The apparent loss of all my papers would only make me suspect, and it was impossible in the long run to avoid all encounters with officials: we needed ration cards, we needed tickets to travel — we were still very civilized and still believed such cards to be necessary . . . at almost the same instant we remembered a medicine bottle that had been prescribed to me. The prescription, in a doctor’s illegible handwriting, had completely changed my name by two minor alterations. A single dot sufficed to turn an ‘m’ into ‘in’ and a millimetre-long line changed the first ‘r’ into a ’t’.
Everything is wrong in this essay: an abbreviation is an entirely artificial coinage, and as much a product of the people as Esperanto; the people themselves usually only contribute sarcastic imitations, forms such as ‘Ari’ are exceptions. And the accusation of Russian authorship in relation to the linguistic monstrosities does not stand up to close scrutiny. As a matter of fact it clearly has its origins in an article published three months previously in Das Reich (on 7 May). Regarding the teaching of the Russian language in those areas of Southern Italy rid of fascism, the article alleged that ‘the Bolsheviks have buried the Russian language under a flood of discordant abbreviations and neologisms . . . pupils in Souther Italy are learning slang.’
Nazism may well have copied any number of things from Bolshevism via Italian Fascism (only to turn everything it touched — like some Midas of lies — into an untruth); it did not, however, need to steal the idea of creating contractions, because they were already in vogue by the beginning of the twentieth century and increasingly after the First World War, in Germany, in every European country, worldwide.
The poison is everywhere. It is borne by the drinking water of the LTI, nobody is immune to its effects.
The envelope and paper bag factory Thiemig & Möbius was not particularly National Socialist. The boss was a member of the SS but he did whatever he could for his Jews, he spoke politely to them, he sometimes made sure they got something from the canteen. I really don’t know what comforted me more thoroughly and enduringly: the arrival of a scrap of horse-meet sausage or for once being addressed as ‘Herr Klemperer’, or even ‘Herr Professor’. The Aryan workers, amongst whom those of us with the Star of David were distributed – segregation only occurred at mealtimes and during raid protection duty; at the work-place the ban on conversation was supposed to be a substitute for isolation, but no one adhered to it – these workers were certainly not devotees of National Socialism, at least by the Winter of 1943/44 they weren’t any more. Everyone feared the foreman and two or three women who were believed to be capable of denunciation, people prodded each other or exchanged warning glances when one of these notorious characters appeared; but once they were out of sight comradely co-operation was immediately restored.
Most friendly of all was the hunchback Frieda who had trained me and continued to help when I got into difficulties with my envelope machine. She had worked for the firm for more than thirty years and did not let even the foreman prevent her from shouting an encouraging word to me above the noise of the machine room: ‘Don’t be so pompous! I didn’t talk to him, I simply gave him an instruction regarding the gumming machine!’ Frieda knew that my wife was lying ill at home. In the morning I found a big apple in the middle of my machine. I looked over to Frieda’s wor-place and she nodded to me. A little later she was standing next to me: ‘For Mama with my best wishes.’ And then, with a mixture of inquisitiveness and surprise: ‘Albert says that your wife is German. Is she really German?’ . . .
The pleasure in the apple was gone. This Sancta-Simplicitas soul, whose feelings were entirely un-Nazi and humane, had been infected by the most fundamental ingredient of the National Socialist poison; she identified Germanness with the magical concept of the Aryan; it was barely conceivable to her that a German woman could be married to me, to a foreginer, a creature from another branch of the animal kingdom; all too often she had heard and repeated the terms ‘artfremd {alien}’ and ‘deutschblütig {of German blood}’ and ‘niederrassig {of inferior race}’ and ‘nordisch {Nordic}’ and ‘Rassenschande {racial defilement}’: she certainly didn’t have a clear picture of what this all meant – but her feelings could not grasp the fact that my wife could be German.
Albert, from whom she had her information, was rather better at thinking than she was. He harboured his own political opinions, and they were in no way supportive of the government, nor were they militaristic. He had lost a brother in action, he himself had so far been deferred at each army medical examination on the grounds of a serious stomach disorder. He mentioned this ‘so far’ every day: ‘I’m still free so far – I hope this wretched war is over before they finally call me up!’ On that day of the apple, which had also seen a veiled report of the success of the Allies somewhere in Italy, he discussed his favourite topic with a comrade for rather longer than usual. I was stacking piles of paper for my machine on to a trolley right next to Albert’s work-place. ‘I hope they don’t call me up’, he said, ‘before this wretched war is over!’ – ‘–Look here mate, how on earth is it going to be over? No one wants to give in.’ – Yes of course: they will just have to realize that we are invincible; they can’t break us because we are so fantastically well organized {prima organisiert}!’ Fantastically well organized – there it was again, he had swallowed the mind-numbing drug.
An hour later the boss called me to help label the finished boxes. He wrote the labels as per invoice and I stuck them on to the towering rows of boxes which formed a wall separating us from the rest of the workers in the room. this isolation made the old man talkative. He was approaching seventy and still working; this was not how he had imagined his old age, he sighed. But these days you have to work like a slave until you’re done for! ‘And what will happen to my grandchildren if the lads don’t come back? We haven’t heard anything of Erhard from Murmansk for months, and the youngest is in a military hospital in Italy. If only peace would come . . . It’s just that the Americans don’t want it, they’ve no business being here . . . But they’re getting rich through this war, this handful of Jewish pigs. It really is the “Jewish war”! . . . There they are again!’
He had been interrupted by the wail of the sirens; we often had a full-scale alarm unexpectedly, at this time of day we often didn’t hear the early warnings because they had become so common that they no longer led to an interruption of word.
Down in the huge cellar the Jewish group sat around a pillar, crowded together and clearly separated from the Aryan work-force. But the Aryan benches were not far away and the discussions from the front rows reached us. Every two or three minutes we heard the report on the situation from the loud-speaker. ‘The formation has swung to the southwest . . .New squadron approaching from the north. Danger of an attack on Dresden.’
The conversation faltered. Then the silence was broken by a fat woman sitting on the front bench, a very industrious and skillful worker who operated the large, complicated machine producing ‘envelopes with windows’ – with a smile and a tone of calm certainty she announced, ‘They won’t come, Dresden will be spared.’ – ‘Why?’ enquired her neighbour. ‘Surely you don’t believe that nonsense about them making Dresden into the capital of Czechoslovakia?’ – ‘Oh no, I have an even better reason than that to be so sure.’ – ‘What reason?’ The answer came with an enthusiastic smile which sat awkwardly on her earthy and unintellectual face. ‘Three of us saw it quite clearly. Last Sunday afternoon near the Annenkirche. The sky was clear except for a few clouds. All of a sudden one of these little clouds straightened itself out to form a face, a sharply defined, truly unique profile’ (she really did say ‘unique {einmalig}’). ‘All three of us recognized it at once. My husband was the first to call out: It’s Old Fritz, just as he always looks in the pictures!’ – ‘So what?’ – ‘What happened then?’ – ‘What’s all that got to do with our safety here in Dresden?’ – ‘How can anyone ask such a stupid question? Isn’t the image which all three of us saw – my husband, my brother-in-law and I – a sure sign that Old Fritz is looking after Dresden? And what can happen to a city he is protecting? . . . You see! there’s the all-clear already, we can go back up.’
