The Holocaust as Suicidal En terp rise *

by Ludo Abicht
In her autobiographical work Dies ist nicht mein Land - Eine Jii,din
verliisst die Bundesrepublik, I Lea Fleischmann describes a faculty meeting
at the high school where she was teaching. A colleague had been unjustly
reprimanded by the director, and the 43 teachers, including Fleischmann,
remained silent: "It won't be all that bad. I don't want to make myself
unpopular. as I often come late anyhow. Next week Frau Ullmann (the
director) has to write an evaluation of me. All this crosses my mind, and at
the same time my soul is burned by the thought that an injustice is happening
here. You're witnessing it, and you don't say anything." The link is easily -
maybe too easily - established between this collective cowardice and the
Nazi horrors that had victimized her parents and her people. Against this
ugly, obedient "Gennan," the author equates "Jewishness" with courage,
revolt and the unwillingness to participate in this dehumanizing experience.
This typical example of traditional Gennan authoritarianism shows one
of the problems that the literature about the Holocaust confronts us with:
how does one critically assess this episode in European history without
either equating this authoritarianism with fascism or running the risk of
offending the memory of the victims, especially at a time of renewed anti-
Semitic and openly fascist activity?2
In very different ways both Gunther Anders and Bernt Engelmann try to
transcend this dilemma as an unacceptable choice. Although neither of them
claims to be objective or "neutral" - both are Gennan Jews, both are
militant humanists and socialists - their works reflect an uncompromising
attempt to place the discussion within the contemporary public sphere of a
"Gennany without Jews," but a country still uneasily struggling with its
guilt-ridden Jewish problem which is actually a Gennan problem. Anders
* This review will focus on:
Bernt Engehnann, Deutschland ohne Juden. Eine Bilanz. Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann
Verlag, 1979.525 pages.
Giinther Anders, Besuch im Hades. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1979. 218 pages.
1. Lea Fleischmann, Dies ist nicht mein Land - Eine Jiidin verlasst die Bundesrepublik
(Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1980). See also the review by Annette Gerhardt in Die Neue
(May 8, 1980), p. 7.
2. See Henryk M. Broder, Deutschland erwacht (Cologne, 1978), a very convincing
collection of essays and documents about the neo-Nazis and their sympathizers in West
Germany today.
177
178 Abicht
starts his reflections from his very personal impressions and experiences,
whereas Engelmann takes a sociological, even statistical approach in the
style of his ongoing critical exposure of German history and the develop-
ments in the German Federal Republic today. Their attempt, however,
necessarily entails the breaking of a number of tacitly agreed upon
explanations and taboos. This becomes abundantly clear in Engelmann's
treatment of the symbiosis of Germans and Jews before and even after
Hitler's takeover.
It is possible that the sudden explosion of public discussion in West
Germany after the showing of the tv film "Holocaust" has begun to clear the
path for a more mature, less inhibited critical debate of all the aspects and
implications of the tragedy. This includes those aspects which the Left
and/or the official Jewish representatives have hitherto managed carefully to
avoid. If this assumption is true, then both books will have been published
right on time.
Gunther Anders: The Poet as Moralist
Besuch im Hades consists of four separate parts, held together by the
subjective views of the author and the central topic: Parts 1 and 3 are
Anders' travel diary during a 1966 visit to Auschwitz and his native Breslau,
part 2 is a selection of excerpts from his philosophical diaries, written in the
USA between 1944 and 1949, and part 4 was written in 1979 during the
debates following the showing of "Holocaust" in Europe. This timespan of
about 35 years makes it hard to consider this publication as one book. Yet, it
enables us to discover the similarities and discrepancies between the early
and the later reflections on the same events. As a student of Husserl, Anders
has always been concerned in philosophical questions but with a moral
orientation. He is an internationally known opponent of the Vietnam War
and nuclear energy and traces his ethics and commitments back to his
experiences as a boy in World War I followed by persecution and exile
during the Third Reich.
