Even as We Speak (9 page)

Until recent times, one of Germany’s recurring troubles was that it was more integrated culturally than it was politically. A case can be made for the Jews not having been integrated at
all into the political structure, although you would have to eliminate a towering figure like Walther Rathenau – which is exactly what some of the Nazi Party’s forerunners did. But from
the time of Goethe up until the Anschluss the Jews were, at least in part, integrated into the culture; they made a contribution whose like had not been seen in Europe since Alfonso IX founded the
University of Salamanca. Though they often aroused envy and spite among non-Jewish rivals, they aroused admiration in at least equal measure. Kant said that if the Muse of Philosophy could choose
an ideal language, it would choose the language of Moses Mendelssohn. Goethe said that the Jewish contribution was vital. Nietzsche ranked the Jew Heine as the most important German poet after
Goethe. The novelist Theodor Fontane, who started out as an anti-Semite, gave up on the idea when he realized that the Jewish bourgeoisie was a more cultivated audience than the aristocracy, which
he had tried in vain to enlighten. Even the dreadful Wagner was ambivalent on the subject: when Thomas Mann’s Jewish father-in-law left Germany after the Nazis came to power, all he took with
him were Wagner’s letters of thanks for his having helped to build the
Festspielhaus
in Bayreuth.

Which brings us to Thomas Mann. Here one is forced to wonder if whoever gave Goldhagen high marks for his thesis ever showed it to a literary colleague. As evidence of the all-pervading nature
of eliminationist anti-Semitism, Goldhagen has the audacity to rope in, without qualification or explanation, a remark by Thomas Mann. Well, there is a grain of truth in it. In 1933, when Mann had
already begun his long exile, he did indeed confide to his diary that it was a pity the new regime should include him along with some of the undesirable Jewish elements it was dealing with. But
against this grain of truth there is a whole silo of contrary evidence. Thomas Mann had always disliked what he saw as the rootless Jewish cosmopolitanism (shades of his beloved Wagner there) that
criticized because it couldn’t create, and thus gave rise to a bugbear like Alfred Kerr. Mann the Nobel Prize-winning eminence, the new Goethe, the walking cultural icon, had a bad tendency,
quite normal among writers even at their most successful, to take praise as his due and anything less as sabotage. He thought, with some justification, that the annoyingly clever Kerr was on his
case. But for Jews who, in his opinion,
did
create, Mann had nothing but admiration. He had it in the first years of the century, when his conservatism was still as hidebound as the
snobbery he was never to overcome: his two early encomiums for Arthur Schnitzler are models of generosity. He had scores of friendships among the Jewish cultural figures of the emigration and
maintained them throughout the Nazi era, often at the expense of his time, effort and exchequer. For Bruno Walter, it was always open house
chez
Mann, because Mann honoured Walter as the
incarnation of the Germany that mattered, just as he despised Hitler as its exterminating angel. Even to allow the possibility of our inferring that Mann might have thought otherwise is to
perpetrate a truly stunning libel, and one can only hope that the excuse for it is ignorance.

Nowadays it has become fashionable to mock Mann’s supposed equivocation
vis-à-vis
the Nazi regime in its first years, because of the time that passed before he publicly
condemned it. At the time, his own children were angry with him for the same reason. We have to remember that his prestige, worldly goods and most appreciative reading public were all locked up in
Germany; that he was deeply rooted in its complex society; and that at his age he did not fancy leading the very kind of rootless cosmopolitan life for which he had condemned men like Kerr. But his
1933–34 diaries (which one can safely recommend Goldhagen to read whole so that he will not in future run the risk of quoting a misleading fragment from a secondary source) reveal
unmistakably, and over and over, that he loathed the bestiality of the new regime from its first hour. All Mann’s
Tagebüche,
through the Thirties and the war years – and
hurry the day when the whole fascinating corpus is properly translated – show that he never wavered in his utter disgust at what the Nazis had done to his country. As for his opinion of what
they were doing to the most defenceless people in it, he went public about that in his 1936 essay on anti-Semitism, in which he definitively penetrated, and devastatingly parodied, the unconscious
logic of the Nazi mentality: ‘I might be nothing, but at least I am not a Jew.’