Of course it was exceptional that four such revelations of the prevailing state of mind should come together all on one day. But the state of mind itself was exclusive neither to this one day nor to these four people.
None of these four was a real Nazi.
In the evening I was on air raid protection duty; the route to the Aryan control room passed just a couple of metres from my seat. While I was reading a book the Frederick the Great enthusiast called out’ Heil Hitler!’ as she walked past. The next morning she came up to me and said in a kind tone, ‘Forgive me for saying “Heil Hitler!” yesterday; I was in a hurry and I mistook you for someone I was supposed to greet in that way.’
None of them were Nazis, but they were all poisoned.
Someone who thinks does not want to be persuaded but rather convinced; someone who thinks systematically is doubly hard to convince. That is why the LTI is, if anything, less fond of the word ‘philosophy’ than of the word ‘system’. It approaches the system with antipathy, refers to it with disdain, but does so frequently. Philosophy on the other hand is hushed up and universally replaced with ‘Weltanschauung {world-view}’.
Anschauen {viewing something} has never been an intellectual activity, the thinker does the exact opposite, he divorces his senses from the object in question, he abstracts; Anschauen is also never just a matter of simply looking at something with the eye as a sensory organ. The eye only sees. The word ‘anschauen’ is reserved in German for a finer, more portentous and mysteriously significant – I don’t know which – activity of condition: it denotes a way of seeing which involves the observer’s inner being and his emotions, and it denotes a way of seeing which discerns more than simply the surface of a given object, which in a strange way also grasps its essence, its soul. As a substitute for philosophy, the word ‘Weltanschauung’, already prevalent before National Socialism, lost its solemnity and acquired an everyday, business-like ring. ‘Schau {vision}’, revered by the followers of Stefan George, also became a ceremonial word for the LTI – if I were writing this notebook in the form of a proper dictionary, and in the style of my beloved encyclopaedia, I would doubtless refer to the entry on ‘Barnum’ – ‘system’ belongs in the list of abominations along with ‘intelligence’ and ‘objectivity’.
But if ‘system’ is frowned upon, how does the Nazis system of government refer to itself? Because they have a system as well, after all, and are proud of the fact that absolutely every expression and situation in life is caught up in this network; that is why ‘totality {Totalität}’ is one of the foundations of which the LTI is built.
They don’t have a System, they have an Organization, they don’t think systematically with the power of reason, they cull secrets from all that is organic.
I must start with the adjective which, alone amongst this family of words – and unlike the nouns ‘Organ {organ}’ and ‘Organisation’, and the verb ‘organisierien {to organize}’ – has maintained the splendour and the aura that it had from day one. (When was day one? Without question at the dawn of Romanticism. But, of course, one always says ‘without question’ when questions crop up, so this will have to be dealt with separately.)
By the time Clemens hammered on my head with the Myth of the Twentieth Century during a house search in the Caspar-David-Friedrich-Straße, and tore up the accompanying pages of notes (fortunately without deciphering them), I had already pondered Rosenberg’s Delphic central idea of the ‘organic truth’ in my diary. And already at that point, before the invasion of Russia, I wrote: ‘How ridiculous it would be in its jumble of hollow phrases if only it didn’t have such frighteningly deadly consequences!’
Rosenberg informs us that the professional philosophers always make a double mistake. first, they set out ‘to find the so-called single, eternal truth’. And second they search ‘along a purely logical route, drawing conclusion after conclusion from axioms of reason’. If, on the other hand, one surrenders oneself to his, Alfred Rosenberg’s, strictly non-philosophical insights derived from the profundity of an omniscient mystical vision, then the ‘whole bloodless, intellectual rubble heap of exclusively schematic systems is done away with’ once and for all. These quotations contain the most significant reason for the LTI’s antipathy towards the word ‘System’ and what it denotes.
Directly following on from this, the concluding few pages of the Myth finally enthrone the notion of the ‘organic’; orgao (org′) means to swell, to put out shoots, to be trained unconsciously like a plant, ‘organic’ is sometimes translated into German as ‘wunchshaft {sprouting}’. The single, universally valid truth which is meant to exist for an imaginary, universal humanity is replaced by the ‘organic truth’ which emerges from the blood of a particular race and is only valid for that race. This organic truth is not thought up and fostered by the intellect, it is not grounded in rational knowledge, but instead is to be found at the ‘mysterious centre of the soul of a people and of a race {geheimnisvollen Zentrum der Volks- und Rassenseele}’, present for the Teutons {Germanen} since time immemorial in the Nordic bloodstream: ‘the ultimate “knowledge” of a particular race is already embodied in its earliest religious myth.’ Things would not get any clearer if I assembled a mass of quotations; it is not Rosenberg’s intention to make things clearer. Thought strives for clarity, magic takes place in semi-darkness.
‘Organisation’ remained an honest and honoured word within the LTI, indeed it underwent a further refinement which had not existed prior to 1933, except perhaps in occasional and isolated technical contexts.
The will to totality entailed an excess of organization, right down to the Pimpfe, no, right down to the cats: I was not allowed to make any more contributions to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cats because there was no room in Das deutsche Katzenwesen {The German Feline} – this really was the name of the society’s newsletter, which had become a Party organ – for those mongrel creatures which resided with Jews. Later they took our pets away from us, cats, dogs, even canaries, and killed them, not just in isolated cases and out of individual malice, but officially and systematically; this is one of those acts of cruelty which will not be mentioned at any Nuremberg Trial and for which, if it was up to me, I would erect a towering gallows, even if it cost me eternal salvation.
I have no strayed as far from the subject of the LTI as it may at first appear, because it was precisely the ‘German Feline’ which provided the opportunity for this linguistic invention to become both popular and ridiculous. In their mania for organization the greatest possible degree of centralization, the Nazis created collective ‘umbrella organizations’ over and above individual organizations; and because the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten still felt it could be a little daring during the first Fasching season of the Third Reich – later it became tame and finally went completely silent after two or three years – it published in its first Fasching special edition, amongst other things, a note about the ‘Umbrella Organization of the German Feline’.