Contrary to what the title suggests, the book starts rather surprisingly
with a series of reflections after Anders and his companion have already left
the "Hades" of Auschwitz. In discussing the meaning of the death camp, he
focuses on the atypical fate of Edith Stein, once a student of Anders' father
Wilhelm Stem and Edmund Husserl. After her conversion under the
influence of Max Scheler, she became a Catholic nun who pleaded with the
Pope to intervene on behalf of the threatened Jews, and who, a Jew herself,
was finally murdered in Auschwitz, surrounded by her own people and yet
considered a renegade and a traitor. Anders compares her absolute, totally
non-opportunistic religious conversion to Husserl'S own convenient
Protestant baptism, a typical and equally useless form of assimilation of
many Jews in the German-Austrian middle-class before World War II. But
Holocaust as Suicidal Enterprise 179
this comparison becomes irrelevant and absurd faced with a policy that took
neither religious nor cultural assimilation into account and decided ar-
bitrarily who belonged to the real German' people. Edith Stein, more
steeped in the great German traditions than most Germans and definitely
more Christian than most Christians, did not. To Anders her fate symbolizes
more than anything else the permanent insecurity of the Jewish people in the
diaspora. For, if this complete integration of Edith Stein did not save her and
thousands of others, we should begin to look for other ways to stop the
madness of imminent genocide. Will the vivid memory of the massacre be
powerful enough to finally take away the threat?
If only three of us would speak
- three moaning in a meager chorus -
We'd soon and easily be entering
Your ears and hearts.
For three are father, mother and the child,
Three deaths each heart could measure,
But we, the millions, are today forgotten.
As we are millions and millions too many. ("Numbers," 1945)
In his "philosophical diaries" (1944-1949), Anders is struck with the
poverty of our traditional, classical "imagination." The reality of Auschwitz
forces us to redefine this ability: "Because its object, the phantastic reality,
is phantastic in itself, imagination (die Phantasie) has to funs;tion as an
empirical method, as an organ to perceive that which is factually enor-
mous." In his "Analytics of the Sublime," Kant concluded that man could
never match the potential for human grandeur. Anders reverses this
inability: the gap he observes is no longer between reason and imagination,
but between human actions and imagination, and the consequences have
proven to be terrible, as people who perpetrate the most heinous and
monstrous crimes are no longer capable consciously to realize the mon-
strosity of their deeds. The optimism of the Kantian enlightenment has
turned into an almost absolute pessimism, for, even if our attempts at
transcending this inability would become universally accepted, it still would
remain an open question whether we could really "imagine" the possibility
of an apocalyptic end. The reaction of both the victims and the tormentors to
the Holocaust shows the dangerous limits of our humanistic tradition: new
genocides have happened since the end of World War II and, again, people
have failed to react in a significantly different and more effective way.
Despite Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the existential philosophers, and
especially despite the permanent inhumanity of our own century, we still
cling to the comforting ideologies of human progress and developing
"humanization" of the private and the public spheres, still unable to imagine
further horrors, including our own self-destruction.
Anders' journey to his "roots" in Breslau reinforces these observations:
after 50 years of exile he feels like a Silesian coming home to the Breslau of
180 Abicht
Kaiser Wilhelm and the First World War. But the Jews and the Germans
have left, and the few German speakers he meets take it for granted that he,
too, is an old Nazi, looking for the former SA-Allee in a Polish city. This
alienation in time and history is stressed by the totally different reactions of
his younger, American companion, who only sees present-day Bratislava
and cannot possibly share his emotions. And the childhood memories
exemplify the contradictions of the German-Jewish experience. He thinks of
older friends, who enthusiastically volunteered to serve the Kaiser in 1914,
and who ended in Birkenau in 1944; of his mother who frantically organized
the ladies' relief organization for the herioc boys on the Eastern and
Western fronts, who thought of herself as a hundred percent German and
patriot, and who later was forced to adopt the first name "Sarah" in her non-
Aryan passport as a token of degradation and ridicule; of his father, who
proudly celebrated July 12, "Dreyfus Day," as a reassuring symbol of the
final victory of reason and tolerance in Western Europe.
