more appropriately, not forgetting. Opinion polls in Germany showed that while 80 percent of Americans were proud to be Americans, and 50 percent of Britons were proud of being British, only 20 percent of Germans were proud of being German. Michael Stürmer, another historian, argued that only by restoring their history to themselves could Ge
rmans recover their pride again. He added that Germans were “obsessed with their guilt,” and that this obsession was interfering with their ability to develop a sense of national identity, which by implication had political and cultural consequences. He resented the implication, he said, that Germany “must be viewed continually as a patient in therapy.”29 As historian Charles Maier put it, “There has been no closure in this debate, only exhaustion.”30

  This was underlined by the Jenninger affair. In November 1988, at a ceremony to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, Philip Jenninger, president of the Federal German parliament (and therefore the second-highest official, after the president of the republic himself), delivered a speech in which he treated the Holocaust as an historical event and therefore not necessarily unique, and as one in which, moreover, many Germans were “bystanders”—i.e., not directly responsible. Although many people, including many Americans, thought his speech was courageous, many others were outraged and Jenninger was forced to retire.31

  The same memory pattern repeats itself in respect to art. It was only in the mid-1990s that the world belatedly woke up to the fact that thousands of paintings—old masters and Impressionists alike—which had been looted by the Nazis from their Jewish owners, were circulating freely on the auction market, and had been doing so since shortly after 1945. Auction catalogs had for years openly printed the provenance of paintings, stipulating that they had been acquired by prominent Nazis, from Hermann Göring down to well-known dealers, but for sixty years no one had paid proper attention. It was only after two Russian art historians discovered a cache of pictures in Moscow—pictures that had been thought destroyed in Berlin—and the strengthening feeling about the Holocaust, that this scandal was fully exposed. The same was true about “dormant accounts” in Swiss banks. Here too, countless accounts belonging to Jews who had been sent to the death camps were “rediscovered” in Switzerland in the late 1990s, when almost anyone could have spotted this outrage much earlier. (One of the reasons the Swiss refused earlier claims was that claimants had no death certificates, as if the SS issued death certificates in the camps.) In March 2006, a Swiss book, Observe and Question, alleged that, during World War II, the Swiss authorities had turned away thousands of Jewish refugees who attempted to cross into neutral Switzerland. Swiss nationalists vowed to block distribution of the book. Here, too, this information could have been exposed much earlier.