She came from an officer’s family which belonged to the old nobility, her father had died as a retired general, her brother returned from the world war as a major, whereupon he found a prestigious position of trust in a large Jewish firm. If anyone had asked me prior to 1933 what Paula von B.’s political opinions were, I would probably have answered as follows: obviously German and equally obviously European and liberal, despite the odd wistful reminiscence of the glorious Imperial era; but it is more likely that I would have replied that politics wasn’t an issue for her, that her entire life revolved around intellectual matters, and that the practical demands of her university post prevented her from becoming an aesthete or being lost in hot air.
And then came 1933. Paula von B. had to collect a book from my department. Usually so serious she came up to me on this occasion with a cheerful face and a youthful spring in her every step. ‘You look radiant! Has something good happened to you?’ – ‘Something very good! Do I really need to explain this? . . . I feel ten years younger, no, nineteen: I haven’t felt like this since 1914!’ - ‘And you are telling me about it? You can say all this even though you can see, read and hear how people who used to be close to you are being denounced, how books which you once respected are being condemned, how people are rejecting the very intellectual things that you used to . . . ‘ She interrupted me a little alarmed and very lovingly: ‘My dear Professor I hadn’t expected you to overreact so nervously. You should take a couple of weeks’ holiday and not read any newspapers. You are allowing yourself to get upset at this moment, and allowing yourself to be distracted from what really matters by minor embarrassments and blemishes which can scarcely be avoided during periods of such radical change. In no time at all you will judge things quite differently. Can I come and visit the two of you some time soon?’ And with the greeting ‘kind regards to your family’ she exited through the door like a bouncy teenager before I could even reply.
The ‘no time at all’ turned into many months, during which the general perfidy of the new regime and its particularly brutal attitude towards the ‘Jewish intelligensia’ became ever more apparent. Paula von B. may well have been shaken in her artlessness. We didn’t see each other at the university – I don’t know if she deliberately avoided me.
Then one day she did turn up at our place. She felt it to be her duty as a German to make an open confession to her friends, and hoped that she could still consider herself to be a friend of ours. ‘”Duty as a German” is not something you would have said in the past,’ I interjected, ‘what has being German or non-German got to do with highly personal or universal human questions Or do you want to discuss politics with us?’ – ‘Everything is related to the issue of being German or non-German, this is all that matters; you see that’s what I, what we all, have either learned from the Führer or rediscovered having forgotten it. He has brought us home again!’ – ‘And why are you telling us this?’ – ‘You must recognize, you must understand that I belong entirely to the Führer, but I don’t want you to think as a result I have renounced my affection towards you . . . ‘ – ‘And how can these two feelings be reconciled? And what does the Führer say concerning your former boss Walzel, the teacher your admired so much? And how can you reconcile this with the humanitarianism of Lessing and all the others about whom you had essays written? And how . . . but it’s pointless asking any more questions.’
She had in fact simply shaken her head in response to every sentence I uttered and had tears in her eyes. ‘No, it really does seem to be pointless, because everything you are asking is based on reason, and the accompanying feelings stem from bitterness about insignificant details.’ – ‘And what are my questions supposed to be based on if not reason? And what is significant?’ – ‘I’ve told you already: that we’ve really come home! It’s something you have to feel, and you must abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort which you are experiencing at present . . . And our classical writers? I really don’t think that they are at variance with him in any way, you just have to read them properly, Herder for example, and in any case they would certainly have been convinced sooner or later! – ‘And where does this certainty come from?’ – ‘Where all certainties come from: faith. And if all this doesn’t mean anything to you, then – yes, then the Führer is right after all when he comes out against the . . . (she just managed to swallow the word Jews and continued) . . . against the sterile intelligentsia. Because I believe in him, and I had to tell you that I believe in him.’ – ‘Well in that case, Fräulein von B., the best thing is to postpone our friendship and the discussion about faith indefinitely . . . ‘
She left, and for the short time that I continued to work at the university we really did make an effort to avoid one another. After that I only saw her again on one occasion, and once heard her name mentioned in conversation.
The encounter occurred at one of the historic moments of the Third Reich. On 13 March 1938 I innocently opened the door leading to the main banking hall of the Staatsbank and started back until I was at least partially hidden by the half-open door. The reason being that inside everyone present, both behind and in front of the counters, was standing stiffly erect with outstretched arms listening to a declamatory voice on the radio. The voice announced the law governing the annexation {Anschluß} of Austria to Hitler’s Germany. I remained half-hidden in order not to have to practise the salute along with everyone else. Right at the front of this gathering of people I caught sight of Fräulein von B. She was in a state of total ecstasy, her eyes sparkled, she was not simply standing to attention like the others, the rigidity of her posture and salute was more of a convulsion, a moment of rapture.
A few years later a piece of news reached the Jews’ House indirectly about a number of university people. It was reported with a chuckle that Fräulein von B. was the most adamant supporter of the Führer. At the same time she was also much more harmless than many other party followers because she was not interested in denouncing people or any other sort of malice. She was just utterly enthusiastic. Currently she was apparently showing everyone a photograph which she had managed to take. On a holiday trip she had been able to admire the Obersalzberg from afar; she had not caught sight of the Führer – but she had seen his dog and managed to take a wonderful photograph of it.
When my wife heard about this she remarked, ‘I told you as early as 1933 that B. was a hysterical old maid who had found her saviour in the Führer. He relies on these old maids, or rather he relied on them until he had the power in his own hands.’ – ‘And my reply is the same as it was then: you may well be right about the hysterical old maids, but there must have been more to it, and it certainly wouldn’t be sufficient now either, especially not now (it was after Stalingrad), despite all the instruments of power and despite all the tyranny, regardless of how ruthless it is. He must radiate faith, and this faith must communicate itself to more than just old maids. What’s more, Fräulein von B. is not just any old maid. For many years (some of which were pretty difficult for her as well) we knew her to be a very sensible woman, she had a good education, she had a post to which she was well fitted, she grew up in a sensible, hard-working environment, for many years she felt at home amongst people with broad horizons – all of which should have made her relatively immune to a religious psychosis of this kind . . . I hold much store by her claim “I believe in him” . . . ‘
It is true, the first Christmas after the usurpation of Austria, ‘Greater Germany’s Christmas of 1938’, is entirely de-christianized by the press: it is in every way a ‘Festival of the German Soul’ which is being celebrated, the ‘Resurrection of the Greater German Reich’ and accordingly the rebirth of the light, at which point the discussion turns to representation of the sun and the swastika, leaving the Jew Jesus entirely out of it. And when shortly afterwards a Blood Order is founded to celebrate Himmler’s birthday it is specifically referred to as an ‘Order of Nordic Blood’.
But when taken together what comes across in these words is in fact something akin to Christian transcendence: the mysticism of Christmas, martyrdom, resurrection and the consecration of an order of knights – these ideas, be they derived from Catholicism or Parsifal, are plainly linked (and that despite their paganism) to the actions of the Führer and his Party. And the martyrs’ ‘ewige Wache {eternal guard}’ directs the imagination in a similar direction.