But the irony does not stop here: Anders' father developed a set of
philosophical theories which he called "personalism." This concept was first
adopted by Max Scheler. From there it found its way into the philosophy of
Emmanuel Mounier and the progressive Catholics around Esprit and finally
emerged as the ideology of the ruling Diem clique in South Vietnam: "My
father, my father, if you only knew!" This descent into Hades, Auschwitz
and Breslau, by far the largest section of the book, sets the tone for the
subsequent discussion of the German reception of the tv "Holocaust" series.
The lesson brought about by the telecast of this mediocre and distorted
product should not be forgotten: "Only through fiction can the facts, only
through individual cases can the innumerable be made clear and unfor-
gettable. " Consistent with his earlier theories about the gap between action
and imagination, he rejects the usual explanation of a past the majority of
the Germans have "repressed," for "repression" presupposes at least some
trauma, and Anders doesn't believe those traumas ever existed. Of course,
they had been confronted, at least after the war, with the documents of the
Holocaust, but he doubts that they were fully grasped. The horror had been
"reduced to its enormity" and had therefore never reached the popular
consciousness. The fact that only a personalized, fictionalized story finally
reached that consciousness through a tv soap opera is no automatic cause for
hope, for "none of the prevailing religious or philosophical ethics" are
prepared to deal with Hiroshima or Auschwitz, and the question whether it
is still possible or even makes sense to establish such a new morality must
remain unanswered. This would imply a moral and social revolution of
hitherto unthinkable dimensions, far beyond the obsolete and corrupt
liberal-humanistic ideology or even its dialectical materialist variant.
Anders does not reject the class nature of fascist anti-Semitism, but he is no
longer convinced that a mere socio-economic restructuration will guarantee
the development of a new ethic, strong enough to overcome the total
amorality Auschwitz revealed. He calls this amorality "ontological," as it
Holocaust as Suicidal Enterprise 181
enabled the destruction of individuals and groups simply on the basis of their
"being" (being Jewish, being Gypsy, being "different"), rather than on
account of their allegedly harmful or "bad" behavior.
Bernt Engelmann as Seemingly Objective Pragmatist.
Whereas Gunther Anders' ethical questions pointed to the moral
bankruptcy underlying the Holocaust, the author and polemicist Bernt
Engelmann approaches the same facts from a seemingly amoral, pragmatic
perspective: "So let us free ourselves of disgust, horror and guilt feelings.
Let us break through the taboo that until now has prevented us from taking a
closer look at the causes and the of the persecution of the Jews
that culminated in the mass murder of the 194Os, and at the same time prevented
the impartiality and objectivity that are necessary to research the truth ....
Let us instead try to carefully order the evidence, to register it correctly and
to strike a balance, whatever the outcome may be - firmly convinced that
one can only learn something, even from the most terrible mistakes, when
one is able to recognize them" (p. 10).
Engelmann understands this impartiality and objectivity quite literally,
as he is even prepared to look at the Holocaust from the viewpoint of the
anti-Semites and Nazis themselves, for whom the results certainly surpassed
their most ardent wishes. They have indeed succeeded in curing Germany
from "the Jewish disease," in creating a virtually "Jew-free" (judenreines)
post-war society. So, if they were right in the first place - and Engelmann is
willing to let this theory go unchallenged - things must look much better
and brighter today than, e.g., during the days of the "Jew-dominated"
Weimar Republic.