Historical research has by now established beyond question that the Nazi Party was principally financed not by the great capitalists of Brecht’s imagination but by the
Kleinleute –
the little people. Reduced to despair by inflation and by the Depression, they assigned their hopes and their few spare pennies to the cause of the man they thought
might rescue them from nothingness. He did, too – so triumphantly that they didn’t suspect until the eleventh hour that he was leading them into a nothingness even more complete than
the one they had come from. The Holocaust would have been unimaginable without the Nazi Party; the Nazi Party would have been unimaginable without Hitler; and Hitler’s rise to power would
have been unimaginable without the unique circumstances that brought the Weimar Republic to ruin. To hear Goldhagen tell it, mass murder was all set to go: a century-long buildup of eliminationist
anti-Semitism simply had to express itself. But the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.

After the Second World War, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor began publishing a series of books and articles which added up to the contention that Hitler’s regime was the inevitable
consequence of Germany’s border problem, and that his depredations in the East were just a harsh version of what any German in his position would have been obliged to do anyway.
Hitler’s war, Taylor argued, brought Europe back to ‘reality’, out of its liberal illusions. Then, in 1951, the German historian Golo Mann – one of Thomas Mann’s three
sons – made a survey of Taylor’s historical writings, and took them apart. He accused Taylor of predicting the past. The Weimar Republic, Mann pointed out, had been no liberal illusion
and might have survived if extraordinary circumstances hadn’t conspired to undermine it. German nationalism was not a demon that always strode armed through the land – it was in the
minds of men, and could have stayed there. This confrontation between the frivolously clever Taylor and the deeply engaged Golo Mann was a portent of the intellectual conflict that blew up in
Germany more than thirty years later, when the learned historian Ernst Nolte foolishly went to print with an opinion that sounded like one of Taylor’s brainwaves cast in more turgid prose: he
stated that Nazi Germany, by attacking Russia, had simply got into the Cold War early, and that Nazi extermination camps had been the inevitable consequence of tangling with an enemy who was up to
the same sort of thing. This time, there were plenty of German historians and commentators ready to oppose such views, because by now the perverse urge to marginalize the Nazis had penetrated the
academic world, and had been identified as a trend that needed to be stopped. Younger historians who had looked up to Nolte hastened to distance themselves from him; the glamorous Michael
Stürmer, in his virtuoso summary of modern German history
Die Grenzen der Macht
(The Limits of Power), consigned Nolte’s theory to a dismissive passing reference. Stürmer
also wrote a sentence about Hitler that is unfortunately likely to remain all too true: ‘Even today, the history of Hitler is largely the history of how he has been underestimated.’

Why is this so? Strangely, anti-Semitism has probably played a part. We tend to think of him as an idiot because the central tenet of his ideology was idiotic – and idiotic, of course, it
transparently is. Anti-Semitism is a world view through a pinhole: as scientists say about a bad theory, it is not even wrong. Nietzsche tried to tell Wagner that it was beneath contempt. Sartre
was right for once when he said that through anti-Semitism any halfwit could become a member of an élite. But, as the case of Wagner proves, a man can have this poisonous bee in his bonnet
and still be a creative genius. Hitler was a destructive genius, whose evil gifts not only beggar description but invite denial, because we find it more comfortable to believe that their
consequences were produced by historical forces than to believe that he
was
a historical force. Or perhaps we just lack the vocabulary. Not many of us, in a secular age, are willing to
concede that, in the form of Hitler, Satan visited the Earth, recruited an army of sinners, and fought and won a battle against God. We would rather talk the language of pseudoscience, which at
least seems to bring such cataclysmic events to order. But all that such language can do is shift the focus of attention down to the broad mass of the German people, which is what Goldhagen has
done, in a way that, at least in part, lets Hitler off the hook – and unintentionally reinforces his central belief that it was the destiny of the Jewish race to be expelled from the
Volk
as an inimical presence.