Here the word ewig {eternal} plays its very special part. It is one of those words in the LTI dictionary whose specifically NAzi aspect derives purely from excessive use: an inordinate number of things in the LTI are ‘historisch {historic}’, ‘einmalig {unique}’ and ‘ewig {eternal}’. It is possible to see ewig as the final rung in a long ladder of National Socialist numerical superlatives, but with this final rung heaven is reached. Eternal is an attribute reserved exclusively for the divine; by calling something eternal I elevate it to the sphere of the religious. ‘We have found the path to eternity’, Ley claims at the opening of a Hitler school in early 1938. In examinations for apprentices there is a common but pernicious trick-question. It reads: ‘What comes after the Third Reich?’ If the candidate is gullible or falls into the trap he will answer ‘the Fourth’, at which point he will be failed mercilessly as an inadequate disciple of the Party) even if he has an excellent knowledge of his subject). The correct answer should read: ‘Nothing comes after it, the Third Reich is the eternal German Reich.’
I only noted on one occasion that Hitler referred to himself, in words unambiguously derived from the New Testament, as the German saviour – (but once again: not much reaches my ears and eyes, and even now I can only undertake a very limited amount of supplementary reading). I noted under 9 November 1935: –He called those who fell at the Feldherrnhalle “My Apostles” – there are sixteen, of course he has to have four more than his predecessor – and in the funeral ceremony there are the words “You have risen again in the Third Reich”.’
My colleague Spamer, the folklorist who knows so much about the genesis and subsistence of legends, said to me one day during the first year of Hitlerism, when I was voicing my dismay at the spiritual state of the German people: ‘If it were possible – (at the time he held this to be a clause of unreal condition) – to force the press, all publications and teaching to follow a single line, and if it was asserted everywhere that there had been no world war between 1914 and 1918, then within three years the whole world would believe there really hadn’t been one.’ When I reminded Spamer of this at our first proper reunion he corrected me: ‘Yes I remember; but you have got one thing wrong, at the time I said within one year, and I believe that to be true even more so now!’
In general, the power of legend is most potent with people who have no intellectual education or historical knowledge. Here the situation is reversed. The more someone knows about the history of literature and the history of Christianity, the more the term ‘Third Reich’ speaks to him of the ‘life hereafter’. Those who purged the Church and religion itself in the Middle Ages, zealous reformers of the human race of later ages, men of the most diverse persuasions, have dreamt of an age which would supersede paganism and Christianity, or at least corrupt contemporary Christianity, of a perfect Third Reich, and they hoped for a Messiah who will bring it into being. Memories of Lessing and Ibsen are aroused.
Taken as a whole the diverse phrases and expressions in the LTI which touch on the world hereafter form a net which is thrown over the imagination of the listener, dragging it into the realm of faith. Is this net deliberately woven, is it, to use the eighteenth-century expression, priestly deception? In part, certainly. It mustn’t be forgotten that a yearning for faith and an openness to religion undoubtedly played a part in the case of certain initiates in the new doctrine. It isn’t always possible to weigh up the guilt and innocence of the first net-makers. But the impact of the net itself, once it was there, seems to be to be incontrovertible; Nazism was accepted by millions as gospel because it appropriated the language of the gospel.
Was? — I whave only traced the ‘I believe in him’ up to the final days of Hitler’s Reich. I am now dealing day after day with people who have been rehabilitated and those who want to be. These people, regardless of how different they are from one another in other ways, have one thing in common: they all claim to be part of a special group of ‘victims of fascism’, they were all forced against their better judgement, and by some form of violence or other, to join the Party that they had loathed from the outset, they never believed in the Führer and never believed in the Third Reich. But recently I met my old pupil L. in the street, whom I had last seen during my final visit to the provincial library. At the time he shook my hand sympathetically; I was embarrassed because he was already wearing a swastika. Now he came up to me with delight: ‘I am pleased that you have been saved and are back in post!’ – ‘And how are things with you?’ – ‘Bad, of course, I am employed as a construction worker, but I don’t earn enough for my wife and child, and I am also not physically suited to this kind of work in the long term.’ – ‘Aren’t you going to be rehabilitated? I know you well enough – I’m sure you haven’t got anything criminal on your conscience. Did you hold high office in the Party? were you politically very active?’ – ‘No, not at all, I was an insignificant little Pg.’ – ‘So why are you, of all people, not being rehabilitated?’ – ‘Because I haven’t applied for it and can’t do so.’ – ‘I don’t understand.’ Pause. To which he replied with difficulty and eyes downcast: ‘I can’t deny it, I believed in him,’ – ‘But you surely can’t still believe in him now; you can see what it all led to, and all of the regime’s atrocious crimes are now apparently for all to see.’ An even longer pause. Then, very quietly, ‘I accept all that. The others misunerstood him, betrayed him. but I still believe in HIM, I really do.’
It may well be that the increasing shortage of people and material played a part, for this led increasingly to the merging of individual newspapers and their reduction in size, necessitating, in the case of personal announcements, the most concise wording possible (often through the use of abbreviations, which made them garbled almost to the point of incomprehensibility). ultimately, as in the case of an expensive telegram, every word and every letter was carefully weighed up. In 1939, when death for the Fatherland was still a novel event and not just another part of everyday life, at a time when there was still a surplus of paper and compositors, announcements for those who had died in action filled a large square surrounded by a thick black line, and if the hero had, for example, owned a factory or shop in his private life, then the Gefolgschaft {workforce} would insist on putting their own announcement in the paper. For the employees of a firm, the placing of a second announcement alongside that of the widow was an essential duty, which is why the hypocritical word ‘Gefolgschaft’ belongs in my revision book. If the deceased was a really big cheese, a high-ranking official, or on many different boards of directors, then there would sometimes be three, four or even more announcements of his heroic death, one below the other, and they could easily fill a good half-page of a newspaper. here there was clearly space for emotional outpourings and expansive phrases. By the end, however, there were rarely more than two lines of the narrowest column available for a single family announcement. The black line around the individual announcements was also dropped. The dead lay squeezed together in a single black-edged rectangle as if in a mass grave.
Scherer maintains that in Germany intellectual rises and declines take place with uncompromising thoroughness, and that they lead to great heights and great depths: ‘a lack of moderation seems to be the bane of our intellectual development. We soar upwards and then fall correspondingly far. We are like the Teuon who has lost all his possessions in a game of dice, puts his own freedom on the last throw, loses this as well and willingly allows himself to be sold as a slave. This, adds Tacitus, who is telling the story, shows the extent of Teutonic tenacity, even for a bad cause; they themselves call it loyalty.’