But even if we hypothetically accept the distorted viewpoint of the Nazis,
we must come to the conclusion that it was still not advantageous for them to
eliminate the Jews. In eight out of the ten chapters of his book, Engelmann
demonstrates in a chilling, detached way how the destruction of the Jewish
part of the German population has affected specific areas of German
cultural, technological and even military developments. Before they could
begin with the elimination of the "Jewish virus" from the endangered
German national body, the Nazi "race researchers" had to define this virus
as clearly distinct from its environment. And this proved from the start to be
an impossible task: as a result of the complex racial history of the Jews,
especially since the 19th century, the "blood relationships" in the medical
sense of the word, were much closer between German Jews and "Aryans"
than between Jews in Europe and the Middle East, for example. Thus,
contrary to their own theories, they began to identify people according to
the religion of their grandparents and great-grandparents, thereby including
the Jews, who had converted to Christianity, and the Christians, who had
adopted the Jewish faith. Furthermore, the cultural integration of Jews and
182 Abicht
converts in German-Austrian life, from Rahel Levin to Johann Strauss, and
from Lorenzo da Ponte to Adolf von Baeyer, had been so thorough, that
Nazi historians had to rewrite entire chapters of the biographies of such
eminently German geniuses as Franz Lehar and Richard Wagner, whose
works they ought to have banned as the degenerated products of Jewish
artists.
As we know, all this did not confuse the Nazi architects of the "Final
Solution," among them the partially Jewish Reinhard Heydrich(Siiss), in
the least, and the carefully planned genocide was carried out. Engelmann
starts his research in the field of medicine: before 1933 Germany was the
world's most important center of medical research and teaching. This he
measures by the disproportionally high number of Nobel Prize winners,
scientific discoveries and the leading role of the medical schools. After
World War II the center completely shifted to the USA. A careful
examination of the list of researchers and professors in both countries
indicates the prominent place of German-Jewish scientists, many of whom
were refugees from the Nazi persecutions, and this despite the quota system
that kept the Jewish presence at an "acceptable" minimum. At the same
time the so-called harmful effects of "Jewish medicine," such as the defense
of premarital sexual relations, birth control and the "commercial specializa-
tion" of the profession - as opposed to the allegedly Aryan family
practice - have become the general rule in a Jew-free Germany. Besides
exposing these accusations as totally unfounded myths, the present-day
state of the medical science, including psychoanalysis, in Germany shows,
according to Engelmann's findings, nothing but a marked and miserable
impoverishment.
The author finds this picture even more startling when he turns to the
world of theater, film, music and the performing arts in general. Precisely
those names who made the German-Austrian culture world famous in the
Weimar period were the ones who were silenced, driven into exile or killed.
Engelmann includes here the Jews as well as those non-Jewish artists and
performers, sponsors and critics who preferred emigration to the cultural
wasteland of a forcefully Aryan German Reich. However, these "big
names" (Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Albert Basser-
mann, Richard Tauber, Max Reinhard, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill,
Bert Brecht, Paul Hindemith, Josefvon Sternberg, Fritz Lang, etc.) are only
the tip of the iceberg. One does not have to look for important people. On
the contrary, it becomes hard to find the names of those valuable artists who
were not part of this exodus, Griindgens being maybe one of the great and sad
exceptions. The Nazi "Kulturpolitik" virtually wiped out the once flour-
ishing German film industry, as this policy hit about 40% of the actors and
more than 50% of the producers and directors, many of whom contributed
greatly to the development of British and American film. And as Goebbels
had proclaimed the equation Jewish = "Marxist," the same measures were
taken against any artist vaguely suspected of leftist convictions or sym-
Holocaust as Suicidal Enterprise 183
pathies so that the socially critical members ofthe "purely German" artistic
world were also forced to leave with the Jews. The same applies to literature,
where more than three quarters of the important authors
3
were driven into
exile, sent to the concentration camps or, as in the case of Marx, Heine,
Luxemburg and Kafka, whose books were burned and taken from libraries
and bookstores, they were posthumously eliminated. Moving into the field
of politics, Engelmann finds that the political attitudes of the Jewish
community were not very different from those of the educated middle-class
to whom they belonged, thereby invalidating the anti-Semitic myth of the
Judaeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. Even the often claimed "international orien-
tation" of the European Jews has to be rejected as false, for the over-
whelming majority of them were staunch and active nationalists who -
again in disproportionately high numbers - volunteered for military
service in World War I.