Hannah Arendt, in her long, courageous, and much misunderstood career, had her weak moments. In her popular
Eichmann in Jerusalem
(first published serially in this magazine) she
undoubtedly pushed her useful notion of the detached desk worker too far. But she was resoundingly right when she refused to grant the Nazis the power of their
fait accompli
. She declined
to suppose, as Hitler had supposed, that there really was some international collectivity called the Jews. Echoing the fourth count of the Nuremberg indictment, she called the Holocaust a crime
against humanity.

The Jews were the overwhelming majority among Hitler’s victims, but he also killed all the Gypsies and homosexuals he could find. He let two and a half million Russian POWs perish, most of
them from the gradually applied technique of deprivation. The novelist Joseph Roth, drinking himself to death in Paris before the war, said that Hitler probably had the Christians in his sights,
too. We can never now trace the source of Hitler’s passion for revenge, but we can be reasonably certain that there would have been no satisfying it had he lived. Sooner or later, he would
have got around to everybody. Hitler was the culprit who gave all the other culprits their chance. To concentrate exclusively on the prejudice called anti-Semitism – to concentrate even on
his
anti-Semitism – is another way of underestimating him.

At the end of this bloodstained century, which has topped by ten times Tamburlaine’s wall of skulls, lime, and living men, the last thing we want to believe is that it all
happened on a whim. In the Soviet Union, the liquidation of bourgeois elements began under Lenin. By the time Stalin took power, there were no bourgeois elements left. He went on finding them. He
found them even within the Communist Party. They didn’t exist. They never had existed. He killed them anyway. Eventually, he killed more people than Hitler, and it was all for nothing. Far
from building socialism, he ensured its ruin. His onslaught had nothing to do with social analysis, about which he knew no more than he did about biology. Unless you believe in Original Sin, there
is almost no meaning that can be attached to his behaviour, except to say that he was working out his personal problems.

In China, Mao Zedong went to war against the evil landlords and the imperialist spies. Neither group actually existed. The death toll of his countrymen exceeded the totals achieved by Hitler and
Stalin combined. They all died for nothing. Dying innocent, they have their eternal dignity, but there are no profundities to be plumbed in their collective extinction except the adamantine fact of
human evil. In Cambodia, Pol Pot encouraged the persecution, torture, and murder of everyone who wore glasses – but enough. A country, no matter how cultured, either respects the rights of
all its citizens or is not civilized. The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment
Hitler came to power. It had been before, and it has been since – a fact that might secure for Goldhagen’s book, when it is published there, a considered reception, despite its
contents. I look forward to reading the German critical press, especially if one of the reviewers is Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Of Jewish background (his book about his upbringing in the Warsaw ghetto
is a minor masterpiece), Reich-Ranicki is one of the most brilliant critical writers in the world. I know just where I want to read his piece: in my favourite café on the Oranienburger
Strasse, just along from the meticulously restored synagogue, whose golden dome is a landmark for the district. Two armed guards stand at the door, but this time in its defence – a reminder
of what Germany once did not only to others but to itself, and need not have done if democracy had held together.

A shorter version first appeared in the
New Yorker
, 22 April, 1996

The preceding review is reprinted in a form substantially different from the way it first appeared in the
New Yorker
. The way it looks here is much closer to the way I
first wrote it. Goldhagen’s book was big news at the time, so Tina Brown very properly decided that my notice should be promoted from the ‘back of the book’ reviews department to
‘Critic at Large’ status in the middle of the magazine. This unlooked-for elevation, however, proved to be a mixed blessing, because in a position of such prominence the
soi-disant
Critic at Large often finds himself not as at large as he would like. Suddenly he is held to be speaking for the magazine as much as for himself, and inevitably it is decided
that his personal quirks should be suppressed, in the interests of objectivity. My animadversions on Goldhagen’s prose style were held to be a potentially embarrassing irrelevance: to dispute
his interpretation of factual events was going to be contentious enough, without getting into the subjective area of how he wrote his interpretation down. I didn’t think that it was a
subjective area; I thought the callow over-confidence of his jargon-ridden style was a clear index of how he had been simply bound to get his pretended overview of the subject out of shape from the
start; but I knuckled under or we would have all been stymied.