At the time this made it clear to me that the best and the worst of the German character can be traced back to one common and abiding trait. That there is a connection between the bestiality of Hitlerism and the Faustian excesses of classical German literature and German idealist philosophy. And give years later, when the catastrophe had occurred, when the full extent of all the beastialities and the real depth of Germany’s fall were clear for all to see, I was sent back to that passage of Tacitus by a tiny detail and a passing remark on it in Plievier’s Stalingrad.
Plievier talks about a German road sign in Russia: ‘Kalatsch on the Don, 3200 km to Leipzig.’ He notes: ‘A strange triumph, and, even if a thousand kilometers had been added to the real distance, it was all the more an authentic expresison of this pointless and immoderate venture.’
Antisemitism, as a form of hostility with social, religious and economic causes, has cropped up across the ages and amongst all nations, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes in a mild form, sometimes more virulently; to ascribe it specifically and solely to the Germans would be unjust.
There are three things that make antisemitism in the Third Reich something entirely new and unique. First, the pestilence flares up, more searingly than ever before, at a time when it appears to have long since become a thing of the past. What I mean is that there were certainly antisemitic excesses here and there prior to 1933, just as there were occasional outbreaks of cholera and the plague in European ports; but just as one apparently could be confident that within the civilized world there was no longer a danger of epidemics destroying whole cities, as in the Middle Ages, so it also seemed completely impossible that Jews could once again be deprived of their rights and persecuted as they had been in the Middle Ages. And the second unique feature, together with this anachronistic dimension, is the fact that this anachronism did not come along in the guise of the past but as something utterly modern, not as a people’s revolt, a mad frenzy or spontaneous mass murder (although at the outset spontaneity was used as a pretext), but highly organized and with all the technical details completely worked out; because anyone who today commemorates the murder of the Jews thinks of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. However, the third and most crucial innovation consists of embedding the hatred of the Jews in the idea of race. In earlier times the animosity towards the Jews was directed at a group which stood outside the Christian faith and Christian society; the adoption of the country’s religion and customs served as a compensation and (for the succeeding generation at least) as a blurring of differences. Displacing the difference between Jews and Non-Jews into the blood makes any compensation impossible, perpetuates the division and legitimizes it as willed by God.
These three innovations are all closely related to one another, and all three point to the fundamental trait reported by Tacitus, the ‘tenacity, even for a bad cause’. Antisemitism as a matter of ancestry is ineradicably tenacious; thanks to its claim to being scientific it is not an anachronism, but rather entirely appropriate to modern ways of thinking, and as a result it considers it almost self-evident that it would use the most scientific methods at its disposal. That it should do so with extreme cruelty again goes hand in hand with the fundamental trait of excessive tenacity.
In Willy Seidel’s Der neue Daniel (The New Daniel), written in 1920, one encounters, alongside the idealistic German, the figure of Lieutenant Zuckschwedt, the representative of that stratum of German society which made us so detested abroad and which at home Simplizissimus attacked in vain. The man isn’t incompetent, all things considered he can’t really be labelled a villain, and he certainly isn’t a sadist. But he has been ordered to drown some kittens, and on his removing the sack from the water one of the little animals is still whimpering. He then smashes it to ‘strawberry jam’ with a stone and shouts at it, ‘You stupid creature – I’ll show you the meaning of thoroughness!’
One might expect that the author, who clearly depicted this representative of a degenerate section of the population for the sake of fairness, would remain faithful to his judgement right to the end, just as in Rolland there are two Frances and two Germanies. But no, at the end there is forgiveness and sympathy for the painstaking cat murderer and he is transfigured into something altogether more positive, whilst the Americans are condemned increasingly harshly in this novelistic exercise in setting nation against nation. And the reason for such leniency and harshness is that in the case of the Germans there is always racial purity, whilst the Americans are of mixed race
What distinguishes National Socialism from other forms of fascism is a concept of race reduced solely to antisemitism and also fired exclusively by it. It is from here that it distills all its poison. Absolutely all of it, even in the case of foreign political enemies whom it cannot dismiss as Semites. It therefore turns Bolshevism into Jewish Bolshevism, the French are beniggered and bejewed, the English can even be traced back to that biblical line of Jews considered lost etc. etc.
The fundamental German attribute of excess, of inordinate single-mindedness, of reaching out for the infinite, provided this concept of race with the most fertile of grounds. But is it actually a German invention? If one traces its theoretical manifestations back, there is an unbroken line leading by way of important figures such as Rosenberg and the Englishman-turned-German Houston Stewart Chamberlain to the Frenchman Gobineau. His Essai sur l’inégelaité des races humaines, which appeared between 1853 and 1855 in four volumes, preaches first and foremost the superiority of the Aryan race, the pre-eminent and indeed exclusive claim of humanity of unadulterated Germanic civilization, and the threat posed to it by the all-pervasive, incomparably inferior Semitic blood, a thing barely deserving of the name human. Here are all the ingredients required by the Third Reich for its philosophical justification and its policies; all subsequent pre-Nazi consolidation and application of this teaching invariably goes back to Gobineau, he alone is, or appears to be (I leave this question open for the present), the person responsible for conceiving this bloody doctrine.
Even in the last hours of Hitler’s Reich a scientific attempt was made to find German precedents for the Frenchman. A substantial and painstakingly researched study appeared in the Publications of the Reigh Institute for the History of the New Germany: The Idea of Race in German Romanticism and its Origins in the 18th Century. Hermann Blome, its sincere and foolish author, in fact proved the very opposite of what he believed he had proved.
And it can also be proved from another angle that antisemitism based on the idea of race was not present in Germany before the arrival of Gobineau. In his study on ‘The Origins of Antisemitism in German Thought’, published in Aufbau (1946, no. 2), Arnold Bauer points out that those student fraternities which set great store by all matters German and Romantic ‘did not as a matter of principle exclude Jews from their ranks’. Ernst Moritz Arndt only wanted Christian members, but saw the baptized Jew as a ‘Christian and national of equal standing’. ‘Jahn, the father of gymnastics, who was notorious for being exceedingly Teutonic, did not even consider baptism to be a prerequisite for membership of a fraternity.’ And the fraternities themselves rejected baptism as a condition of membership at the founding of the Alliance of German Student Fraternities. According to Bauer, and here he concurs with the Nazi students studying for their doctorates and postdoctoral qualifications, this demonstrates the lasting effect of the ‘intellectual legacy of the humanists, the tolerance of someone like Lessing and the universalism of someone like Kant’.
And yet – and this is why this chapter belongs to my LTI, despite the fact that I have only now got to know Blome and, of course, the study by Bauer – I am forced to stick to the opinion that I formed during those evil years: these racial teachings, twisted and distorted into a unique privilege of the Teutons and justification for their monopoly on the human race, and which ultimately became a hunting license for the most atrocious crimes against humanity, have their roots in German Romanticism. Or put another way: the Frenchman who invented them is an adherent, a follower, a pupil – I don’t know to what extent a conscious one – of German Romanticism.