This brings us to the central and most controversial theme of the book:
far from benefiting the Nazis, Engelmann argues, the persecution and
extermination of the Jews was one of the main causes of Hitler Germany's
military defeat. Already in World War I the German Supreme Command
issued proclamations in Yiddish, reminding the Eastern European Jews of
their century-old cultural relationship with Germany and the advantages of
joining the Germans in their struggle against the anti-Semitic Czarist
regime. Engelmann asserts that these feelings remained mutual long after
the end of World War I and the potential for using the Eastern European
Jews as allies was real. We can summarize his arguments about the military
question with the following points:
1. If the 2.8 million "non-Aryans" in the Greater German Reich had
sent the average 12% of the population to the army, about 336,000 men and
women would have enlisted.
2. About 400,000 German soldiers (SS, service personnel, members of
the "death squads"), more than the entire Waffen-SS in 1943 and almost the
size of the Bundeswehr today, were involved in the "Final Solution" instead
of the war itself.
3. Nazi Germany had lost the potential support of about eight million
Jews in Eastern Europe, many of whom became very active in the Soviet
resistance forces.
4. Even Goring admitted secretly in 1942 that the loss of specialized
researchers and skilled engineers (about 40% of the university instructors)
had been harmful to the German cause.
5. Maybe most fateful of all for the Nazis: practically all the nuclear
physicists who were responsible for the proposal that led to the "Manhattan
Project" and the building of the bomb (e.g. Victor Weisskopf, Eduard
Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugen Wigner) were Jewish-Austrian or Jewish-
3. For example, it would be impossible to teach any course on 2Oth-century literature if one were
to stick to Goebbels' list of authors acceptable to the national socialist definition of "German."
184 Abicht
German scientists who had been trained in Germany and left on account of
the anti-Semitic climate and persecution in their homelands. The support of
another refugee, Albert Einstein, was crucial to obtain the approval of
President Roosevelt. Also Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Rudolf Ernest Peierls
and Franz Eugen Simon, to mention only a few internationally known
names, had been directly or indirectly affected by Hitler's or Mussolini's
anti-Semitic policies, and Engelmann sees no reason to believe that most of
them would not have stayed in Germany, Austria or Italy. And even if (and
the possibility is real) the remaining nuclear physicists could have produced
"the bomb," the Nazi regime's contempt for "the speculations of Jewish
science" effectively prevented the realization of such a project.
After all of the above, Engelmann's conclusions become predictable:
from a purely German national perspective the persecution of the Jews was
a suicidal enterprise with respect to culture, science, political philosophy
and even military research and practice. No sentimental or hypocritical post-
factum philo-Semitism can cover up this impoverishment of public life in the
German states that succeeded the Great German Reich after 1945. "And
worst of all: The citizens don't seem to miss a thing."