I repeatedly dealt with Gobineau in my early writings and I was thus thoroughly familiar with his nature. I have to take the scientists’ word for it that as a scientist he was misguided. But I can easily believe it; because there is one thing that I myself know for sure, namely that Gobineau was never by nature a scientist, that he was never one for the sake of science itself. Science was always in the service of his own egotistical idée fixe, it was solely there to provide incontrovertible evidence in support of this obsession.
Count Arthur Gobineau has a more important part to play in the history of French literature than in the history of science, but characteristically this role was first recognized by the Germans rather than his compatriots. In all the periods of French history through which he lived – he was born in 1816 and died in 1882 – he felt himself to have been robbed of what he saw as his hereditary droit du seigneur as a nobleman and of his chance to develop to the full his potential as an individual, robbed by the rule of money, the bourgeoisie, and the masses calling for equality, by the reign of all that he termed democracy, a t hinkg he detested and considered to be responsible for the demise of mankind. He was convinced that he was a pure-blooded and direct descendent of the French feudal aristocracy and the Frankish ancienne noblesse.
Gobineau, by nature a writer, started out as a pupil of the French Romantic school, which was characterized by a penchant for the Middle Ages and opposition to the everyday world of the sober bourgeois. For him, being an aristocratic longer, a Frank and a Teuton were one and the same. From an early age he pursued German and oriental studies. Both linguistically and in its literature, German Romanticism had established a connection with the Indian prehistory of Germanic civilization and an Aryan common ground between the different European peoples. (Scherer’s book, which accompanied me to the Jews’ House, lists in his annals under 1808 Friedrich Schelegel’s The Language and Wisdom of the Indians and under 1816 Franz Bopp’s A Comparison of the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic Languages.) The construction of the Aryan has its roots in philology rather than science.
Because all of the distinctive features of National Socialism are present in Romanticism in embryonic form: the dethronement of reason, the animalization of man, the glorification of the idea of power, of the predator, of the blond beast. . .
But is this not a terrible indictment of the intellectual movement to which German art and literature (in the broadest sense of the word) owe so many of their humane values?
The terrible indictment is justified despite all the values formulated by Romanticism. ‘We soar upwards and then fall correspondingly far.’ The definitive characteristic of the German intellect is boundlessness
In the Jews’ Houses books are precious possessions – most of them have been taken away from us, getting hold of new ones and the use of public libraries is forbidden. If an Aryan wife uses a lending library in her own name and the Gestapo finds us in possession of one of the books we are fortunate to get away with a good thrashing – on a couple of occasions I was myself fortunate enough to get away with it in this way. What we have, and are allowed to have, are Jewish books. The definition is not rigid, and since all of the valuable private libraries have now been ‘taken into safe keeping {sichergestellt}’ – LTI, because the representatives of the Party never steal or rob – the Gestapo no longer sends experts.
On the other hand we are not particularly attached to the few books that remain; because many a copy has been ‘inherited’, which means in our own special language that it was left abandoned when its owner suddenly disappeared in the direction of Theresienstadt or Auschwitz. With the result that it brings home very forcefully to the new owner the fate which can befall him too any day and, especially, any night. Thus every book is lent by everyone to everyone else without further ado – we of all people certainly do not need a sermon on the transience of earthly possessions.
philosophizing involves the exercise of reason, of logical thought, something which Nazism views as the most deadly enemy of all. The requisite antithesis of clear thinking is not, however, to see properly in the sense that Schnitzler defines the verb schauen {to see}; that would also get in the way of the constant National Socialist rhetoric of deception and stupefaction. Instead it finds in the word Weltanschauung the insight {das Schauen}, the vision {die Schau} of the mystic, i.e. the vision {Sehen} of the inner eye, the intuition and revelation of religious ecstasy. The vision of the Saviour from whom the laws of our world arise: this is the innermost meaning and the deepest yearning articulated by the word Weltanschauung as first used by the New Romantics and then adopted by the LTI. I keep returning to the same verse and the same formula: ‘On a single patch of ground / Weed and flower both are found’ . . . and: the German root of Nazism is called Romanticism . . .
A Christ unsuited to Europe, the affirmation of Teutonic dominance within Catholicism, the emphasis on a positive attitude to life, on the cult of the sun, together with the Saxon blood and the vigorous character of the national comrades – all of that could just as well be in Rosenberg’s Myth. and the fact that, despite all of this, Braun is not a Nazi, and neither anti-intellectual nor anti-Jewish, merely gives the Nazis a broader base when it comes to their parading of swastikas as a Teutonic symbol, their worshipping of the sun wheel and their constant insistence on sunny Teutonism. ‘Sonnig {sunny}’ was rampant at the time in the announcements of those who died in action. I was therefore entirely convinced that this epithet was rooted firmly at the heart of the old Teutonic cult and derived solely from the vision of the blond Saviour.
Until, that is, I discovered a good-natured female worker at the factory keenly reading a forces’ postal service booklet during a breakfast break and, on my request, was lent the pamphlet. It was one of the series ‘Soldaten-Kameraden (Soldiers-Comrades)’ published in huge numbers by the Hitler press Franz Eher, and consisted of a series of short stories under the overall title Der Gurkenbaum (The Cucumber Tree). They all disappointed me insofar as I had expected a publication of the Eher press in particular to contain the Nazi poison in its most concentrated form. He had, after all, injected the army with more than enough of it in other booklets. But Wilhelm Pleyer, whom I later got to know better as a Sudeten German novelist without my initial impression being significantly changed either for the better or for the worse, was both as a writer and as a man a very minor Pg indeed.
The fruits of the ‘Cucumber Tree’ consisted of extremely uninspired and entirely harmless so-called humoresques. I was just about to put them to one side having gained nothing from them when I came across a mawkish story about happy parents, about a happy mother. It told the story of a very lively, very blonde, golden-haired, sunny-haired little girl: the lines were brimful of blonde hair, sun and a sunny mentality. The little girl had a special relationship with the sun’s rays and was called Wiwiputzi. How did she come by this strange name? The author asks himself this as well. It may well be that the three i’s made the word seem particularly bright, or that the first three letters reminded him of vif, lively, or that there was something else which struck him as poetical and life-affirming about this invented word – be that as it may, he answered his own question as follows, ‘Ersonnen? {Thought up?} No, it just appeared of its own accord – ersonnt {conjured up by the sun}.’
When I gave the worker her book back I asked her which of the stories she had liked the most. She replied they were all nice, but the best was the one about Wiwiputzi.
‘If only I knew where he got the idea for the play on the word sunny {das Spiel mit dem Sonnigen}.’ The question had slipped out almost against my better judgement and I immediately regretted it – what, after all, was this entirely unliterary woman supposed to answer? all I would do would be to embarrass her. But strangely enough the answer came right away, without a moment’s thought: ‘Well, I suppose he must have been thinking of Sonny Boy!’
For once that was really the vox populi. of course I couldn’t organize a questionnaire, but at that moment I was intuitively sure, and still am today, that the film Sonny Boy {The Singing Fool} – who after all knows that sonny means a little boy and has absolutely nothing to do with ‘sunny’? – that this American film was at least as responsible for the plague of sunniness as the cult of the Teutons.
Why therefore is it different, why does a palpable and undeniable brutality come to light when a female warder in Belsen concentration camp explains to the war crimes trial that on such and such a day she dealt with sixteen ‘Stück’ Gefangenen {‘head’ of prisoners}? In both of the former cases we are dealing with the professional avoidance of reference to the person, with abstraction, Stück {piece, head}, on the other hand, involves objectification. It is the same objectification expressed by the official term ‘the utilization of carcasses {Kadaververwertung}’, especially when widened to refer to human corpses: fertilizer is made out of the dead of the concentration camps and referred to in the same way as the processing of animal carcasses.
Dictated by an embittered hatred, behind which lies a burgeoning despair in the face of helplessness, this objectification is articulated still more deliberately in a stereotypical phrase which cropped up in military despatches, above all in 1944. They repeatedly point out that gangs can expect to be shown no mercy; in the case of the expanding French resistance in particular there was for a time routine mention of the fact that umpteen people had been ‘niedergemacht {massacred}’. The verb ‘niedermachen’ betrays the fury directed at the adversary, but at least in this case he is still thought of as a hated enemy, as a person. But then one reads every day: umpteen people have been ‘liquidiert {liquidated}’. Liquidieren derives from the language of commerce, as a loan word it is a degree or two colder and more objective than its respective German equivalents; a doctor liquidiert {charges} a particular sum for his efforts, a businessman puts his business into liquidation {liquidiert}. In the former case we are dealing with the conversion of medical effort into cash value, in the latter the final settlement, the giving up of a business. When people are liquidated they are settled or terminated as if they were material assets. In the language of the concentration camps it is said of a group that it ‘was led to its final solution {der Endlösung zugeführt}’ when it was shot or sent to the gas chambers.
Should this objectification of the individual personality be seen as a special characteristic of the LTI? I don’t think so. This is because it is only applied to people to whom National Socialism has already denied membership of the human race proper, people who, as members of a lesser or inimical race, or as subhumans, have been excluded from that true brand of humanity exclusive to the Teutons or those of nordic blood. Within this recognized circle of people, on the other hand, it lays particular emphasis on individual personality. To demonstrate this fact I wish to single out two irrefutable pieces of evidence.
The military no longer speak of the people under the command of a particular officer or in a company, but rather of the men {Männern}; every lieutenant reports – I ordered my men {Männern} . . .
The desire to emphasize the individual personality is expressed even more clearly than in the word ‘Männer’ in a new formulation adopted universally in bureaucratic language, one which degenerated into unintentional comedy. There were no clothing or ration coupons for Jews, they were not allowed to buy anything new and were only given second-hand things by special clothing and household stores. Initially it was relatively easy to get something from the clothing store; later a petition was necessary, which was passed from the appointed ‘legal adviser’ of the district, and the Jewish division of the Gestapo, to the police headquarters. on one occasion I received a form card with the notification: ‘I have made a second-hand pair of working trousers available to you. To be collected . . . etc. The Chief of Police.’ The underlying principle being that no decision of any kind should be made by an impersonal office, but by the appropriate person in charge. The result was that all official communications were translated into the first person and ordained by a personal god. I, the financial director in person, and not the tax office X, ordered Friedrich Schulze to pay three marks and fifty Pfennig for failure to pay on time; I, the Chief of Police, sent out a fine amounting to three marks; and last but not least I, the Chief of Police, personally even granted the Jew Klemperer a second-hand pair of trousers. Everything in majorem gloriam of the Führer principle and the individual personality.
No, National Socialism did not want to depersonalize or objectify those it regarded as human beings, namely the Teutons. It is merely that a leader also needs people to lead, those on whose unconditional obedience he can rely. It is telling how often during the twelve years the word ‘blindlings {blindly}’ appeared in oaths of allegiance, and in telegrams and resolutions paying homage or expressing support. Blindlings is one of the linguistic pillars of the LTI, it denotes the ideal manifestation of the Nazi spirit with regard to its leader and respective subordinate leaders, and it is used almost as often as ‘fanatisch’. But in order to carry out an order blindly I mustn’t even begin to think about it. Thinking about something always means delays and scruples, it could even lead to criticism, and finally to the refusal to carry out an order. The basic principle underlying all military training lies in the inculcation of a series of automated movements and actions, in order that the individual soldier and individual squad carry out the orders of their superior just as a machine springs into action at the press of a button, independent of external circumstances, independent of internal considerations, and independent of the dictates of instinct. National Socialism certainly does not want to encroach upon the individual personality, on the contrary, it seeks to reinforce it, but that does not preclude it (as far as it is concerned!) from mechanizing this personality at the same time: everyone should be an automaton in the hand of his superior and leader, and at the same time he should also be the one who presses the button to activate the automatons under his own control. This construction disguises universal enslavement and depersonalization, and explains the excessive number of LTI expressions lifted from the realm of technology, the mass of mechanizing words.
It is of course essential in this context to disregard the growth of technical terms experienced by all languages of the civilized world since the beginning of the nineteenth century, one indeed which is still being experienced today, and which is a logical consequence of the rapid spread of technology and its increasing importance in day-to-day life. rather, it is in this case a matter of technical expressions being applied to non-technical areas, in which they then function as a means of bringing about mechanization. In the German language this was only very rarely the case before 1933.
What both images, the semi-technical and the entirely technical, have in common, however, is the fact that they were only ever applied to objects, situations and activities, never to people. During the Weimar Republic all kinds of businesses were reflated {ankurbeln}, but never the managing director himself, all kinds of institutions were anchored, as were various authorities, but never a finance director or a minister himself. The really decisive step towards a linguistic mechanization of life is only taken at the point where the technical metaphor is applied directly to a person or, in the words of an expression popular since the beginning of this century, aimed at him {eingestellt}.