This may be true for the majority of the West Germans, but the reader of
Engelmann's provocative book surely misses many other things. For one, he
does not live up to his initial promise (Introduction, p. 10) to present a
coherent and conclusive scientific argument for his assertions. The method
he lIses is largely inductive and often speculative, and many a fact seems to
have been selected to fit the thesis. Especially when he discusses the
potential Jewish contribution to the Nazi war effort, he makes a daring jump
from middle-class World War I patriotism in the Jewish community both in
Germany-Austria and abroad to a possible uncritical support of an
imaginary non-racist National Socialism. The historical record, however,
shows that anti-Semitism had always been one of the core elements of Nazi
ideology, from Hitler's pre-war fascination with Aryan theories to the
publication of Mein Kampf, and from the systematic anti-Semitism of the
founding meetings of the NSDAP to the "Final Solution." Of course,
Engelmann will not deny these facts, but they make his artificial distinction
between the real racist policies and some possible "purely nationalistic"
fascism rather specious. But worse than this speculation is his virtual neglect
of all the average, "non prominent" Jews who were murdered. In Eichmann
in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt made the point that such elitist thinking was
one of the main causes of the destruction of European Jewry. And while he
mentions in passing the attitude of the Germans and many of the assimilated
Jews toward the poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he, unlike
Herbert S. Levine and Thomas Rothschild in Fremd im eigenen Land,4
4. Fremd im eigenen Land, eds. Henryk M. Broder and Michel R. Lang (Frankfurt am
Main, 1979). Levine: "On the day when most of the Germans will fully accept their foreign
neighbors as fellow citizens and when the 'Gastarbeiter' will feel comfortable and at home in
Holocaust as Suicidal Enterprise 185
doesn't say a word about the general West German treatment of the new
immigrants, euphemistically called "Gastarbeiter," who today have re-
placed the poor Eastern Jews on the social scale.
Is There Anywhere We Can Go from Here?
Aside from these substantial flaws in his argumentation, Engelmann's
concluding remarks about the state of affairs in present-day Germany echo
the equally somber conclusions of Gunther Anders, who recognizing the
vital necessity of a new, post-Holocaust morality, is rather despairing that
such a radical change would or even could ever occur under the present
circumstances. And the Jewish presence in the GDR is so minimal, that a
meaningful comparison is virtually impossible, though the few known
factors do not suggest a significantly different pa ttern,
5
in spite of the official
anti-fascist orientation and the welcome absence of even the slightest neo-
fascist activity. If we accept this assessment ofthe situation, the discussion is
practically closed. In their own lives, however, neither Anders nor
Engelmann has resigned himself to this sad and threatening reality:
Engelmann is a vocal member of the West German democratic Left, and
Anders remains an active fighter against nuclear energy power and military
build-ups. A renewed attempt to sterilize "the womb out of which that here
crept" (Brecht, The War Primer) will have to go beyond the usual critique of
anti-Semitism and, at the same time, beyond the understandable but
simplistic anti-Germanism. For a link between some form of liberal philo-
Semitism (in a "Jew-free" society) and a continued discrimination against
e.g. foreign workers is readily established as Germans ease their conscience
about Jews while the hatred for the alleged "alien element' (Fremdkorper)
remains virulent. But blanket anti-Germanism has to be countered as
well since it helps cover the historical truth and absolve the non-German
nations and individuals of their part in anti-Semitism and the Holocaust -
which in no way means that we should belittle the emergence of a new
German Right and its ugly practices. The Berufsverbote are a reality, and so
is Franz Josef Strauss ..
The Right in Germany has always made good opportunistic use of knife-
in-the-back theories. Though it is difficult to calculate the role the
Versailles Treaty and the anti-German attitude in pre-World War II Europe
played in furthering the Nazi rise to power, a certain responsibility cannot be
denied. Surely Gunther Grass exaggerated when he put the blame for a
Gennany the last remnants of the Gennan-Jewish problem will have been solved. Not before"
(p. 278). Rothschild: "The equation is quickly made: he doesn't like those people, so he doesn't
like the others, and all of them cheat us. So: 'The foreigners are all Jews anyway.''' (p. 356).
5. See the prolonged discussion around Christa Wolfs fictional autobiography Kindheits-
muster, 1977.
186 Abicht
reemergence of West German nationalism squarely on the "anti-German
hysteria" in the neighboring countries.
6
But, again, there is nothing more
conducive to a kneejerk nationalist reaction than the feeling of isolation and
unfair treatment by "the others." After 35 years, the time for taboos and
myths of any kind has long run out, in Germany as well as abroad.
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6. In a speech delivered at the Brussels Europalia Festival in November, 1977.