I ask myself parenthetically whether eingestellt sein {to be disposed towards something} and Einstellung {attitude, view} – today every housewife has a particular view on the subject of sweeteners and sugar, every boy has a different attitude towards boxing and track and field events – should also come under the rubric of linguistic mechanization. Yes and no. These expressions originally had to do with focusing a telescope on an object at a particular distance, or tuning a motor to rotate at a specific speed. But the first transference of this meaning to a different field was only partly metaphorical: science and philosophy – philosophy in particular – seized hold of the expression; precise thinking, the thought apparatus, is focused {eingestellt} sharply on an object, the technical undertone is definitely preserved, intentionally so indeed. The public at large are likely to have first picked up on the word from philosophy. To be considered cultured one had to have an ‘Einstellung {view}’ on vital matters. To what extent people were generally still aware by the beginning of this century of the technical, or at least of the purely rational, meaning of these expressions can scarcely be ascertained with any accuracy. In one particular satirical sound film the coquettish heroine sings that her life is ‘von Kopfbis Fuß aufLiebe eingestellt {focused on love from head to toe}’, which speaks for a knowledge of this original meaning; but at the same time a patriot who believes himself to be a writer, and who is later celebrated as one by the Nazis, sings of his feelings being entirely ‘auf Deutschland eingestellt {tuned in to Germany}’. The film was based on Heinrich Mann’s tragi-comic novel about a senior schoolmaster; the man of verse celebrated by the Nazis as an early supporter and fighter in the Freikorps bore the not particularly Teutonic first name Boguslav or Boleslaw – what is the use of a philologist whose books have been stolen and whose notes have been partially destroyed?
The explicit mechanization of the individual himself is left up to the LTI. Its most characteristic, and probably also earliest, creation in this field is ‘gleich-schalten {to force into line}’. you can see and hear the button at work which forces people – not institutions and impersonal authorities – to adopt the same, uniform attitude and movements: teachers in various institutions, various groups of employees in the judiciary and tax authorities, members of the Stahlhelm and the SA, and so on, are brought into line almost ad infinitum.
But should it really be considered romantic when Goebbels misrepresents a trip to the bombed cities in the west by claiming that he who had originally intended to instil courage in the victims had in the end himself been ‘recharged {neu aufgeladen}’ by their unshakeable heroism? No, this is plainly nothing more than the old habit of degrading people to the status of machines.
I say plainly because in the other technical metaphors used by Goebbels and the Propaganda Minister’s circle direct references to the realm of the mechanical abound without the slightest recollection of any power currents {Kraftströme}. Again and again working people are compared with machines. Thus, for example, there is a reference in the Reich to the governor of Hamburg working like ‘a motor which always runs at full tilt {ein immer auf Hochtouren laufender Motor}’. However, unlike this comparison, which still draws a clear distinction between the image and the object with which it is compared, a Goebbels sentence such as the following provides more compelling and serious evidence of this intrinsically mechanizing attitude: ‘In the foreseeable future we will be running at full tilt again {zu vollen Touren} in a range of areas.’ We are thus no longer being compared with machines, we have become machines ourselves. We: that is Goebbels, that is the Nazi government, that is the totality of Hitler’s Germany which, in dire distress and critically depleted of energy, is to be spurred on; and this powerful preacher doesn’t just compare himself and his faithful followers with machines, no, he identifies them with them. A more dehumanized way of thinking than the one exposed here would not be conceivable.
Given that this mechanizing linguistic usage grabs hold directly of the individual, it is hardly surprising that it endlessly embraces things outside its domain which are more easily within its grasp. There is nothing that can’t be started up {anlaufen} or overhauled {überholen}, just as a motor is overhauled after it has run for a long time or a ship is overhauled after a lengthy voyage, there is nothing which can be channelled in or out of somewhere {hinein-, herausschleusen}, and of course – oh language of the fledgling Fourth Reich! – everything and anything can be set up {aufziehen}. And if it is time to extol the indomitable will to live demonstrated by the inhabitants of a bombed city, the Reich proclaims as philological evidence the popular expression of the local Rheinland or Westphalian population: ‘Everything is back on track {Es spurt schon wieder}.’ (I had this specialist term from the field of automobile construction explained to me: the wheels on a vehicle stay on the right track.) And why is everything on the right track again? Because everyone is ‘working to their full capacity {voll ausgelastet}’ thanks to the excellent organization all-round. ‘Voll ausgelastet’, a favourite expression of Goebbels during the last years, is also undoubtedly a term lifted from the language of technology and applied to the people themselves; it sounds simply less aggressive than the motor running at full tilt because human shoulders can also be used to capacity {auslasten} like some load-bearing structure or other. Language brings everything to light. The constant encroachment and spinning out of technological terms, the revelling in them: in the Weimar republic there was only the cranking up {Ankurbeln} of the economy, the LTI didn’t just add the idea of running it at full tilt, but also ‘the well-adjusted steering {die gut eingespielte Lenkung}’ – all of this (which I have in no way exhausted here lexicographically) bears witness not only to the de facto disregard of individuality, something purportedly valued and nurtured, but also to the will to subjugate the independent thinker, the free human being. and this evidence cannot be invalidated by any number of protestations that it is precisely the individual personality which is to be developed in total contradistinction to the ‘de-individualization’ striven for by marxism, and which in turn finds its true apotheosis in Jewish and Asiatic Bolshevism.
But does language really bring it to light? A word keeps coming into my mind which I now hear again and again as the Russians attempt to rebuild our decimated school system: people are endlessly quoting Lenin’s remark that the teacher is the engineer of the soul. But this is also undoubtedly a technological image, indeed the most technological of all in fact. an engineer deals with machines. If he is seen as the ideal man to tend the soul, then I can only conclude that the soul is regarded as a machine . . .
Do I have to? The Nazis always pontificated about the fact that Marxism is materialism, and that Bolshevism surpasses even socialist doctrine in its materialism by attempting to imitate the industrial methods of the Americans, and by appropriating their technical way of thinking and feeling. How much of all this is actually true?
Everything and nothing.
It is certainly the case that Bolshevism served its apprenticeship under American technology, that it proceeded with great enthusiasm to mechanize its own country, a process bound to make the biggest possible impression on the language. But why did it mechanize its country? In order to attain for its people more humane living conditions, to reduce the burden of work and provide a physical basis from which they could prosper intellectually. The wealth of new technical terms in their language thus testifies to something diametrically opposed to what it reveals about Hitler’s Germany: it points to the weapons employed in the battle for the liberation of the mind, whilst in the case of Germany I am forced to conclude that the imposition of technological terms implies an enslavement of the mind.
If two people do the same thing . . . the most trivial of sayings. But in my philologist’s notebook I intend to underline this home truth from my own discipline: if two people use the same expression there is absolutely no reason why they should have the same intentions. In fact I want to underline it today again and again. Because it is absolutely essential that we learn about the true spirit of different nations, nations we have been isolated from for so long and about which we have been told so many lies. And we have been told more lies about Russia than any other . . . and nothing gives us better access to the soul of a nation than its language . . . and yet: Gleichschalten and Ingenieur der Seele {engineer of the soul} – both are technical expressions, but whilst the German metaphor points to slavery, the Russian one points to freedom.
